Exodus: Gods And Kings is the second collaboration between director Ridley Scott and visual effects artisan Peter Chiang, a co-founder of VFX studio Double Negative (which earlier this year merged with Prime Focus World).
Scott and Chiang’s first teaming with Scott was on the Sony Pictures Television/Scott Free Productions pilot The Vatican. Exodus is thus the first Scott-directed theatrical feature on which Chiang has worked–and he filled the role of overall VFX supervisor on the high-profile Biblical epic which brings new life to the story of the defiant leader Moses (Christian Bale) as he rises up against the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton), setting 400,000 slaves on a monumental journey of escape from Egypt, which is besieged by deadly plagues.
Chiang’s filmography includes a pair of BAFTA Film Award nominations for VFX on the basis of The Bourne Ultimatum in 2008 and The Borrowers in 1998, and a Visual Effects Society (VES) Awards nom for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Feature on the strength of Green Zone in 2011.
SHOOT: What were the biggest challenges that Exodus: Gods And Kings posed to you as a visual effects supervisor?
Chiang: Three major challenges immediately come to mind. The story takes place in 1300 BC. We worked very closely with production designer Arthur Max and Ridley who is obviously a very visual director. Ridley draws brilliantly. Between the three of us, we kind of sketched out what the world of ancient Egypt would be.
Arthur told us what he could realistically build and we detailed how we could extend that digitally to realize the full picture.
There’s also a subconscious perception as to what ancient Egypt would have looked like at that time, containing ancient relics. We tried to get our new look and at the same time everybody’s preconception of that old architecture to create a believable world.
The second challenge was creating the 10 plagues, representing them in a naturalistic way. Ridley did not want to segregate the audience from the plagues. He wanted to convey the sense that each plague could physically happen. Crocodiles eating each other, causing the blood red Nile. Dead fish spawning frogs, the frogs die, flies appear eating the rotting flesh and so on. There would always be a physical explanation for the plagues and what they represented. The only leap of faith was the death of the first-born child–that’s one area that couldn’t be explained physically.
And the third major challenge was the parting of the Red Sea. We started out with a traditional tsunami churn, creating a stampeding leading edge of white water that would be viewed from a distance as a silver thread on the horizon. We studied tsunami footage, surfing film footage, connecting the leading edge of the tsunami to a giant surging Hawaiian ocean wave trailing behind it. Sadly there’s a lot of footage of the Japanese tsunami that caused so much destruction. While it’s horrible, the tsunami footage is not that cinematic. We used breaking waves to make the visuals more interesting, to create interesting shapes and crests of water.
SHOOT: Provide an example of how you made one of the plagues look “naturalistic”?
Chiang: Let’s take the infestation of the frogs. On set we wanted to have a reference of what the frogs would look like. Ridley cast the type of frog he wanted. He asked me how many of that species of frog we should have on set. I threw out a number of 400. Animal wranglers got us 400 frogs of the species Ridley liked. When you put frogs on set, they don’t do that much. They hop around, you shoot them on set and then count them all to make sure they’re all still accounted for. Then you do another take. We used this as a basis to build on, to give it that Ridley Scott feel. We digitally evolved it into 10,000 frogs, a lava flow of frogs, great surges of frogs knocking down and coming through doorways. The entire surface was covered by frogs who appear everywhere.
We conducted very stringent studies of the texture and characteristics of frogs, how they needed to be lit so that our CG frogs would look real. We developed frog crowd systems to allow them to move and swarm a particular way.
SHOOT: How many effects shots went into Exodus: Gods And Kings?
Chiang: We had 800 shots when we broke down the script. That grew ultimately to 1,300. We shot native 3D which adds its own complications to the proceedings. And with Ridley Scott’s vision, you always have to raise the level to an 11 on a scale of 10.
SHOOT: Provide an overview of the visual effects companies involved in Exodus?
Chiang: I was the overall visual effects supervisor of the film. A portion of the work went to Double Negative which was led by supervisor Charlie Noble. Double Negative worked on the Egyptian environment and the plagues. Moving Picture Company’s prime focus was on the parting of the Red Sea and the film’s opening battle. Method Studios looked after a lot of the skies and additional work. We had this gang of U.K. companies–also including Lola and Peerless. Eighteen or so shots for the Red Sea were given to Scanline in Canada. MPC and Scanline coordinated to maintain the consistency of the water. It was a huge coordinated effort.
