A combination of full-scale practical effects, and invisible visual effects from Industrial Light & Magic, made it possible in ‘Dead Reckoning Part One.’
A landmark effects sequence in Christopher McQuarrie’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One spans pretty much the entire third act of the film, as we witness Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) attempting to board a moving Orient Express train in the Alps, take on the bad guys (including atop the train), before it ultimately crashes into a valley below following a bridge explosion.
Working with ILM production visual effects supervisor Alex Wuttke, Industrial Light & Magic handled the VFX for this extended sequence.
Much of the live-action was filmed for real on a track in Norway with a stand-in train, as well as on set pieces captured at Longcross Film Studios.
ILM replicated the train completely synthetically, as well as the extensive Alps environment. The studio also orchestrated the bridge blast and augmented a full-scale practical locomotive crash that had been filmed in the UK. Finally, they helped realize several shots of Hunt and Grace (Haley Atwell) racing through a teetering train carriage.
ILM visual effects supervisor Jeff Sutherland breaks down the detailed work for befores & afters.
b&a: For the train sequence, I’m very much aware that Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise and all the filmmakers wanted to shoot as much in-camera as possible, but what was the methodology for filming actors on top and also inside the train?
Jeff Sutherland: You’re right, they very definitely get a lot more in-camera than a lot of filmmakers might. Tom does his own stunts, but as far as the approach for that sequence, it was actually shot in a valley in Norway that was standing in for the Alps. There was an actual train, and much of the filming was done on top of that train. The train itself was a combination of things. They shot it with a diesel locomotive, and then they had a couple of cars that were Orient Express replicas that were used for that.
Essentially, the train is a digital replacement much of the time, even though they did shoot on top of a train on location. The locomotive needed to be replaced, and then a full Orient Express train was built to extend the train every time you see it at length. We also used that for various rig removals to mix and match the practical train for different shots.
Alex and his on-set team were very good about scanning lots of the carriages, interior and exterior. They did several practical builds of those carriages as well for a lot of the interior-exterior stunts filmed at Longcross Studio in the UK.
b&a: To get the environment through which the train was traveling, was there some sort of array capture for that?
Jeff Sutherland: Yes, the team shot array footage from both on top of the train and the front of the train on the stretch of track that was used in Norway. They went back and forth on it with the camera arrays capturing footage from both perspectives, which were oriented for the interior side shots looking out windows. For on the top of the train, obviously there’s nowhere to hide seams, and there was a more complete stitch done for those shots where the environment needed to be replaced.
When we could keep the environment, we did, but the shoot schedule spanned such a long period of time that we were going from season to season. Things had to be changed just to get the season correct and have things not ‘bump’ in the cut. This meant a lot of the environment was created by us from scratch and replaced. Array shots were generally used, array footage was generally used for fast cuts and quick things. Then for anything that needed to be built out, we did a full CG environment build.
b&a: There’s that moment when Ethan smashes into the window of the train. It’s such a quick moment. That is obviously an elaborate stunt, but, also, what augmentation or visual effects work did you need to do for that?
Jeff Sutherland: Despite Tom’s penchant for doing his own stunts, there’s a digi-double takeover on that particular shot. He comes through as a digi-double and then there’s a transition in shot to Tom as photographed. It’s a fast moment that helps to hide things a little. It’s totally unexpected, which also helps, I think.
b&a: At some point, Ethan is on top of the train fighting Gabriel. How were those scenes achieved?
Jeff Sutherland: One thing that we did a lot of was “rig-removal”, where we needed to get rid of some safety rigging. It covered fair chunks of the train roof, for example. Other than that, the main approach was to shoot it with a moving train. A lot of times there was a little bit of manipulating the speed of the train, which got very tricky, to make sure that that felt consistent through the fight sequence. Then we replaced exteriors for continuity reasons, where they might have wanted to use a piece of the fight in a different part of the cut than maybe wasn’t originally intended. We would need to do some background replacement for that. It’s quite a long sequence, too. We had to throw everything at it and I have to give credit to our incredible paint and roto team without their painstaking work, crafting those seamless final shots would not have been possible.
Aiding in the continuity of the shots filmed with smoke coming out of the locomotive. This was created by the special effects team via a variable smoke generator.. We added smoke in several shots and we augmented it in almost every shot as well. A lot of that blowing across the top, which also helped us modulate the speed by playing with how fast the smoke and steam was rolling by.
b&a: Tell me about the bridge explosion, how was that simulation done?
