The idea of the moon crashing into Earth seems impossible, but Moonfall's visual effects supervisor used real physics to figure out how it could happen.
It’s not every day you get to bring the Earth to the brink of destruction, but that’s exactly what director Roland Emmerich set out to do in his latest film, Moonfall.
Peter Travers: That really is, ultimately, the very first discussion, too — because where do you even put your camera with something that big? If you put it out in space, it will be comprehensive, but that’s not a camera [perspective] we’re accustomed to, so it could take you out of the moment. That’s why, every chance we got, we tried to put the camera at eye level on the Earth, because that’s the most impactful camera.
So in Maya, I created an accurate, volume-scale-speed model of a mini solar system of the Earth, the moon, and the sun. There are a lot of weird things about the moon — its density, its orbital speed, and that it’s actually five degrees tilted, for example. So I just started plugging in all of this stuff, and, using Newtonian physics, I got a simulated moon to spin at the correct speed around the Earth. Then we started messing with it, trying things to get the moon to fall the way we need it to.
I know this sounds kind of strange, but this sort of Newtonian physics is actually simple calculations when you have a small number of gravitational objects. When you get into a large number of gravitational objects, it gets really complicated. The terms for it are the “Two-Body Problem” and “Three-Body Problem,” based on how many objects you’re dealing with.
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