In OSC’s book (yes, I read it :rolleyes: ), he says something about one of the reasons he was happy to write the book version is that the movie is actually a love story. And it is. I always cry when Ed Harris types “Love you” long pause “wife”. Because that kinda says it all, ya know??
And the drowning scene: I saw that in the theater when the movie first came out, and it really upset me. It still does.
And yeah, the ending’s crap, but the rest of it is worth the price of admission.
The first time I saw this flick I thought it would’ve been great for him to have sacrificed himself for the creatures. Somehow it seemed with that ending it would’ve been more satisfying if the creatures emerged yet Bud still died. These days I tend to agree with you, though.
Lightwave was used to pre-visualize the water tentacle scene, but was not used in the actual film. (I was demoing Video Toasters and Lightwave at the time.) After shooting, the whole thing was modeled in Alias and rendered (like virtually every 3D CG effect) with Pixar’s RenderMan renderer, prMan. I’m not sure if it was animated in Alias, or if it was exported to Wavefront.
The water tentacle was not ray-traced. The path the tentacle took was photographed with a special camera rig that shot still images in all six directions. Each “cube” of six images was combined into a cubic environment map used for reflection mapping the outside and was distorted with a specially developed shader, for the refraction effect.
But Photoshop does suck for anything involving more than a single frame. Combustion/Flame/Inferno are usually the choice for rotoscoping and compositing multi-frame sequences.
I loved the whole “WE LOST THE CRANE! IT’S ON ITS WAY DOWN TO YOU!” section, with the falling coils of umbilical, the accelerating sonar pings… and then the relief as it crashes down beside the rig. And then the horror, as it wobbles and goes over the edge, and the umbilical starts to pay out… pure art. Pure gold!
Remember also that when the rig’s flooding, that ring saves Bud’s life and his hand by jamming the automatic door open.
*Photoshop grew out of Thomas Knoll’s doctoral project in 1987. His brother, John, a visual effects specialist, was working on feature films at the time and got the idea to use the program that would become Photoshop on the James Cameron-helmed 1989 epic “The Abyss.”
In those days, special effects were all composited (combined) optically: layers of film were lined up and repeatedly exposed in a huge piece of equipment called an optical printer. That process was proving increasingly cumbersome for a new generation of effects that were generated entirely in a computer, as in the case of the gleaming silver “water pseudopod” in “The Abyss.” In the groundbreaking scene where a closing metal door seems to cut the computer animation in half, John Knoll composited the scene digitally in a Pixar Image Computer (running the prototype Photoshop software) rigged to an Exabyte tape drive. “Terminator 2” refined the process, and film compositing would never be the same again. So, Photoshop indeed came out of a real-life “Abyss.”
*
This is from a side comment located at: http://www.newsandtech.com/issues/2005/09-05/pt/09-05_pscs2review.htm
but its consistent with what is discussed on the Criterion Edition DVD of The Abyss which is where I got the information initially.
Knoll may have used his prototype Photoshop on that particular film, but Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull invented the Alpha channel back in 1977 and won an Oscar for it. I was personally compositing film resolution imagery digitally on Targa cards using DGS Digital Arts, Targa Tips, QFX and Lumena - all of which predated Knoll and his johnny-come-lately software. I’m a little touchy on the subject as I’ve been an expert for a company defending it’s self against Adobe’s patent claims.
One little thing about the attempt to revive MEM was, I thought, rather touching. They thought they’d failed, and we, the audience, was looking down at her, kind of like a near death sequence when the spirit hovers above the body. So we see the one guy reach over and gently put her shirt back in place(her chest had been bared for the shock paddles.) Kind of a “making her decent” thing.
It’s full of nice little details. Cameron pays attention to the little things. When the water tentacle first appears and Cat wakes up, he grabs a potted plant to smack it with!
Something else I find touching, which usually slips below the radar. When Bud is proposing to swim under the rig to the next hatch, Cat immediately gets ready to go with him. Thing is, Cat really does NOT want to go. His words, his body language, the way he chivvies Bud to hurry up before his nerve fails, everything tells you that he’s terrified; he absolutely does not want to go into the water and make that swim. But there’s a deranged Navy SEAL waiting, and he’s going to back up his friend no matter what, because that’s what you do. And a good thing he did!
the plant was located somewhere down in the carolinas, IIRC.
biehn was interviewed for starlog magazine and he said they were deep enough in this tank to require one or two (i’ve forgotten) safety stops (for non-divers these are various assorted depths where you stop and hang out for a period of time waiting for the nitrogen gas to precipitate out of your blood. the deeper you’ve been and the longer you’ve been down, the longer you have to decomp. if you don’t, you can get bent, which is not a good thing for your continued good health).
he said that often, he and the rest of the cast would be done and going and james cameron would still be at the final safety stop, hanging upside down, and making notes for the next day’s shoot.
It was indeed a real rat breathing in an oxygenated fluorocarbon fluid. Ed Harris’s fluid-breathing scene was not real, though. From a James Cameron interview:
‘What you see is a rat breathing a liquid. There are no tricks, no special effects of any kind. The only thing we did to fudge it was to put a little pink dye in the stuff so it wouldn’t just look like water. That was necessary for the later scene where Ed Harris’ helmet fills up. We had two kinds of helmets: one used in air for the scene where his helmet really fills with liquid; another helmet we used underwater that had a face plate that would pop open so that Ed could be fed with an air regulator. We tinted the face plate of that one, and we allowed the water from the environment to go into the helmet, then closed the face plate. We told the audience that the fluid inside the helmet was pink in an earlier scene, and then what we really had was a pink face plate and tank water inside the helmet for all the scenes where he’s submerged. That illusion worked pretty well."
