This is THE shot of the movie… what the scientists (well… some of them…) predicted finally happens. The one in a million chance that all the meteorological systems are in perfect sync to overflow the barrier are… well, in sync !!!.

This shot required so much planning on such a tight budget… so I first went up in the helicopter to shoot the plate for the shot… I had to do that first because all other element shots depended on this… (mesurments and all…!!!) We shot from the helicopter with the spacecam rig. The most important thing when you shoot from a chopper is… the pilot !! although we have an equally important DOP with us to operate the spacecam, it’s a team effort between these two guys to get great shots… I was fortunate enough for this project to work with helicopter pilot Marc Wolff of Flying Pictures Inc. (check out their website and see what I mean !!) and the aerial director of photography was John Marzano… an unbelievable team !! Here’s a frame of the original plate…

Also, as soon as we were greenlight for this movie, I had the miniature team build a 1/5th scale replica of one of the barrier’s…. the team got the blueprints of the barrier, and started building a miniature to be able to shoot all the needed water elements for the shot… usually, we would have preferred a 1/3rd scale replica but… you know… there’s a thing called “budgets” that we have to respect so we decided with 1/5th scale.

We then found this unbelievable “tidal pool” and chose that location to shoot most of our “exterior” bigger sets that had to be in the water… what is great about a tidal pool is that it empties itself every 12 hours !!! so it was great to move sets in and out of there because of that ! So, we had an unlimited water supply to feed our powerful high pressure hoses and, for some of the bigger water elements, we had our 10,000 litre tanks that had to be “craned-in” at the right spot !

To shoot all of the water elements I needed for the shot, we waited for the night. We then shot a multitude of water elements to build the final shot, using the 10,000 litre tank or using high pressure hoses. I shot a multitude of water jets hitting all parts of the miniature set with a high speed camera. We used many of these elements for the final composite.