Plus other fun stories from the making of the Roland Emmerich film.
As part of VIEW Conference 2021, I hosted a 25th anniversary panel about the visual effects of Roland Emmerich’s 1996 disaster movie, Independence Day. On that panel were visual effects supervisors Volker Engel and Douglas Smith, and production designer Oliver Scholl.
We talked about the designs, set builds, models, miniatures, CG and digital effects which helped realize Emmerich’s vision, and which led to the film winning the VFX Oscar (awarded to Engel, Smith and to Clay Pinney and Joe Viskocil).
I thought it would be fun to feature their conversation here on the 30th anniversary of the film, along with a number of behind the scenes images. Read on to learn about what Engel describes as the sometimes ‘wire tape and rubber-band style’ of effects in Independence Day (literally), how Smith leant his hand to shooting miniatures with appropriate depth of field, and how the design of a ‘simple’ home interior for Will Smith’s house in the movie ended up being one of his toughest challenges.
A big thanks to Volker Engel for many of the images seen below.
b&a: One thing I wanted to ask each panelist was their earliest memory of coming on board Independence Day or ID4, as it became known? Oliver?
Oliver Scholl: Well, I was on a different show. I had started on Broken Arrow as a concept artist when I got the call from Roland and the offer to do Independence Day. And I basically had designed one movie in Germany before this, that was a $4 million movie in Stuttgart, shot in two warehouses. And Roland offered myself and Patrick Tatopoulosto co-design together Independence Day, which was a huge opportunity.
I knew Patrick because we both worked together on Stargate. I was a concept designer on Stargate, and Patrick did the creature design. So I knew him from there and I really respect him very highly, still to this time, as an artist and as a person. And so that was a great opportunity.
What I remember most, what sticks in my head still today is when we started, Patrick and I started in this little office that was underneath the roof on the Fox Studios lot, and we were sitting there just drawing spaceships. It was so fascinating, just being in Los Angeles and drawing spaceships, what I liked to do my whole life and getting paid for it.
We knew it was a fun project and really great to do, but we couldn’t imagine how big it’s going to be in the end, or how big it was in the end.
b&a: Volker, what about you? What’s your first memory of coming on board the show?
Volker Engel: As Ollie said, I had worked on this, I believe in dollars it was about $3.2 million movie called Moon 44, which we completely did in Germany, and I was lucky enough to become the visual effect supervisor of that film. And then I was miniature effects supervisor on Universal Soldier, and there was not much in there in that respect, in that movie. And after Universal Soldier, which was only a very short gig for me with Roland, I went back to Germany and I wanted to finish my studies. And I studied at a film school called the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg, close to Stuttgart.
After several years, while Roland had done Stargate, which I was not part of at all, I figured I want to go back into the business. I wanted to gain a lot more experience. And what happened was I put it in my official resignation to the film school which takes, I think about three months, until you officially can leave.
And it’s one of these things where when you shout out to the universe, sometimes something comes back. So it was exactly two weeks after I put in this resignation that I actually got a phone call from Roland, who said, ‘We have this screenplay, it’s called Independence Day. It’s a bit like War of the Worlds only much more gigantic. And do you want to come over to America and do this with us? Most likely as in the role of supervising miniature work.’
So that’s how it all started for me, putting together two suitcases, and going to America, actually also taking some students of the film school who had some practical knowledge in filmmaking from other projects beforehand, but they also ended up working on the movie.
b&a: And Doug, what about you? How did you come on board?
Douglas Smith: I got in contact with Pam Easley. She was a visual effects producer on True Lies. I had worked on True Lies as the visual effects DP, although I’d been a supervisor on other projects, and I’d stayed working at DD for a little bit doing commercials. She sent the script to me and I immediately saw it as a version of War of the Worlds. And I really liked War of the Worlds and it read really fun. I also thought it would be a cool project to be a part of.
I went over and met Roland and we talked about the testing. They already had this concept for putting the models at 90 degrees for explosions. And they wanted to shoot a series of tests for that and as proof of concepts and at least one of those shots actually made it into the movie. The very first test that we shot, I think, first or second, anyway, at some point it made it back into the movie.
b&a: Oliver, what were some of the really early design challenges that you faced on the film?
