The bridge we love to destroy in movies. An excerpt from issue #1 of befores & afters magazine.
As a young boy, visual effects supervisor John Bruno would often travel over the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco with his family to go to the cinemas. One movie he saw at a young age was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), in which Ray Harryhausen orchestrated an incredible stop-motion animated gigantic octopus attacking and destroying the Golden Gate.
“It really impacted me as a young child,” recalls Bruno. “We saw the movie and then we had to drive back across the bridge a few hours later. I remember being really nervous! I didn’t know if what I had seen in the movie was real.”
Years later at Boss Film while working on Ghostbusters (1984), Bruno shared that formative story with Harryhausen himself, who was visiting the studio. “I told him, ‘You’re probably responsible for me getting into visual effects. It was so real to me as a kid, and it could have been the thing that got me into all this.’”
Jump to the mid-1990s and Bruno’s connection to the Golden Gate continued as the visual effects supervisor for X-Men: The Last Stand. A major sequence in the film sees Magneto (Ian McKellen) using his powers rip the bridge from its foundation, and move it to Alcatraz.
It turns out the visual effects supervisor is just one of several who have had to take on the challenging task of destroying the 1.7 mile long Golden Gate. Indeed, if you’re a visual effects artist who has worked on an alien invasion or natural disaster film in the past two decades, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve wreaked havoc on the Golden Gate Bridge, too. Here’s four different ways VFX artists have brought the bridge down.
WHEN BEAMS OF LIGHT ATTACK
In The Core (2003), the Golden Gate falls victim to one of a string of incidents linked to the halt of the rotation of the Earth’s molten core. This results (obviously) in an unfiltered patch of ultra-violet radiation—in the form of a laser beam of heat and light—wafting through the bridge, slicing it up and causing general mayhem.
Visual effects supervisor Greg McMurry oversaw the effort to destroy the bridge on this occasion. “What we had to do was make this beam that just keeps getting hotter and hotter,” he says. “It creates this boiling mass of water going towards the bridge and when it gets there it breaks the bridge down, the asphalt gets incredibly hot, car tires melt, and then the bridge collapses.”
Live-action for the on-bridge shots helped sell the panic caused by the beam, including to show the impact on the asphalt. “The special effects team actually made up some compound that they could inject underneath the tires of the cars,” details McMurry. “When you pushed the car a little, the tire would roll and it looked like the rubber had become stuck to the pavement.”
Additional practical effects work came in the form of a miniature bridge section built and shot by Hunter/Gratzner Industries, which also contributed several model model cars that fall down towards camera.
Then, ComputerCafe modeled a CG Golden Gate using reference stills taken during the traffic shoot, and images and publicly available information from the bridge’s visitors’ center and the internet. This was incorporated into live-action photography.
“Actually, a lot of work was done with stills,” notes McMurry. “I made a couple of trips to the bridge to shoot the various pieces of architecture in large format stills. We put that together in two-and-a-half-D for the backgrounds. I was also the cameraman who shot the aerials. We had to get special permission to fly near the bridge, since it wasn’t that long after 9/11.”
ComputerCafe destroyed its CG bridge to show a collapsing roadway, falling towers and snapping cables. McMurry recalls plenty of discussion about adhering to any ‘real’ physics if that event actually happened. “There was a very fun debate about what would happen if the center broke. Some people said, ‘Well, these towers, since they’re under stress, they would just go immediately back out this way.’ We did some tests but then we said, ‘Well, that looks stupid.’”
“We decided that it looked better to mangle all the cables and twist them up. You know, part of it was a lot of us were wondering at that time whether doing a big disaster scene like so close to 9/11 was in good taste. We came to the conclusion that it was so far out there that nobody would equate it to anything.”
Taking out such an iconic location was certainly a challenge, although McMurry says the opening part of that sequence perhaps proved equally as memorable, referring to an underwater view of the beam of light heating up the San Francisco Bay, effectively ‘cooking’ some fish.
