February 2, 2009
When Jeffrey Katzenberg came to San Francisco earlier this month to
screen clips from his forthcoming film, he issued a warning: “What you
are about to see may be disturbing to watch.”
Disturbing, that is, to people who love the City by the Bay. The
company he leads, DreamWorks Animation, unleashes some pretty dramatic
destruction on San Francisco in “Monsters vs. Aliens.” A wild chase
through the city’s streets in the animated 3-D movie culminates with an
extended fight between a giant monster and a giant alien at the Golden
Gate Bridge, which does not survive the encounter.
San Francisco is a familiar movie location. In fact,
computer-generated effects were used to destroy the bridge in “X-Men:
The Last Stand,” released in 2006. But the DreamWorks designers faced
special challenges. For one thing, they planned to assemble, and
disassemble, much more of the city. And they needed to do it in three
dimensions.
 “We
were first really scared,” says Mahesh Ramasubramanian, a DreamWorks
visual effects supervisor, on hearing of the San Francisco scenes.
But new technology and the movie’s quirky plot helped. Its heroine,
Susan, has been turned 49-feet-11-inches tall by some space gunk, and
winds up joining forces with terrestrial monsters to fight an alien
invasion. In the San Francisco sequence, she is chased by a 350-foot
monster that turns everything in its path into rubble. Click blogs.wsj.com for the whole story.
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