Oliver Scholl: As I mentioned before, the whole movie was about these giant ships hovering over cities and the destruction and all that stuff. And so the obvious question was, what are these ships looking like, besides what do the aliens look like, which was mainly Patrick’s thing.
We wanted to figure out what the ships are looking like, because if you don’t have a ship design, you don’t know what the consequences are for visual effects, how are you going to shoot them, how are you going to build them? How are you going to frame them? How do you attack them? How are the guys going to win the war against these ships against these aliens?
So there was a lot of back and forth between Patrick and myself and Roland trying to come up with these shapes. And I have to say in the end, it was Roland saying, insisting on going back to the roots and saying, ‘You know what? It’s about aliens. It’s about flying saucers. We want something really simple.’
The shape of the destroyer was basically a function of that simplicity, saying, it’s a saucer, a flying saucer. We need this tower structure, so it has a front and we can fly along it with the aeroplanes. And then it was Patrick doing these beautiful patterns for the bottom. We did two versions of the schism or whatever you want to call that giant thing, opening at the bottom.
Oftentimes it happened that Patrick started something and I would finish it, or I started something and Patrick would finish it. So designs were going back and forth between the two of us.
b&a: In fact, that’s interesting with the two production designers, of course you and Patrick, what was that like for you?
Oliver Scholl: When we got the offer from Roland to do the movie together, and both of us not having designed a movie in the States, or at all, for real, certainly nothing of this size, we just knew we had to stick together and tackle it in a way that would help us navigate the manufacturing and who’s doing what.
So what we actually did is we did the set list and we had an amazing art director. I always say we had adult supervision on the movie, Jim Teegarden, who really ran the whole thing, who was really the guy who held it all together and kept it going because we didn’t have a clue in that beginning time. So we split up the movie along the set list, basically saying, ‘Who’s doing what?’ And stuck to that. I did Area 51, the underground stuff, the attacker hangar. Patrick was out in Wendover and in Fontana where the destroyed aftermath is of the city.
Actually the most scariest set to me was the Will Smith house interior.
b&a: Really?
Oliver Scholl: You’re going to laugh about that. But that to me was the scariest thing ever. I didn’t have any problems designing spacecraft or a weird underground bunker. But a normal American house interior? That scared me.
Jim Erickson was the decorator, and Victor Zolfo was Jim Erickson’s right hand. And while Jim was with Patrick, I think in Wendover at that time, shooting the airfield stuff and running into the hangar, Victor and I were doing, dealing with the apartment with the house interior.
That was just scariest set ever, I mean, it worked out and everybody’s going to laugh about it when I tell that story. But, I grew up in Germany. What do I know about American traditional houses here? Actually the house looks a lot like the house that we were renting at that time with my wife-to-be at that point. We got married during Independence Day, actually. I just thought, ‘Well, that’s the type of house they would live in.’
b&a: Volker and Doug, what was the state of play in your mind back then about the mix of practical and digital effects? I’ve always thought Independence Day combined those so well.
Volker Engel: When you looked at the first test that we did with aeroplanes, and I’m talking about YF-22s and F-18s hanging on fishing wires and seeing what we could get away with, well, until we pretty quickly found out in tests that we couldn’t do any dynamic flying with those or at least not enough. There’s actually three shots in the movie with Air Force One in front of a big blown up photo backing on fishing wires, as a three-foot miniature.
Roland really pushed us to go as far as we could with in-camera methods or sometimes it would just be a wire removal. But the digital compositing back in the day with, with Cineon, Flame/Inferno and Domino, back in the day was already established. So it was quite a mix of shooting, literally thousands of elements, sometimes bluescreen and motion control all overlapped here and there. That was the philosophy—go with miniature in-camera, as much as you can, which was a lot.
Percentage-wise, it’s always hard to say, I always want to say it’s 75% miniature, and then there’s also some CG in there, whenever you see either dozens of planes, or later, hundreds of planes and alien attackers underneath those ships.
b&a: Doug, what about from your point of view? Where were we at back then with miniatures and digital work?
