Indiana Jones: a look into the visual effects challenges and slight of hand for Crystal Skull

This sketch will highlight the wide range of challenges the visual effects team faced in creating the 540 visual effects shots (on screen for some 48-minutes) in this film. Although the team developed cutting edge technology to solve many of the issues that had to be dealt with they were also careful to remain true to the original films. ILM made the decision early on to utilize miniatures for a number of sequences but they weren't necessarily used as you might have thought. Constructing the short-lived town known as Doomtown used both practical miniatures and digital technology to achieve the resulting sequence. It was also necessary to develop advanced smoke and particle simulation techniques for the iconic nuclear event sequence.

Among the challenges was creating a digital jungle. The approach, capture as much incamera on location as possible and then augment that reality with digital jungle that integrated seamlessly. What's an Indiana Jones film without treacherous creatures that the characters have to contend with? This time around it's ants... over 200,000 of them to be exact. Creating the thousands of swarming jungle ants that had to attack and interact with the actors in a believable manner was a challenge all to itself.

To create the vast destruction necessary on such a grand scale the team used newly developed 'fracture' technology that allowed for the volumetric fracture of intricate geometry in a realistic manner. A challenge that loomed for the duration of the project was the valley destruction sequence. We'll take a look at the mixture of miniature elements, digital environment and simulated water for the film's climactic finale.