PUSHING CHICAGO 50 YEARS INTO THE FUTURE AND THEN THROWING IT 65 MILLION YEARS BACKWARDS

Lacking a functional time machine of their own, the Sound of Thunder filmmakers relied on 21st-century ingenuity to recreate Chicago as a plausibly modern 2055 city and again in various stages of de-evolution leading step by step into the primordial swampland it once was.

Production centered in Prague and surrounding areas in the Czech Republic, utilizing a number of outdoor and indoor locales as well as the city’s famed Barrandov Studios.

Elements of production design combined with both practical and computer effects were used to set the scenes.

It was Hyams’ intention to present a plausible reality for his future cityscape, rather than "people gliding around on conveyor belts under domed skies. If you look back the same number of years, to the early 1950s, an enormous amount of changes are evident in the cars and building designs, and yet, there are still some of those cars and buildings from the 1950s around today. It’s not a complete renovation from one period to another but more a series of newer elements adding to and blending with the existing structure."

Visual effects supervisor Tim McGovern, who shared a 1991 Special Achievement Oscar for his work on Total Recall, notes that "the city background began with a 3-D grid database of downtown Chicago that was designed for an entirely different purpose – to monitor the installation of satellite dishes on rooftops so they don’t block each other. Taking that as a starting point, we decided which buildings to update and how. By adding and altering we have a brand new layout of the city."

Also working closely with Hyams was production designer Richard Holland, who previously collaborated with the director on the 1999 action thriller End of Days and more recently worked on the hit Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London. Together they created a number of sets, from the high-gloss Time Safari offices to the pulsing heart of the portal below; from a city breaking apart at the seams to a voracious prehistoric jungle.

 

It’s a Jungle Out There
Holland’s biggest challenge was planting a jungle in Central Europe’s decidedly non-tropical climate – a task of Amazonian proportions that required masses of imported greenery from Italy, Belgium and the UK as well as from the Czech Republic’s legendary fairy-tale forests, and construction of an enormous greenhouse months prior to principal photography. The production cleared out a 1930s-era ice skating rink on an island in Prague’s Vltava River and stocked it with 50-foot trees, 5,000 individual plants and several tons of soil spread over Holland’s intentionally uneven floor design. With the help of a watering system and lamps, the greenery soon thrived in its own humid ecosystem complete with birds, insects and a tar pit. Crew members needed thigh-high rubber boots to get through it.

Meanwhile, a hangar in Prague’s Letnany Airport became a temporary home for 300 giant, temperature-sensitive ferns, to keep them verdant until shooting commenced.

Holland extensively researched the period to incorporate as much authentic vegetation as possible. His collection includes varieties of bamboo, oak, willow, elm, tall pine, magnolia, ferns and a specimen commonly (and appropriately) known as lizard plant. "Flowering plants hadn’t fully developed at that point," he says. "They were still at the early stages of evolution." Likewise, there was no grass in the Cretaceous era and colors were largely muted except for the few blooming plants. "Amazingly," he adds, "several Cretaceous-era plants still exist today, such a ferns and palms. I have palm trees in my yard in L.A. I see them now in a different light, knowing that their ancestors were around millions of years ago."

Drawings of an extinct carnivorous plant intrigued director Hyams so the greens crew created a facsimile using real plants and hand-crafted its toxic red bulbs from foam. Additionally, the production enlisted help from a local forestry expert to obtain living fungi, roots, moss and other vegetation from the Bohemian forest. (On one foraging expedition the crew encountered a wild boar giving birth and crept quietly – and quickly – in the opposite direction.)

"The tar pit is also real… to a point," Holland reveals, referring to a scene in which a dinosaur sinks to its death in a noxious black lake of ooze. "Actually, the pit is only 12 inches down in its deepest area and only 2 inches in the shallow end. But in the movie it will appear so deep that the Allosaurus disappears into it."

Meanwhile, in nearby Milovice, McGovern and his crew took over the abandoned airstrip of a former Soviet military base. There, on grounds that once housed tanks and rocket-launchers, they choreographed scenes in which cars collide on the slippery streets of "new" Chicago, fall into cracks in the pavement or rack up against the burgeoning trunks of massive trees. "At this point in the story," McGovern explains, "it’s heavily overgrown with jungle so we didn’t have a good place to shoot the cars. We couldn’t do it in the jungle, the park or the city streets, so we used this empty tarmac and put in tracking markers to indicate where buildings should be for when we joined the images later."

 

The Treacherous Subway
Practical effects also figure prominently in A Sound of Thunder, most notably in a harrowing sequence in which Travis and Sonia navigate a dangerous flooded subway tunnel in the hopes of escaping certain death above ground.

Barrandov Studios, the largest in Central Europe, provided a sound stage on which special effects supervisor Joss Williams, leading a combined English and Czech crew, built a set to fully submerge a subway car for the scene. A BAFTA nominee for his work on Sleepy Hollow and more recently the special effects supervisor on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Williams was faced with having to fully flood the compartment in which stars Burns and McCormack are trapped.

Mindful of the myriad safety issues, Williams opted to lower the train compartment into standing water rather than fill it from a stationary point, explaining, "this way, we can raise the set quickly and the actors feel safer." The maneuver required a 100-foot, 310-ton crane to lower the train car set into a 14-foot deep concrete tank filled with 75,000 gallons of water.

Though game for the experience, both actors were initially apprehensive. "Having the ceiling above and nowhere to go, I get a bit claustrophobic," McCormack admits. "Still, I didn’t feel I was in danger because there was a frogman holding oxygen two seconds away."

It was important that Burns and McCormack themselves were in the tank. "The modern audience is aware of how a film is made and they can tell if stunt doubles are used," remarks Mike Valentine, chief underwater camera operator (Tomb Raider, Sexy Beast). "We wanted to use our actors in close-ups and action sequences, which was a real challenge in such an enclosed space." To meet that challenge, Valentine conceived an underwater speaker system whereby the director could speak with the actors in the tank. It was so successful that NASA borrowed the invention for training astronauts in Houston.

To prepare for the aquatic scenes, Burns and McCormack took diving lessons with the help of a Czech-English interpreter and became certified divers.

 

The Portal
To represent the time transport vehicle, Holland based his design on particle accelerators and various NASA equipment. Its control panel features a gyroscopic degree indicator as well as monitors for oxygen dilution, oscillating wind speed and atmospheric analysis. In the suit-up area, a translucent storage rack holds the safari’s nitrogen-bullet shotguns. "It’s a 360-degree feast for the eyes in there, a metallic gold and gray enclosure with digital instruments, detail and lights, a combination of beauty and function," says Kingsley. "Working in a set like this is really inspirational to actors.

"The east and west sides of the portal are asymmetrical," he continues, pointing to some of the subtle ways in which realism was achieved in such a fantastic contraption. "The tubing appears more complex in some areas than others. It looks at though the equipment has been improvised as the business developed – not in the sense that there are visible patches and repairs, but in that there have been ongoing modifications. The implication is that they are only slightly ahead of the technology they’re dealing with."

For a section of the capsule that required a gold foil-type coating, Holland contacted NASA and was provided with a sample of thermal padding used in space rockets. From that, he and his artists created a quantity for the set, using similar material.