“We literally went to the fish market and we got real fish from the fish market, and then shot that in Gene Warren Jr.’s tank at Fantasy II Effects,” recounts McMurry. “We filled that full of air and shot up through the water to get the ripple, and then let the fish float up in front of the lens. We joked that no fish were killed or injured in making this film, but we did use a fish in the shot that was about to be dinner…”
MOVED WITH MAGNETS
With that earlier connection as a child to the Golden Gate, John Bruno had to oversee the bridge’s more unusual destruction for X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) as it is moved by Magneto’s power to control metal. A few separate beats were required for the sequence: for Magento and his followers’ arrival on the bridge, the ‘snapping’ off of the North and South pylons, traveling across the Bay and crash landing on Alcatraz.
“I felt we should try to get as much of that in-camera as much as possible,” says Bruno. “We felt we could build a full size section to shoot on in Vancouver, surrounded by a greenscreen large enough for cars to drive along at 35 miles per hour, which was the actual speed limit on the bridge. Then miniature effects supervisor Pat McClung would build a 10th scale section of the bridge, with cars, that was 60 feet long and 9 feet wide that would break away and magnetically float above the Bay towards Alcatraz. It included 10th scale cars. We composited the cast into those shots.”
Bruno comments that much of the scene started with real photography. “With miniatures, you already had something, on film, that was lit properly. It was a great guide. Because we had the Large miniature, we could ‘find’ additional angles. Extra shots. And didn’t need to wait months to see anything.”
Framestore (then, Framestore CFC) built the digital bridge that would ultimately be used for many shots in the sequence. Artists there also built CG cars, generated debris, simulated cables and added various digi-doubles.
To acquire live-action elements of the bridge and San Francisco backgrounds—which would also inform digital matte paintings and water elements—the VFX team was somewhat constrained by state and federal permits. They could not stop traffic or fly over the bridge at any time.
“So,” recounts Bruno, “Craig Lyn from Framestore went out with 5D cameras and took stills at magic hour over a two day period. Walked the whole bridge from both sides on the pedestrian walkway. That’s how all the background plates were taken.”
Bruno was proud, in particular, of the combination of techniques used to make the sequence possible. He recalls Ian McKellen offering a memorable assessment of the shots in that regard. “We ran the film in London at a special screening for Framestore and Ian came to introduce it, which really excited everybody. After he watched the film he said, he didn’t remember doing some of those shots, flying above the bay, swinging the bridge around—‘I don’t remember being there for those.’ I thought that was a nice compliment to the VFX work we did.”
LARGE CREATURES REALLY HATE THAT BRIDGE
We’ve seen what happens when a giant octopus takes on the Golden Gate and, thanks to Pacific Rim (2013) and Godzilla (2014), we now also know the impact that massive bipedal monsters have on the bridge’s structure (hint: it’s not good).
For Pacific Rim, Industrial Light & Magic was tasked with an opening scene which see a Kaiju attack the bridge, sending cars and their occupants crashing into the Bay. It was, essentially, a completely CG sequence which ILM orchestrated based on production storyboards. “Speaking with director Guillermo del Toro about the sequence,” relates ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll. “He liked the idea that the attack occurred in fog so you never got a particularly good look at the monster. I cross the Golden Gate Bridge every day on my commute into the office, and on one of those commutes the weather was very close to how I wanted to light the sequence, so I pulled out my phone and shot an image. That became the primary reference for the look.”
The digital bridge was built starting with some available models, and then modified with extra detail for the specific destruction shots. “Certainly,” says Knoll, “all of the destruction in the foreground required a bunch of additional detailed modeling. That said, the geometry of the bridge isn’t really that complex, and contains many repeated elements so I don’t remember it being a particularly challenging model to prepare.”
When it came time to break the digital bridge—and the vehicles on it—the criteria was that it look exciting, and this involved often making several scale cheats, notes Knoll. “We were always scaling things up and down, cheating gravity stronger or weaker, just to make everything feel like it had the right scale but wasn’t too slow to maintain the excitement. The destruction simulations were tweaked just to look good. They’re not based on any mechanical analysis of material strengths.”