Douglas Smith: Even today they say your plan that you start with at the beginning of a project, it changes by the time you get to the end of it, you’ve decided to do things in different ways because technology is changing. And this was really at the focus point of change between using practical effects and models to going into digital.
I don’t know if I remember this clearly, but I thought that Roland, at one point, he said that he did not have confidence in the digital process to get everything he wanted. And that on the previous projects he had been over-promised and he was nervous about putting too much in the digital basket at that point. Roland was also interested in finding the ways that would be extremely cost-effective. I know that they had promised this movie to be made for under a certain amount of money and they were doing everything they could to hit that spot.
So, one of the things that happened that I was surprised at with the technology, was it was really expensive to store a lot of data at that time. It seems ridiculous now, but the process of putting a file on disc would use up the disc, so they tried to get it off there as fast as possible because the next element had to go on.
Speaking to what Volker was saying about the dog fights, we spent a lot of time, Volker and myself, trying to figure out how to do these, especially the final battle at the end, under the giant spaceship where the alien attackers are fighting off the jet fighters. It was finally answered by the people at VisionArt. They had a great guy there, Rob Bredow. He put together software that could detect who was winning the battle. He could set the parameters and set this battle into motion of jet fighters, attacking alien fighters and vice versa. And they’d let it run overnight in various scenarios. Those are the elements that they could use to complete all this background stuff.
Shooting hundreds of elements was daunting, And if you view it from a traditional shooting miniature way, it was impossible. So that was great.
b&a: Meanwhile, Oliver, the full-sized alien attacker, that must have been amazing to see once it was built.
Oliver Scholl: Yeah, it was, it was really fascinating as a process and it was a lot of labour of love. Frank Bollinger was the head construction art director on the project. Frank had also been on Stargate with us and he was the construction supervisor on Moon 44.
Patrick had done the original sketch of the flying saucer. And then Roland literally drew a sketch that had that head shape that the attacker has, that is so strong on it. And then Patrick did finalize the illustration and I designed the rocket launcher and the rocket that goes on there, and we did the interior together. When we were building it, I think it was about 60 feet across in full size, it was basically more or less built in place in the set that that they were going to shoot it.
Patrick did a lot of experiments with the sculptors and with our plasterers in order to get the surface texture to be really interesting and different. If you look at the attacker, it doesn’t have a smooth surface, like the normal spacecraft that you were used to at that time, it actually has a cool fiberglass texture that was then sanded. So you got this meandering pattern, and it was a long process trying to figure all that out.
Tully Summers was the sculptor who actually did the original model of it. There were multiple sizes. We had a lot of stuff that we replicated in several sizes and it was an interesting challenge also for the model shop, which was right outside our door to match these textures across scales, quite a design trial-and-error thing.
b&a: Doug, do you want to give an insight for people who might not know how miniatures were filmed back then?
Douglas Smith: That’s an awful big question.
b&a: Just briefly!
Volker Engel: Depth of field.
Douglas Smith: Yeah, depth of field. The basic issue is you can’t let anything go out of focus. And it’s very interesting with your own perception. As soon as you see something go out of focus a little, you can tell how big it is.
One of the solutions that was talked about for that was, what if we do it as a forced perspective, which means you put the miniature close to the camera and the full size part with the live people is way in the background, but you have to keep everything sharp and then you cannot move the camera because it reveals that the miniature object is so close to camera. And you also need a huge amount of light over everywhere the people are, which covers a large area.
So, what appears that it might save some money at the beginning, it turned out, I think, was a far, far better thing to build the full-size attacker, than it was to conceive of that as a forced perspective miniature.
b&a: Volker, you told me once that this film was made with what’s described as that wire tape and rubber-band style. Can you talk about that in the context of this cruise missile miniature?
Volker Engel: So, in one scene we’re supposed to be in the bomb bay of this bomber that launches the cruise missile and what we did was shoot against bluescreen. And when those bomb bay doors open, you see the cityscape in the background. So the bluescreen was actually replaced by cardboard where—I did some myself—with different colored gels behind it.
