You should not see the effects

German World Magazine sat down with Bremerhaven native, Academy Award and Emmy winner Volker Engel, the day after Roland Emmerich’s 2012 premiered at the Regal, a futuristic glass-castle movie theater in downtown Los Angeles. The SFX Magician and his partner, Marc Weigert, cooked up the impressive Special Effects with their company, Uncharted Territory, for this latest “Opus Destructivus Maximus”

GW: What should the audience expect?
VE: A story’s fundamental idea is the most important thing for me. How would the world’s biggest governments react if they knew a couple of years in advance there would be a huge catastrophe? Do they try and save as many people as possible? How many can even be saved? How do you pick who will be saved? Who should be saved? What should be saved? Are the greatest pieces of world art and literature, and the technical achievements that make up our civilization, worth more than the world population? Who is responsible and who has the power and courage to decide; especially when the decisions are difficult and uncomfortable and you realize everyone and everything can’t be saved? This basic idea is the canvas upon which the special effects are created, and though which our story’s hero, played by John Cusak, guides his patchwork family; his ex-wife, their two children, and her new boyfriend, to safety.

GW: Why did that topic lend itself to a new movie?
VE: The movie is based in part on a book which mentions, although this is not the story’s basis, that the Mayan Calendar ends in 2012. The sun, at that time, heats up the earth’s core and the tectonic plates move faster than usual on top of the super heated magma. In general the movie is meant to be entertainment and deals more with the question of how people react in extreme situations; how these circumstances bring out the good, the bad and the ugly in us humans.

GW: What is more important, the story or the SFX?
VE: As long as the story is solid, many things, like a chase, whether it takes place with ships in space or speedboats in the Florida keys, are almost interchangeable. It’s almost harder if the audience has already been somewhere; everybody knows what a garden fence or grass looks like, but hardly anybody has been to space. I love special effects, but when the movie does not offer a thrilling story and great actors who pull us in, no one cares about the effects. Audiences should not even notice the effects!

GW: What does one have to bring to the table to be part of your team?
VE: Teamwork is key! Often programming is associated with reclusive lone wolfs. With Special Effects, the team and the final product stands above everything; there is no maverick style programming. Emotional intelligence and the ability to function as part of a team trumps technical talents when you put a team together. We often work fourteen hour days and there can’t be any tension on a personal level. There are three areas: 3D computer animation, graphic animation, and compositing. All teams in all three areas have to pull together.

GW: With Austrians and Germans in key positions, what is your working language?
VE: Mixed. For our next project, which will begin shooing in March, 2010 in Berlin Babelsberg, we will hire local artists and it will be important for them to speak English as well as German.

GW: After shooting so many films in Hollywood, why will the next production move to Berlin?
VE: Europe lends itself to a movie set in 16th century England. Additionally, Germany offers very generous tax breaks and government film aid. Marc Weigert and I specialize, through our company Uncharted Territory, in setting up and organizing a special effects team wherever we go. Hardware and physical components are the least expensive factor, and I am sure we will settle into Berlin’s studios quite well.

GW: With all the technical advancements, how do you stay up to date with cutting edge technology?
VE: On that topic, I always admit that I have never programmed complicated effects. Technology moves so fast that it’s impossible to be the best in every area. You have to do it all the time to keep up with just one area. Creating the vision of the movie and maintaining its integrity is my responsibility. I like to compare it to being the project’s eye.

GW: Compared to the milestone Independence Day, has creating Special FX become more difficult?
VE: Back then, thirteen years ago, nobody had seen these kind of special effects. And aliens, compared to supermarkets or natural landmarks that everybody has seen, are always less real to us, and thus easier to portray because audiences don’t have preconceived notions about how they should look. 2012’s challenge was to deal with the audience’s daily reality; everybody has a mental image for shattering glass or how a palm tree moves in a storm. Attending to all the details of thousands of small elements, from mailboxes to walkways to office buildings, was quite demanding. For 2012, we had hundreds of artists working at Uncharted Territory, and we cooperated with 14 other companies, including Munich’s Scanline, who specialize in water animation. We always joke around that Independence Day had 400 SFX shots. Nowadays almost every romantic comedy has that many. 2012 has 1300! The movie runs 158 minutes, and 77 of those minutes consist of special and visual effects.

GW: After your team destroyed Los Angeles for the third time, and this time you did the job thoroughly, what else is on your wish list?
There is no short answer to this question. I love my job because it never repeats itself. There are always new challenges. The story is the most important thing for me, that’s where my fascination starts. When we sit together with Roland (Emmerich) it’s like telling stories around a campfire. The story has to be thrilling, whether it’s a giant lizard in New York or an alien attack. In the next movie, it’s 16th century Shakespeare.

BIO: Born in Germany’s Bremerhaven, Volker Engel won the film industry’s highest honor, an Academy award, for 1997’s “Independence Day”. In 2006, he won an Emmy for “The Triangle,” a TV production. Along with Marc Weigert, he owns Uncharted Territory, a leading worldwide Special Effects company. http://www.uncharted-territory.com

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