“The bridge attack is one of the biggest cheats in the whole show,” adds Knoll. “The nominal size for the Kaijus and Jaegers was around 250 feet tall, and we tried to stay around that where we could. The roadway of the Golden Gate Bridge is around 230 feet above the water, so the Kaiju in those shots is cheated up to around 700 feet tall!”
Only a year later, the bridge suffered through another creature feature, when Godzilla smashes through the center span while under attack. This sequence was handled by MPC. It began with a live-action shoot on a one-to-one partial set build. “It was the full width from tarmac to rails and the side guards,” outlines MPC 2D supervisor on Godzilla, Axel Bonami. “This allowed for a number of vehicles including tanks to be positioned on the bridge for the sequence. On location texture photography was captured for the modeling and textures we required to create the CG bridge. Reference photography was also gathered to get a sense of fog attenuation in different light conditions.”
Using a Golden Gate model made for an earlier movie as a starting point, MPC fleshed out additional details, also relying on a set scan. “We built the model using reference pictures of the Golden Gate bridge, right down to the spacing between cables but we also had to adjust it slightly to match the on-set bridge section,” says Bonami. “The Golden Gate is such an iconic location that we found masses of information about its construction online, right down to its underwater foundations.” Additional elements included CG crowds, vehicles and rain.
Godzilla’s interaction with the bridge—despite ultimately breaking through it—remains somewhat low-key. “In the movie, notes Bonami, “the cables are grabbed, shaken and cut. In reality if one of those cables were cut, the bridge would swing and if Godzilla were to walk thought it the effect on the bridge would be devastating. Our challenge was therefore to downplay the physics but also to try and maintain realism.”
LETHAL COMBO: A TSUNAMI AND A SHIP
The barrage against the Golden Gate Bridge takes a different turn in San Andreas (2015) when a 9.6 magnitude earthquake produces a tsunami that pushes a large container ship against the bridge, snapping the center span. It’s one of the most destructive of the movie ‘bridge attacks’ and required significant mix of water and destruction simulation to be pulled off.
“I think the script said, ‘A 100 foot tsunami wave crashes into San Francisco,’” recalls visual effects supervisor Bryan Grill from Scanline VFX, which took on the sequence. “They had already previs’d a lot of those big moments in the story. Seeing a huge wave and a full cargo carrier hit the bridge—it was something we hadn’t really seen before. We’d seen big reptiles hit it, apes cover it and X-Men move it. But here it was real-world elements colliding with each other, giving it scale.”
Scanline began the visual effects process by sourcing, via the film studio, a CG model of the bridge from a vendor who had previously needed to build and destroy it. However, for story reasons, that digital bridge had actually been slightly modified from the real thing, as Grill explains.
“If you’re at the part of the bridge where the big cable comes down, it comes right down to six feet off the road surface. “For that other film, perhaps because people in their cars needed to see an oncoming monster, the vendor had actually taken that big cable and moved it up 12 feet. They also changed how many lanes there were. So when we got this beautiful asset, it didn’t quite work for us, for what we were going to do to the bridge. So, we had to re-work it.”
Grill adds that another unusual challenge was what would cause the bridge to collapse, and that was the way the container ship would dig into the bottom of the Bay—from which water had receded as the tsunami approached—as it got pushed into the bridge, making for an even bigger wave of steel against the Golden Gate.
Despite the craziness of the sequence, some kind of real physical plausibility was still aimed for. “We researched it and came up with the point of how much pressure before the bridge would actually fail from that ship leaning against it,” says Grill.
That went also for the dynamics of the bridge destruction, itself. Scanline looked to some famous wave motion-like footage of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington collapsing after suffering aeroelastic flutter.
“We used that for the buckling of the road,” notes Grill. “People have seen that kind of movement in the real world, so when you then notice it in our shot, you go, ‘Oh my God, this bridge is doing what bridges would do.’ Even though we took a lot of creative license, it was those little things that I think helped bring the story and the drama to fruition.”
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