FMX 2014: Creating a Universe For "Thor: The Dark World"

FMX Tuesday 22nd 2014
Creating a Universe For "Thor: The Dark World" by Alex Wutke (Double Negative)
Our first talk of the week was taken by Alex Wutke and he was at FMX to talk to us about the creation of Thor: The Dark World. It was a brilliant presentation and I learnt so much about everything involved in the process and the connection that the double negative team had with Marvel Cinematics in order to create the realms surrounding Asgard.

Asgard Dungeons
The first place that he showed us was the creation of the Asgard Dungeons and we got to see how it got from the pre-production stage to the end result. They begun with lots of concept art creating many different variations on what they believed that it should look like.They wanted to add in a lot of detail and concentrate mainly on the aesthetics of the environment and add in a lot more dirt and grime so that it didn't look as neat as the first film. The camera movements that feature during this scene are all based off the movements of a helicopter camera in the way they have a slight shake them them and are not completely still; giving a more realism to the movement.

During this scene there is also a scene where there is a force field present and it had a good story behind it. When coming up with ideas they began looking at Norse designs for the idea of the symbols and patterns that are reoccurring. They then had to figure out how the force field would actually work. They figured that they could use sensors and trackers for it to work and map the movements of the characters hands so that as they touched the force field it would light up and lens flares would appear where necessary.

During this scene where we see the force field in action we also see the Kurse transformation; which looked incredible!  The Kurse transformations heat based and for the testing they conducted experiments yo see how different materials would burn and they used this as inspiration for when the Kurse burns up.

Asgard Throne Room
We then moved onto looking at the scene where the Harrow Ship crashed into the Throne Room. For this scene they made  a replica so that they could use it for reference and back plates to start working from, but a full scale 3D model had to be created anyway due tot he amount of destruction that occurred here. All the destruction was created using Houdini, 3D software and during this scene they wanted a strong light source coming from back lighting to create harsh foreground shadows.

Harrow Ship Interiors
With the Harrow Ships, like in the scene where Thor and Loki commandeer one, we see a lot of outside shots, giving the impression that they are moving extremely quickly. So, when it came to looking at interior shots they wanted to find a way to keep that momentum so came up with the idea that there is a 3D map on the inside that folds out in front of them ans they navigate through this at great speed, allowing the audience to see how fast they are travelling still.

Svartalfhiem
Again they wanted to use as many reference images as they could so this time used Iceland and its barren, open spaces. In this place, as its where the Dark Elves used to live, they used negative lens flares to miss in well with their theme of things being negative, e.g black and implosions.

Greenwich
The last place that we looked at was Greenwich, again they went down and took a number of different reference images. This scene during the last third of the film, was more difficult to create as there is a scene where they have a large amount of water that needs to be churned up and moved around the bottom of the Harrow Ship. For this, they again used Houdini and created a compilation a water simulator that had different levels of water and spray coming off so that they could change this if necessary to create the best look possible.

Altogether I loved this talk, it was insightful and we found out so much information about all of the different locations and how they came about building them as it was so in depth and required so much time and effort. It just shows you how much effort that it takes to create something like these rooms and city for a film. The amount of work that goes into them from all of the different departments is extraordinary and you see just how much effort they all put into this film.