Rescue plunges audiences into the hard, but inspiring work of saving lives in the face of a natural disaster. Behind the scenes, the film follows a Canadian naval commander, two pilots, and a volunteer rescue technician as they train for action. When the earthquake strikes Haiti, creating one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of the century, the audience is swept along, joining with the massive effort that brings the military, civilian responders and hardware from around the world. Rescue is a journey of real-world disaster and emergency response captured (in 3D stereoscopic IMAX) with unprecedented scale and impact for the giant screen. You can visit the film’s website at http://www.rescue-film.com

Our job for this movie was to model and animate C17 cargo planes and Chinook Helicopters which are heavily used in such rescue operations. Also, one of our main visual effect for this movie was the computer reconstruction of the Port-au-Prince Cathedral of Our Lady Of Assumption, that was completely destroyed during the earthquake… The scene we imagined is that, while flying his Chinook helicopter over the cathedral to survey the damage, the pilot witnesses the total destruction of the already half destroyed Cathedral, due to a strong aftershock… to do so, we had to understand how the Cathedral was built (architecture, materials etc…) in order for our simulation to faithfully reproduce a correct destruction sequence…

Here is the making of this visual effect;

Also, not always obvious in films, visual effects are needed to simplify shooting scenes that would otherwise be too difficult to film due to, in this example, space ! You just can’t fit an IMAX camera, a film director, or whatever else, in a Chinook cockpit ! So, we built a Chinook and a C17 cockpits in studio for all of those shots in this movie. As you can see in the following two videos, the result is worth the effort (and you won’t believe the $aving$ when you don’t have to fly these aircrafts for cockpit shots !!!). Oh and one last thing… Lauren Ann Ross, the blonde girl flying the C17 ? she’s the real thing and, (at the time of the shoot), just turned 30 years old ! not an actor ! in fact, all those studio cockpit shots were shot with real Air Force pilots flown to Montreal for the film shoot. the Chinook pilot is Major Matt Jonkey…

In times of catastrophy, you can’t just call the Canadian military and say; “Hey guys ! we’re shooting a film about the earthquake and the rescue effort and we would really like to have a shot of a C17 flying over Haiti !! Can you send one over hey?”

So to illustrate the massive military effort, we shot some scenes over Haiti into which we added C17’s and Chinook helicopters coming to the rescue…

And then, we needed some maps… In this one, we transition from a “photo real” CG C17 to a graphic representation of the help arriving in Haiti.

and this map to explain how it happenned.

and the big ending where we have shot in studio cockpits and CG C17’s…