Making 'The Impossible'

"Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible has been receiving high levels of praise from around the world since its late 2012 release. The Spanish production, starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, is the true story of a family vacationing in Thailand at the time of the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26th, 2004. With a mix of practical, miniature and digital effects, the filmmakers strove to accurately depict the harrowing events of that day.

The first wave

The first visual effects challenge was to re-create the initial wave of destruction as it hits the resort the family are relaxing in. “The key idea always was to be realistic, to be very close to the 2004 tsunami in Thailand,” says visual effects supervisor Felix Berges. “We had a lot visual references of the particular area of the real story and these were our references all the time.”

Surrounding the area are pools, bungalows, palm trees, umbrellas and all sorts of other objects. To show the tsunami wreaking havoc on all of these structures, a combination of full scale, miniature and scaled water effects were employed.

1. Crafting miniatures

The bungalows and surrounding buildings were crafted at 1:3 scale. Only three and a half bungalows were built and then duplicated in compositing. The large scale miniatures were shot on an open air 80×100 meter water tank in Ciudad de la Luz, Alicante, Spain.

2. Water dump

Before shooting in the Alicante tank, several tests were undertaken to design the look of the wave impact. This was done firstly in 1:50 scale, and then part of the 1:3 scale was built to see what the water’s behavior would look like."

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