"The Day After Tomorrow", Crossing the Hudson [1st Teaser Trailer] (2004). Two of the heroes cross the frozen Hudson river and make their way into Manhattan.

This shot was intended for Day After Tomorrow's teaser trailer debut over the Memorial Day Weekend. It was the final shot of the trailer, and what the audience took away with them as their impression of the movie so it had to photorealistic and as awesome a spectacle as possible. So we set out to make it look like New York had just been pummeled by the largest snowstorm ever to hit the Earth.

To start off we had a lucky break. We received the base geometry for the city - comprising 5 million polygons and more than 9,000 objects - from one of the lead effects houses on the project. Unfortunately it quickly became apparent that the models had not translated into Max well, which meant a massive effort to fix them and make them renderable. Then we started the process of modelling the snow on the surfaces of all the buildings. And then added more snow. And then more. We must have done about 6 or so passes before we finally got approval. Luckily we struck on a novel mix of max modifers that sped up this process considerably. As the modelling lead for this shot, you can imagine the fun that I had keeping track of all this stuff :-)

I forget how long we had to do this exactly, but I don't think it was more than a couple of weeks (in reality more with all the late nights that went into it). When I eventually saw the teaser trailer in the movie theatre I heards gasps from people when this shot appeared - so I guess it was totally worth it.