And this was just hundreds and hundreds of tiny dots. So it looked like this was supposed to be the Houston cityscape underneath. It’s just tiny little lights, lots of them. And what we did was, we had this cruise missile on a camera dolly, and we pushed it out of this bomb bay and then had it start upwards, which in the movie looks like is it’s actually moving or away from us and then flying away. And this wire tape and rubber-band style expression is so fitting because the cruise missile has these tiny little wings that really quickly fold out and in the miniature that was actually done with a rubber band. I’ll never forget that.
Douglas Smith: Let me add to that. I remember take after take after take, that’s the other side of rubber band and miniatures because you end up with all these little glitchy things that happen and it had to be returned to look at dailies. You go back the next day and try to iron it out, look at dailies, go back and trying to iron it out. And since I just re-looked at the movie, I think that they cut in one frame too many of that missile because it looks like there’s a still frame on the last frame before it moves out of the shot.
Volker Engel: You’re right. It’s a mistake.
b&a: Well, you’ve heard it here first, everybody. Volker, I wanted to, while we’re still talking about miniatures, you got to specifically work on the Area 51 miniature yourself, didn’t you?
Volker Engel: Yes, there are tiny miniatures of those buildings of Area 51 that were used for a background. We had mountain ranges and the sculpting work of our miniature team is just amazing, because as you see them, everything was not very large and our miniature DP Anna Foerster did a tremendous job in lighting this to make the miniature actually look like a really big mountain range, mountain landscape.
And this is only shortly seen before one of the big alien city destroyers hovers over it and opens up. And it’s just about to destroy Area 51 when in turn it finally actually gets destroyed. I was just there adding some finishing touches with a pencil to the miniature.
b&a: Looking through the behind the scenes photos from ID4, I noticed one of the full-sized F-18s is actually made of wood. Can you talk about that, Oliver?
Oliver Scholl: I think they were built for us. It was a shop in the Valley that built them. And if you look at the landing gear in the front, you see that it’s not a real plane because the landing gear is just, well, it’s just a bit chubby, just a bit wrong. But the planes were beautiful that we had.
It was great to have them sitting there next to the alien attacker at one point. We had a model shop outside the art department. The model shop was part of the production company of the production process. You could just see the small scale model, and then you had the big, full size F-18, and then you had the cockpit mock-up on the stage that was used for shooting just the cockpit inserts for the pilots. So that’s the stuff that’s missing sometimes today is, with the CG as good as it is in terms of shortcuts, and not having the issues with light focus and whatever, the haptic element is missing.
That was really fun on Independence Day that we had all these different processes and approaches at the same time. Volker and I did Godzilla afterwards and Godzilla was kind of even more that turnaround between digital and physical model-making, where it was like, all these baby Zillas running around—should we do them digitally, or are they physical models? And that was when the breakthrough was like, ‘No, it’s going to be CG in the end.’ So this mix was really fascinating on all scales.
b&a: Volker, can you talk about the ship arrivals and cloud tank work, I always thought that cloud tank stuff that you guys did was incredible.
Volker Engel: A lot of it was learning by doing. Som you have a rig which is already underwater. It’s like a big aquarium, big tank, and you have these halogen lights in a U-shaped form. And then there was some tubing in front of these lights and there were tiny one millimeter holes in this tubing. And from above, we had attached another tube that would then push paint through this tubing coming out of these one millimeter holes.
At the same time, somebody was actually moving this whole contraption forward. This was done by hand. You can do this only all at once because of course the whole cloud tank is full of paint, and then you have to drain it. Interestingly enough,you cannot just drain it. It has to get into a huge truck, so it can go somewhere where it can be drained legally, because of course it’s some chemicals in this paint. And in the meantime, we had to fill up the whole water tank again with clean water and could set up for another take.
b&a: Where did that look of the ships appearing come from, Oliver?
Oliver Scholl: I think, Volker, correct me if I’m wrong, I think that was more something that came out of the discussion with Volker and Roland, in terms of how they could dramatize the whole thing. So it was, ‘Well, there’s a cloud tank technique. Can we use that to make this fascinating and interesting?’ I don’t remember us doing any cloud tank illustrations. I think that was developed during the visual effects process.
