Maze Runner: Scorch Trials—Building a Post-Apocalyptic City

(piano riff)

(helicopter blades whirring)

Welcome to the Scorch!

The world outside's hanging on by a very thin thread.

Beyond this door,

lies the beginning of your new lives.

Hi, I'm Mike Seymour of fxguide.com for Wired,

where the Digital has just completed work

on The Scorch Trials, the new Maze Runner sequel,

for director Wes Ball.

And this film has about twice the budget

of the earlier film, but initial box office indicates

that money was very well spent.

In the sequel, Wes Ball has a much broader

and bigger canvas to paint on.

In the first film, the story kinda meant

that we would never actually see everything.

Well, not until the end.

But in this film, our heroes see virtually nothing

but vast horizons and huge empty cities.

Typically, environment work or set extensions

are built with almost like kit componentry

that's then textured.

What's fascinating about this film

is how Weta built and textured

this mythical, post-apocalyptic city.

Now, we only ever see the city destroyed,

but to get the accurate ruins, Weta built normal buildings,

and then ran a series of destruction simulations on them.

So we have not just some 3D-modeled rubble,

or some bent reinforcing,

but sort of plausibly accurate destruction.

The debris in these shots actually fell there,

it wasn't just placed by an artist.

And this is really unusual;

normally visual effects companies are paid

to make and film the destruction of cities,

not to destroy everything beforehand accurately

and then just only show us the desolate results afterwards.

Not only were the buildings all accurately modeled,

but there were no matte paintings,

not even for the distant ruins, at the insistence of

veteran VFX supervisor, Richard Hollander.

But Weta's team took it even a step further than that.

All the buildings are unique,

they're not just copied and pasted,

they're all there in the same environment,

all correctly reflecting light,

and uh, shadowing each other as they would,

thanks to Weta's new Manuka renderer.

Chris White, who headed Weta's team, told us

not only did the entire world get built and rendered as one,

but even the texturing was done primarily by simulations

and not by hand-painting.

All the kind of water and rust textures that you see

are not hand drawn.

Chris's team actually ran water simulations,

not that you'll actually get to see them, of course.

And all the kind of flapping cloth and plastic?

You guessed it, they uh, encased each building

in some kind of giant sort of sock cloth simulation,

and then the cloth caught

on only those parts of the building

that cloth would catch on.

In fact, for all the deserts we actually see in this film,

director Wes Ball only ever had

three actual sand dunes to film on.

The rest are all sand simulations.

Even the patina of the warm concrete

was weathered with particle simulations.

Basically, if this city ever got built and then deserted,

this is a vastly accurate simulation

of what it would actually look like.

The environment work then extended to inside the building,

where the underground sewers are home

to the zombie-like Cranks.

Although the lesser infected souls aboveground

were basically done with physical makeup by ADI,

the really evil Cranks below were fully CGI motion-captured

with double-jointed circus actors providing the motion.

They were then modeled with a cross between

some kind of vine-like vegetation

and a horrendous real disease that Chris White found online

called subcutaneous horn,

and trust me, do not Google images of that.

In the end, of course, most of our Gliders survived,

but there is always that third film

that Wes Ball is about to go into pre-production of

as we speak.

Well, please subscribe for more behind-the-scenes action.

I'm Mike Seymour for Wired.

(explosion) (gunshots)

(roars)

(glass shatters, snarls)

(beat)