Behind the scenes of J.A. Bayona’s tale of the 1972 Uruguayan rugby team air disaster.
When Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crashed in 1972 with 45 passengers on board deep in the Andes mountains, the rugby team survivors were faced with both harsh conditions and being in an extremely inaccessible location.
Ultimately, only 29 survived after toughing it out for more than 70 days in the Valley of Tears, mostly huddling near what remained of the plane’s fuselage.
Director J.A. Bayona’s Society of the Snow, from Netflix, follows the events of the crash and eventual rescue. To depict the survivors at the wreckage, production arranged for several different shooting methodologies.
One was with a replica fuselage at a snowy location, and one in a backlot with a fuselage ‘elevator’. Another involved a small LED wall shoot, with the fuselage also built on gimbals to deal with the crash and an avalanche sequence.
Visual effects supervisors Laura Pedro and Félix Bergés then oversaw the effort to craft Valley of Tears mountainous and snow backgrounds–based on real photography captured in the actual area–for all the wreckage scenes. The work was handled by VFX studio El Ranchito.
Here, Bergés tells befores & afters more about the visual effects process, including for the backgrounds and for the crash scene.
b&a: I’m always interested in initial conversations you may have had with the director about the look and feel and style of the VFX in the film. Can you tell me about those early conversations?
Félix Bergés: J.A always wants something that is real and where the visual effects will be in the service of the storytelling of the story. This is a story which is centrally about the Society of the Snow, about these guys who were at this horrible place. He wants to shoot with complete freedom. He didn’t want to use greenscreens. I think the visual effects has served this, to be as free as possible.
J.A wanted to shoot in a very cold place with a fuselage that is exactly the same as a fuselage that was there for real. Of course, it’s a fuselage made by the art department and has a lot of mobile sides, but he always wanted it to be really realistic.
b&a: With that in mind, what was the methodology used to capture moments of the team at the fuselage and then also deal with wide shots and deal with backgrounds?
Félix Bergés: The idea was that the audience always has the feeling that we are at the Valley of Tears. Of course, it’s completely impossible to shoot there. This is a place that is really very difficult to reach, even today with helicopters. So, our approach was to change 100% of the backgrounds. All the shots that you see in the movie, the backgrounds are completely replaced. We have done 1000 shots in this movie. They’re invisible shots, but there are 1000 of them.
We had a couple of different fuselages. The main shoot was in snow at Sierra Nevada, Granada in Spain. We shot here and then we replaced all the backgrounds. Then we also filmed on a small LED volume that was 10m x 20m that we made in a parking lot of the ski resort. The final fuselage was on a backlot where the fuselage could be raised up and down so that it could be covered in snow, such as when the avalanche occurs.
When I worked with J.A on The Impossible, we learnt that it was very important to prep. So, we developed an application in Unreal Engine that we could give to all the department heads to ‘panify’ all the shots. It was like working in a video game and it gave a previs view where you could place your characters and have the fuselage and you could compose shots and see the light for the right moments in the year.
b&a: Since you were replacing backgrounds, how did you acquire reference for those?
Félix Bergés: We have had plates and photography–tens of thousands of photos from the Valley of Tears. We made a lot of little details, because the scale is so big. There is something always moving, something breathing. This was all done in VFX, but our base was always photography.
b&a: When you did the smaller LED wall shoot, were you crafting backgrounds for that as footage or were they real-time backgrounds at all?
Félix Bergés: Those were backgrounds from photography. We had been to the Valley of Tears and then retouched the photos and made backgrounds in Unreal, then decided for each scene what the type of lighting or type of background we needed. There were not really any moving cameras for this. It was almost just like a new way of doing something very old with photographic backgrounds.
It was really nice to have because the lighting is amazing. We have a lot of scenes in the interior of the fuselage and this fuselage was really, very important. And the lighting is really nice because we put the proper background in and the proper background lights. We have very, very nice shots done completely in the volume. We may have had to retouch a little in VFX, but the base is very nice.
b&a: What are some of the challenges you face when you’re creating shots that have such white snowy backgrounds, say in terms of dealing with blow-outs and just composing compelling frames?
Félix Bergés: Well, we had experience with this on Game of Thrones for shots with the White Walkers, but it’s completely true that to deal with white backgrounds, and have different types of snow, is hard. You can achieve good shots mainly with good compositing, taking care of space, colors, and HDRs.
b&a: I thought the flight and the crash were particularly well done. Tell me a bit about how the normal flying scenes were done for interiors and for the crash itself.
Félix Bergés: The special effects supervisor, Pau Costa, made a couple of gimbals for the plane. One was a small one that could make very aggressive movements. Then Pau made a bigger gimbal that could vibrate. Using these two gimbals, we were able to film scenes and then extend the plane for shots during the crash. For the final part of the crash, we had small sets and dummies, scans and face replacement–a lot of different techniques. I think if you mix in a lot of different ways of doing things, it helps sell the illusion. So we had some digi-doubles in there for the very aggressive movements, for example.
b&a: I particularly just like that moment where bits of the plane were coming off, and the tail is wiped out and then the fuselage slides down the mountain. How did you piece these things together?
Félix Bergés: All the wide shots are fully CG via animation. For the final shot before the crash, we have tried to use the actors as much as possible. The actors that you see in the shot are real until the very, very last moment when we do a take-over to the digi-doubles.
