How Visual Effects Pros Created Catastrophic Events in ‘Moonfall’

variety.com:

Ed Meza @edmezavarIn making “Moonfall,” his latest world-destroying sci-fi epic, Roland Emmerich once again tapped talent from his native Germany to bring his apocalyptic visions to life.“Moonfall” follows two former astronauts and a brilliant but discredited scientist, played by Patrick Wilson, Halle Berry and John Bradley, who team up on a mission to save the planet after the moon is knocked out of its orbit and begins hurling toward Earth, creating catastrophic environmental devastation in the process.Of the four VFX companies that worked on the film’s massive action sequences, two originated in Germany, Scanline VFX and Pixomondo, while the others, DNEG and Framestore, are British.Scanline, which is being taken over by Netflix, has been a regular partner for Emmerich since the 2009 disaster film “2012.” That project coincided with Scanline’s arrival in Hollywood, says Stephan Trojansky, the company’s president and senior visual-effects supervisor.

Scanline had also just made a major splash with its proprietary fluid effects software Flowline, which won the company a Scientific and Technical Achievement Academy Award in 2008.“That was just when I arrived in Los Angeles and Roland had this little movie called ‘2012,’” Trojansky recalls. “The last 25 minutes of it was literally just flooding the world.

And he trusted us on this. He saw some demos and said, ‘Let’s do it!’“I said, in honor of you giving us this chance to make this movie, I will be forever your destruction movie buddy and take on the hardest stuff.”Scanline, whose recent credits include “Godzilla vs.

Kong,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and “The Batman,” will continue to operate as a standalone business following the Netflix deal, which is.