For the final feature in our War of the Worlds coverage we speak to Visual Effects Producer Angie Wills.

In her career, Angie Wills has been Lost in Space, pitched Alien against Predator in AVP and herded Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but her latest assignment has increased the scale of effects to a new level. She speaks to Nick Joy while lining up her effects shots.

The tripods will be coming round that headland there [points inland]. Our tripods and Martians are obviously very key in our storyline and they are as important in the story as our key characters Amy, George and Frederick. We have developed these anti-heroes and they are currently in the process of going through their evolution. All of our cast and key members have met our tripods and Martians, so they know what they look like. We’ve also pre-visualised certain scenes and we’ve developed a little app which helps us bring our hero characters to set with us. They are actually quite cool and quite tall – it helps our actors with eye lines, so that they aren’t just looking up into the sky

Is this a little like Augmented Reality (AR)?

Yes, a little bit, because one of our key vendors is actually a games company. One of our remits from the BBC was to use local talent. I’d worked with a few companies, but one particular company based in Manchester called Reel Time do stunning games work and there’s a lot of crossover now between gaming vendors and film and TV. They all use the same technology – the same software – so it made sense to use them. This beach is effectively a huge plate, which we’ll be using for enhancing the evacuation and bringing in the tripods. There will be a lot of elements and CG involved. I’ve worked on beaches quite a lot… but not one this wet [We paddle through deepening tributaries to find some shelter].

Does this extreme weather work against you?

Not necessarily. Sometimes it can be your friend because mist and fog mean you don’t have so much to cover up. When you’re shooting period drama in a 21st Century environment you often have to enhance and replace bits that stop it looking like 1906. In scenes that are city-based, we’ve been filming in Liverpool for London, and there will have to be a lot of clean-up enhancement to make it resemble the city of that time. That’s pretty traditional effects work, which we’re hoping that nobody will notice, because a great visual effect is one that you don’t notice. Unfortunately, with a tripod, you will notice it!

Will you have to augment the beach itself?

I think it’s a fantastic location for the telling of the story, so again I think it’ll be more a case of bringing stuff to the beach rather than changing the beach itself. We enter the story in the Great Empire days of 1906 when we are the dominant force on the planet. We think that we’re invincible and no-one can beat us when all of a sudden this empire from not across the waters, from across space, introduces itself. We focus on how that changes the environment we’re living in.

Will you be doing crowd replication to enhance the numbers on the beach?

We intend to, but it will be dependent on the edit. There will absolutely be some enhancement. There’s about a 100 to 110 set actors, so we’ll be making the number much bigger than that.

What are the challenges in making something that people are already familiar with?

There’s a whole generation of people who don’t connect with the original story or even H.G. Wells. They’re used to connecting with the version on the Sci-Fi Channel or with Tom Cruise. At one of the locations, someone asked me what we were doing and I said War of the Worlds. They said they’d watched it on TV the previous week, but how we’re going to make it look American? For some people there’s going to be a little education curve for the whole story, the fact that it was one of the first, great works of science fiction that I suspect has always been in print.

It will be great to bring the context of that whole story, that timeframe, back to the audience who don’t get that and weren’t taught about H.G. Wells at school. It was contemporary story at the time. It was a sci-fi drama, though I doubt that term existed at the time. The story still holds up, so does the character motivation, the journey and quest.

Was one of your earliest references to the story the 1978 Jeff Wayne concept album?

I think that everybody of a certain generation references that. I felt very old the other day when someone said that their dad used to listen to it! Peter [Harness] has written a brilliant script and Craig [Viveiros] has a vision for this, so it feels like a new story.

What can you tell us about the Martin fighting machines?

I can’t tell you too much about them apart from that they’re big and they’re threatening and they’re characters. The thing I really want to sell is that we developed these characters before we got to the set. It was really important that they came with us. Our set supervisor is Stephen Corinne, who I’ve worked with for about 20 years, and he was the first person I called to ask if he wanted to help me get some Martians together. He has a huge technical animation background as well which helped in us developing our characters. We’re just planning the plates and the journey and crafting them into these environments.

How would you describe the look of the aliens?

I think they will look like… they will fit with the description that plays out in the book. They won’t look like the Jeff Wayne album cover for sure. You have to remember that at this point in our history we were builders of steam engines and all that stuff, but I can tell you right now that steampunk doesn’t come into any of this. What comes to visit us is a very different sort of technology. The technology is very rooted in the place that they have come from, so it’s like nothing they would have ever seen.

Are the tripods individually identifiable?

You’ll have to wait and see. Americans would describe them as ‘awesome’!

 

Follow our War of the Worlds coverage, with a set location report, interviews with actors Rafe Spall and Rupert Graves, director Craig Viveiros and writer Peter Harness.