Call it the Miniature Apple.
On a scorching summer day in the San Fernando Valley, mock-ups of several of New York City’s most familiar landmarks are spread out on a parking lot alongside the Van Nuys Airport. The Statue of Liberty extends her flaming torch to the cloudless sky, while facades of the New York Stock Exchange and a Manhattan high-rise are being worked on by employees of Cinema Production Services.
Soon, each of these structures will be destroyed by a massive earthquake.
Anywhere else and this scene of imminent destruction certainly would raise a crowd of curiosity seekers. In Los Angeles, it’s just another day at the movies.
Actually, there’s a whole lot of shaking going on at CBS-TV these days, what with the rock ‘n’ roll mini-series “Shake, Rattle & Roll,” and this weekend’s “Aftershock: Earthquake in New York.” In this Sunday’s opening to the four-hour “Aftershock,” several million Gotham residents wake up to discover they’ve been living on a major fault line and it’s chosen the second weekend in the November sweeps period to split at the seams.
The last major earthquake to jar Manhattan occurred in 1884, when a 5.2-magnitude jolt radiated out from Rockaway. Chances are slim–less than 10 percent–that a similar event could take place in the next century, but people said the same thing about the odds of Dennis Rodman’s marriage lasting more than a long hangover.
“A New Yorker has a 50 percent better chance of experiencing a magnitude-7 earthquake in New York City than hitting the jackpot playing the lottery every week for a lifetime,” says Dr. Klaus Jacob, a research scientist at Columbia University and consultant on the project. “It has been at least 200 million years since the Ramapoo Fault in New Jersey, which also crosses near the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, has moved in a major way–although small earthquakes occur on or near it every few years.”
In other words, it’s more likely that Godzilla actually will pay a visit to New York–or the Cubs will win a World Series–than a major earthquake would take a bite out of the Big Apple.
To approximate such a catastrophe, CBS called in the special-effects wizards at Rainmaker Digital Pictures and Cinema Production Services. It was their job to make the danger seem somewhat more realistic than what usually transpires in made-for-TV movies.
A tour of CPS’ headquarters, in a nearby industrial park, reveals a miniature Manhattan with a 1/8-scale model of a New York subway train and the empty molds for jumbo jets, skyscrapers and Lady Liberty (not to mention souvenirs from several other pictures, including the White House blown up in “Independence Day”). There are cameras, lights and other necessary elements of the filmmaking process.
Perhaps most impressive is the mini-railroad that runs the length of the makeshift warehouse. On an incline at the far end of the building sit the subway cars that will be destroyed in the first wave of aftershocks.
A camera attached to the front car will record the movement of the train as it passes through a tunnel and is showered with debris from above. These images will be composited into a scene already shot, in Vancouver, of a life-size subway being jostled, along with its passengers.
“We put a real 30,000-pound subway car on gimbals, with airbags and hydraulics, and you could have charged admission,” said Lee Wilson, special effects supervisor at Rainmaker. “The vibrations could go from very tight to jumping up and down. The actors and stunt people had bruises when they came off of it.”
To add an enhanced level of drama and verisimilitude to the ill-fated train ride, the miniature footage was shot at 72 frames per minute, instead of the usual 24. Debris was dropped into the tunnel as the model train made its 100-foot-plus journey, while the lights inside the tunnel were timed to flash between the camera and the front car.
Later, a live shot of a motorman was digitally composited into the window of the miniature car, and such things as sparks, smoke, broken glass and tremors also were added.
“Everything in the show involving the quake has a lot of camera shake going on,” explained Mike Joyce, owner of CPS. “I can’t track that movement with a camera, or everything we insert in the compositing process will be a blur–so we added the shake afterward.
“Using the point of view of the motorman, we’ll also have a computer graphic brick come flying down the tunnel and crash through the window of the cab. We shot a real brick going through a window in Vancouver, but we couldn’t quite get the trajectory we wanted–so, we ended up painting out that brick and inserting a c.g. (computer graphic) brick at the moment of shatter.”
While aerial shots of Manhattan are shown throughout “Aftershock,” scenes of post-quake destruction were filmed in Vancouver and digitally composited–along with traffic and pedestrians–into the film. Any real-time rocking and rolling was done in miniature.
“The Statue of Liberty was sculpted from a solid block of foam,” said Joyce. “A huge mold was then created, and, now, the fiberglass statue is strong enough and light enough that we can drop it numerous times.”
In fact, the first time the Statue of Liberty toppled over–actually, the base crumbles and Lady Liberty takes a dive–it fell backwards, away from the camera. After rethinking the scene, CPS was able to right her course and create an effective flop.
Would the statue really fall face-first into the harbor, as the publicity posters show?
“Well, it’s not plaster or concrete . . . the copper sheeting over the statue’s inner skeleton is the width of a penny,” said Joyce, whose office is filled with books documenting the intricacies of New York architecture. “If anything, it would go down like a crushed soda can, and that wouldn’t be all that exciting. We didn’t want to hurt her too bad.”
Actually, dramatic license is taken throughout “Aftershock.”
“The audience wants to believe . . . we’re not trying to convince them this is real,” said Wilson, of Rainmaker, which also produced special effects for “Titanic” and “Storm of the Century.” “Certainly, there are so many things in real life that happen differently than in the movies–sparks, gunshots. We add what we can to make it more exciting, but there’s always a basis in reality.
“Could a subway train crash and not generate a single spark? Perhaps . . . but would it be as exciting? Obviously not.”
Wilson advises audiences to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. . . . We’re trying to pull this off by making the transition from our live-action sequence to Mike’s miniaturized subway sequence seamless and believable.
“In reality, those exploding spaceships in `Star Wars’ would produce no sound, either. But would you want to sit through an action movie in which you couldn’t hear them blowing up?”
In the same vein, what fun would it be to watch New York City crumble and not be able to hear everyone cheering from across the river in New Jersey? Or Comiskey Park, for that matter.
