Welcome back to the day that will live in infamy. It took five months for the f/x gurus at ILM to create this shot for Disney's feature film Pearl Harbor, scheduled to hit theaters on Memorial Day. Starting with present-day footage of actors charging across the Ford Island Naval Air Station tarmac, animators worked backward in time, removing everything inappropriate to December 1941. Then they added images of custom-built model hangars - some as tall as 6 feet - to the background, enlarged live-action shots of pint-size explosions to sky-blasting proportions, and created soaring CG Japanese bombers. Seamlessly crafted, Pearl Harbor (www.pearlharbor.com) is truly a composite effort. "We didn't have the latitude to say, åThis is sci-fi,' or åThis is how things look on this planet,'" says visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig. "The bar of reality is clearly established when you intercut physical explosions with computer-generated planes."
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