Mammoth undertaking

A REPLICA OF THE MAMMOTH BALLOON WAS PHYSICALLY AND DIGITALLY BUILT FOR THE PRODUCTION

“The primary thing that took David Hindle and I by surprise when first meeting Tom Harper was his insistence on making a real balloon,” recalls co-production designer Christian Huband. “Our instincts as filmmakers would be to resist that and say, ‘Hold on a minute. If we’re going into space we don’t need to make the space shuttle. We’ve got to think about this practically.’ But in this particular case having the real balloon gave us a cipher that informed everything else that we then did.” The physical build also served as a basis for the digital double. “We LIDAR scanned the real basket and extrapolated from that,” explains Framestore CG supervisor Benjamin Magana.

The Mammoth was a heavy digital asset that needed to float in huge cloudscapes and withstand extreme close-ups in various conditions ranging from dry to wet to frozen to destroyed. “The rig, detail and resolution of the balloon had to be insanely high,” remarks Framestore VFX supervisor Christian Kaestner. “For the frozen version, we could do a simulation of a bulged balloon when the cloth pushes through the net, but on top of that the effects department could run particle and frost simulations.” Damage continuity had to be maintained. “In the storm one of the ropes break,” states Kaestner. “We always had to make sure that the orientation of the layout was accurate to what it needed to be, so the ladder was always in the right spot in relationship with the

hanging basket.”