Portfolio Review: Poseidon

by DarenDoc on Jun.12, 2009, under Movie Design

I know, I know… Poseidon, Wolfgang Petersen’s re-imagining of The Poseidon Adventure wasn’t met with much acclaim or box-office awards… but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun and fulfilling to work on. I was excited to work on this movie, partly because it was a chance to work for production designer Bill Sandell again, but also cause it was gonna be a challenge to design this ginormous cruise ship and bring it into the 21st century.

It started with the edict that the ship be roughly the size of the Queen Mary II, which was appropriate, since the original was based exactly on the Queen Mary, in fact, some shots in the original film were done aboard that ship. In the early stages of pre-production, Sandell had concept artist James Clyne do a couple views of the new ship, painting over a photo of a model of the Queen Mary II. This first version of the ship had a lot of cool design elements that were retained throughout the design process.

I was hired to help do some images of key scenes in the script to sell the movie to the studio big-wigs… I joined other concept artists Clyne, Rodolfo Damaggio, and Vladimir Spasojevic in this pre green-light stage. When the production was given the go-ahead, I talked to Bill Sandell about how it might be a good idea to keep all of the design decisions of the ship, including the exterior, within the art department… and maintain a definite line of accountability that would follow through post production and to whatever company would wind up doing the final model. It was suggested that I should start a 3D model in Lightwave, and any changes and adjustments be made to that as we progressed. That way, when we had an approved design that had all the features that were needed, in scale with the sets that were being designed, it could be brought to a certain level and then handed over to the Visual Effects company intact. Sandell and VFX Supervisor Boyd Shermis agreed… and I began.

You can see below in the progression of pretty much all the images I generated of the constantly changing model… I organized the frames in relatively chronological order… grouped by specific ship areas… Hope you find it interesting.

12 comments for this entry:

deg
June 13th, 2009 on 3:31 pm
That was was pretty cool, dude.

I liked the film myself, thought is was a pretty descent action-adventure film, eh.

LLP,
deg
Scott Gammans
June 13th, 2009 on 4:49 pm
OK, that was wicked cool to see the evolution of the ship design. And ye GODS but that exterior model had a ton of detail. What did the finished product weigh in at, five million polys? Did computers whimper and shy away in fear when this model was waved in front of them?
DarenDoc
June 13th, 2009 on 4:52 pm
You know, Scott… I kept it way down in polys… because all that modeling and rendering was done on a powerbook g3… and this was back several years ago… so it had to be pretty economical. I’d have to bring the model back up and look at it to make sure, but I’d be surprised if it was over 150,000 polys.
Scott Gammans
June 13th, 2009 on 10:23 pm
WOW… that’s even more impressive.
deg
June 14th, 2009 on 10:35 am
Yeah, in many cases, you come to learn how many polys you just don’t really need, eh.

Nice job, Daren. But dealin’ with 150K polys on a G3, that’s what impresses me. I remember workin’ on my G4 and that was a pain. It’s all relative to the time though, back then it seemed fine, now my G4 seems to crawl. And I just use it for email and as a iTunes jukebox now.

LLP,
deg
DarenDoc
June 14th, 2009 on 11:43 am
A little update… I just found my backup of the Poseidon model… and opened her up again… the final count is 235,000 polys, all in.
Chris Dawson
June 15th, 2009 on 5:11 pm
Hey there Daren Dochterman! I worked on this movie too, I was a motion control camera operator for the engine room explosion sequence.

On our crew was Ernest Borgnine’s son Chris. We were going to shoot an element of him running from the explosion, but alas there was no budget.

He tried to convince his pop to come over and check us out, but he didn’t get the time . . .
Terry
June 15th, 2009 on 8:35 pm
I have been lurking for a bit and felt like commenting on this post, it is amazing how much a small detail can make a big change; the different lights on the ceiling at the end of the video, some made the room look very formal other made it more causal.
ST-One
June 16th, 2009 on 4:27 am
This ship is a beauty.
And that the model is such a relatively low-poly one is really quite impressive.
ST-One
June 17th, 2009 on 8:42 am
BTW: I wouldn’t mind to see more of this ship/model
DarenDoc
June 17th, 2009 on 10:23 am
I’ll see if I can dig up some higher res pictures… what you see in the slideshow is pretty much all the pictures that were done of the ship by me… but I’ll see what I can find.
ST-One
June 17th, 2009 on 12:16 pm
Thank you