Prometheus has got a huge amount of visual
effects.
Half the film has some kind of visual effects
involvement.
That amounts to about 1,400 shots that we
worked on.
Ridley’s main thing to us initially was
the planet, space, and the ships.
That was a really important part of the story
that he knew that he would need visual effects
help to create.
The environment that he wanted to create for
the planet’s surface, he really wanted to
create something that was really uninviting,
and was a mixture of different locations that
he liked.
We had to go about building something based
on his designs and the input he gave us.
Fuel carried out about 250 shots as well.
They actually had an interesting challenge
of creating some designs for alien technology.
A lot of holographic effects based around
the alien engineers.
It took about six to eight months -- the design
process -- to come up with the idea.
The original logic of how it was designed
and laid out was a big bang.
We used a fluid simulation to map out the
early ideas of a threaded fluid that was exploded
out to a volume.
We had these as basic ideas that shaped the
design of it.
Every nebula in there is basically a frozen
moment of a fluid sim that has been run over
its course, and found that right moment.
And that becomes the nebula gas.
A huge amount – in some of the scenes it
would have been 80 to a 100 million polygons
in there.
Some of the shots could easily take between
a week and two weeks to render.
The majority of it was set, which was fantastic.
Great for the actors, and also good for the
director to see the majority of the thing
in front of him.
And also good for all the visual effects artists,
because you are essentially adding to that
instead of having to push the shot somewhere
later on.
Big things have small beginnings
