Mission: possible: ILM creates a virtual Shanghai, a complex helicopter chase scene, and other 'invisible' effects.(Tom Cruise)(Interview)

Although the start of the summer movie season is still a few weeks away, Paramount Pictures began its rollout early with Mission: Impossible III, an action-packed thriller starring Tom Cruise as undercover operative Ethan Hunt. Complementing the action are dazzling effects created at ILM by a core crew of around 100 that topped out at 180, who generated 530 visual effects in less than four months.

Q How did you do so much so fast?

A A lot of the overhead was in building Shanghai and the helicopters, the CG helicopters and the miniatures, so we pre-built them. Once we had built the assets, JJ [Abrams, the director] could do anything with them. It was a good thing that he didn't change his mind. It would have been terrible if we'd built Shanghai and it turned out that he wanted Berlin.

Q What was the director's overall aim for the effects?

A JJ felt that sometimes technology could get out of control and people wouldn't believe what was happening. He wanted the movie to be believable, have a strong sense of reality, and be more personal. There wasn't any black-box magic. You could see the equipment, how people were using it, and how it functioned.

Q Can you give us an example of this?

A He wanted to show people how the mask process worked rather than just showing the result. So, we built a level of reality into it. In the film, the Mission Impossible team turns pictures of Philip Seymour Hoffman into 3D images, which can really be done. And then we had them do a process almost like a CAD application, where they milled the mask out of a piece of rubber, so the audience would see how things worked and, in the context of the movie, wouldn't question the process.