Pearl Harbor (2001) | > Final Paper | MDIA 350 | | Matthew C. Johnson | November 24, 2009 |

Matthew Johnson
Beth Novak
Evolution of Multimedia (MDIA 350)
24 November 2009
Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor is a docu-drama that was released May 25 2001 and details the attack of the Empire of Japan on the Naval and Air forces the United States had stationed at Pearl Harbor, located on the Hawaiian Islands that brought the United States into World War II. The story of Pearl Harbor, and the men and women who became heroes that day is a story that needs to be told. People need to know what happened that day so that they will never take for granted the sacrifices made by our servicemen and women every day. This movie is very
“It's lit up by an explosion and catches fire, and flaming debris showers to the ground. And it's all right in your face.” The background plate delivered to ILM had almost none of this detail. “When the plate was shot at Pearl Harbor, the practical effects crew used a car launching rig to fire a plane wing at the building,” Snow recalls. “They also set off an explosion, which we enhanced with computer-generated and practical explosions. But the plane, and all the flaming bits flying off it, are CG.” [ (Wolff) ]

“At the point where the plane breaks up, artists switched to an identical version of the plane that was rigged for simulation. “It's a model made of a few hundred pieces that tie together with what we call ‘springs’ of different forces,” says Snow. “Those springs give way when the plane hits a certain force. It's fairly physically modeled on what would really happen. Essentially we broke the plane into small components so it could link together arbitrarily and the animator could control the stress points in the plane.” In addition to ILM's rigid-body simulation tool, Zeno, which allows animators to break apart complex models, artists used the studio's Caricature software to deform geometry and create crumpling effects. “We didn't always want to do that procedurally because we wanted to sculpt and art-direct it,” says Snow. “We would take that animation into Zeno and do the dynamics, and then bring