Those of you who know I’m a film nerd are going to say, “Oh dear, he’s going to go on about Brian De Palma”. While it’s true that De Palma and Sissy Spacek own this story on celluloid, I was pretty stoked to be working on the remake because it stars Julianne Moore and Chloë Moretz, wonderful actors. I spent a long time working on a hail shader for the opening sequence and a physics system to make baseball size hail hailstones drop out of a clear blue sky. Unfortunately, that entire sequence was dropped from the final film and is not available even on the DVD extras so we won’t be looking at that today. What did make it in was the snake cables that trap zap the high school prom crowd, and the collapsing house at the end which I also worked on. I was pretty impressed that they had a complete lidar scan of the kitchen so as to provide not only an ambient light source, but shadows when virtual things fell behind the set furniture. No John Travolta in this one, but still a good flick.