Jeff Sutherland: We used a real bridge, Kylling Bridge, in Norway as inspiration for the bridge that we actually built in CG. To amp up the drama we made it a lot higher. We took a lot of liberties with it, but it was, again, great reference material. It was built in the same way that those old stone bridges are built. They’re a shell of rock, and then there’s rebar and other things. There’s a ballast, a filling, that goes down the middle of them. We built it with that same design in mind. And of course our CG bridge was filled with a lot of this ballast, which essentially was the raw material for our simulations. For maximum control, we broke down the bridge into all the individual stones so that we could generate our simulations on a very granular level. Then we did a full rigid body destruction sim with that model.
b&a: There was also a really nice level of dust for that bridge. I wonder how many discussions you had about dust for that?
Jeff Sutherland: Quite a lot, actually. Dust, and then the water as well on the impact. There’s always a tricky balance between maintaining the realism of that destruction and also providing a really cinematic shot with lots of nice backlighting filtering through that dust. It was a nice aesthetic moment grounded in reality, because they actually shot the locomotive going over a cliff, and we had that as the anchor for the shot.
b&a: Tell me about the challenges there for the train going over into the river. It’s a pretty full-scale practical effect that they’ve orchestrated with shooting the train, but tell me about what ILM had to do there in terms of environment replacement and train replacement
Jeff Sutherland: All of the shots were based on the actual photography of the locomotive going over the edge. The locomotive was kept wherever we could. You’ll probably notice from the photography that there were cameras mounted on the locomotive itself, as well as drone coverage. We also built a full CG locomotive that we used for those shots, mostly to allow for rig removal. Again, we had the photography to ground each shot, which was key. On top of that, we did a full environment replacement. Hundreds of trees, the whole alpine landscape, and of course the river itself.
The locomotive impacted into what was essentially a sunken water tank which provided a nice level of interaction. We enhanced from there, giving the train a little tumble and somersault as it impacted the cliff face on the opposite side of the valley. Much of the water that interacted with the environment was also synthetic, since the environment, the cliff and geography itself was replaced.
b&a: When it goes over the edge, were you needing to add any extra smoke or debris to what was shot?
Jeff Sutherland: As far as the FX, it had smoke coming from the stack, they had a coal tender that went over the edge with it, which was trailing. It looked really nice. What they shot was full of coal and coal dust and had a nice trail from that. We made an real effort to keep those practical elements since they looked great
Then there was additional dust and smoke from the bridge destruction itself, both the explosions from that, and then what was rising up through the course of that beat–all that was CG FX.
b&a: I then really also love the subsequent work, which involved the teetering carriages and Ethan and Grace’s predicament there in trying to get up through it. How did they capture that action?
Jeff Sutherland: Production built some partial carriages at Longcross that they used to create the inch-worming effect of the carriages one by one tumbling off the edge of the bridge as the bridge crumbled below. As always, we used what we could from those carriage builds and a lot of it was replaced digitally for the carriages themselves.
b&a: Were they completely digital, even when they’re inside?
Jeff Sutherland: Inside, we did full builds of most of the carriages. The kitchen carriage was less digital, a lot of that was done practically. There was some FX added for things like grease spilling out of the fryers and some of the debris coming down; some of it was practical and some of it was CG.
For the bar carriage, the one where the piano falls through, around half the carriage for that was built. The actors were suspended on wires in that set, so there was a lot of wire rigging and safety gear and camera gear that was in there. In the end, most of what you see is our hyper-accurate digital recreation of that carriage. Then, depending on the shot, we could split to the actual set piece and use a large chunk of that in some shots. Because we had done a full-detail build, it allowed us to pick and choose when to replace sections as necessary. Often it was more efficient to replace it rather than do a lot of extra paint-out of rigging.
b&a: There’s a couple of exterior shots of the carriages teetering and buckling. I felt like the animation work there worked really well. What were the challenges of getting that blocking and timing right for the carriages almost falling over? I think people might think that’s relatively simple, but I think it was really well done.
Jeff Sutherland: Yes, you’re absolutely right. It was very tricky to keep the realism of that, because it’s such an outlandish concept in some ways. It made for a real classic cliffhanger feel, the way that whole sequence played out, but I think the key to making that work there was a lot of detailed FX work on the crumbling of the bridge. It was almost like a fulcrum where it would lean against the bridge, and then the bridge would start to give way, which would cause one of the carriages to go up in the air, which would pull the next carriage up and then it would slowly inch-worm its way over the edge of the bridge.
All in all Dead Reckoning was a fantastic experience, and it’s always a blast to support great story moments with seamless, invisible effects work. I’d like to acknowledge Alex’s great leadership as well as the work of ILM’s other visual effects supervisor on the show, my colleague Simone Coco, our visual effects producer Claudia Lecaros, and all of the amazing ILM visual effects crew members who poured their heart and soul into this work.