Volker Engel: Yeah, I think so too. I mean, there was a basic idea about, of course, these gigantic ships over the cities emerging out of the clouds and one of the key shots that was also on one of the posters later, shows the ship above New York emerging out of the cloud. That was a mix of a lot of these cloud tank elements with a miniature city destroyer, and also a shape that we had. I think it was not very wide, which was sort of a half-round shape where we used the same technique pushing through this paint.
b&a: What was your VFX Oscar experience like, first to you, Doug?
Douglas Smith: It was for me, who does not like crowds or speaking in front of people, it was incredibly intense and even anxiety-producing, actually getting there in the theater with Joe Viskocil and Clay Pinney and Volker. The energy level was really high. And I had no idea if we were going to win or not and the process of sitting there in the theater, while this thing is ticking away, was driving me crazy.
I don’t think it was driving Joe Viskocil crazy because he had had a few drinks in the limo on the way there. And so when it actually did win, I felt actually relieved because I had one job to do. And that was to get up there and just thank a few people. I wouldn’t mind if it happened again, because then I’d like to enjoy it versus being scared the death of the entire process.
b&a: Volker, what do you remember? It was a huge year. You guys won, but the other two films were Dragonheart and Twister, such amazing competition that year.
Volker Engel: Both of those movies had fantastic visual effects and weirdly enough, I remember the cameras just 10 seconds before Jim Carrey who on stage was opening the envelope and announcing who the Oscar will go to, the cameras were on the Twister team. So I actually thought they know something already, maybe a minute before, that we don’t know, but it turned out they didn’t.
The moment Jim Carrey starts reading our names, all the cameras had to quickly move around and point at us. I mean, I’m only saying that because you have to imagine what a weird moment that is because for 15 seconds you think, ‘Oh, okay. We’re not going to get it. Okay. That’s fine.’ And then they start reading your name and then your heart rate goes up quite a bit.
b&a: Just to finish off, do each of you want to share a fun story that you remember from the film, either on set, or in post or pre?
Oliver Scholl: There was so much stuff going on and I just have to say, going back to your Oscar win, I want to point out to everybody that this was Volker’s first real visual effects supervisor job in America, with great support by Doug and Joe Viskocil and his teams. I mean, Volker, what do you do after you win an Oscar for visual effects on your first visual effects job?
Volker Engel: Well, thank God I had great advice from some professionals that I talked to after that. And they said the biggest mistake you can do is just rest on your laurels, and it’s not going to get easier. And so, I just kept pushing and learning and do the same thing, be hungry for knowledge and keep on going. And I think that was actually good advice.
Douglas Smith: I would back up what Oliver is saying. If you do get an Oscar, it is a combination of all sorts of things and it is a huge team and even the performance of Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith contributes to the fact that you get an Oscar in visual effects, because people just like the film. I also have to say that Roland Emmerich is a large part of this. He has a vision and it’s a very direct one and he’s not a distant general. He’s in there being very specific about what he wants. So all of this we are the recipients of something that is the collaborative work of hundreds of people and some particular people, specifically.
Volker Engel: Yeah, I’d like to chime in regarding Roland actually, because we haven’t talked about him, but he’s the kind of director who knows exactly how many seconds he needs a shot. That is very rare. You mostly have directors who say, ‘Okay, give me a lot of footage, and then we’re going to figure it out in editorial.’ And of course you can’t do that always with those effects. Because computer-generated visual effects are really expensive, but with this trial and error approach that we had on a lot of these miniature shots, Roland could already tell you looking at a video of what we had just shot. He said, ‘It’s fine. I got enough footage. I need these one and a half seconds. And that’s good enough.’
I have one last thing that I remember vividly. And that was the day of our White House explosion that Joe Viskocil did so amazingly. We had seven cameras set up that day up to capture 360 frames per second for the slow motion.
And what nobody was telling us was there was a whole team of journalists invited and they had rafters set up. So, all of a sudden we had, I don’t remember how many, but like 40, 50 journalists who were actually watching us doing our White House explosion. So what can I say…no pressure.
b&a: Wow, I didn’t know that. I mean, obviously it went off pretty well, Volker.
Volker Engel: Yeah. We only had to do it once.
