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According to the film's storyline, the Earth finds itself in crisis in the year 2259 A.D. The Mondoshawan are on a mission to bring all five elements to Earth when their mothership is shot down over an alien planet by the dreaded Mangalores (realized with excellent alien designs by Nick Dudman). As envisioned by Besson and Stetson, their tiny ZFX 200 fighters make a dynamic dive on the massive Mondoshawan craft, raking its surface with fiery missiles. "We shot the move on the Mondo-shawan ship first, then did different moves on the little ZFX 200 fighters," Stetson remembers. "We had two scales for the miniature attackers: a cleaned-up design maquette measuring about 16" long was used for long shots, and a 4' miniature for close-ups."
The camera follows directly behind the devastated craft as it crashes into the planet's surface. Flames erupt through its shell, which crumples on impact, recalling the destruction of the Hindenburg. "I think Mark patterned it after an actual crash he saw on film where a pretty sizable jet plane crashed into the ground at an airshow," Neil says. "It went in at high speed and disintegrated little by little from the nose to the tail. That was the guiding principle: this thing was boring in and breaking up beyond the diameter of the ship, whose width covers the impact point."
The "destruction" of the Mondoshawan ship was shot on a soundstage. "We turned the whole environment 90 degrees, so we were looking across the stage at the tail of the ship and pulling our motion-control camera back," Neil says. "We created interactive lighting effects, like firelight, as a sweetener to help join the model to the pyrotechnic plate."
"No models were harmed during the creation of the sequence," Stetson adds with a laugh. "That was sort of a philosophical thing. I was dealing with a space fantasy here, but I didn't want to do another big 'miniature explosion' movie. I didn't want to build a huge 40' spaceship, drop it into a planet surface and explode it; I wanted to do something a little more violent with the actual explosion and then just scale the ship into it. Scott Rader tracked in a lot of surface explosions to the miniature — some that we had photographed and some from the Digital Domain pyro library. We then followed the Mondoshawan ship as it crashed into the red planet, which was a typical 'Luc-vision' shot looking straight down the tail of the ship as it impacted the surface."
The massive explosion that results involved a huge pyro shoot at Indian Dunes. "The planet was a patch of ground about 50' wide by 125' deep, which was sculpted very carefully with little craters," Neil reports. "We chose that spot because it gave us late afternoon light and was relatively flat; we could do pyrotechnic events without starting grass fires. Thaine Morris and his associate, Ilya Popov, assembled a huge system of 45 to 50 mortars set up in a ring in the center of the landscape so they'd all blow from the center out as the ship hit. They also set up primer cord around the outside to create a spray of debris. It was a very cleverly choreographed pyrotechnic event. We put two small, high-speed Photosonics 4ML cameras side by side and bracketed the frame rate because additional camera costs were small compared to the cost of dressing the set. We did two formal takes. The final frame-rate was around 100fps. We shot on 5293 because it was fairly dark late in the day, and I wanted to hold the depth of the pyrotechnics."
Aside from creating stylized but believable space battles, Digital Domain's crew had to envision Evil (with a capital E) for Besson's fantastic tale. Audiences first glimpse Evil when a massive warship encounters a glowing, planet-sized ball of lava. Responding to its potential menace, a phalanx of cruisers fire three missiles at it. This tactic, however, only serves to make the vast orb larger — and angrier. When the warships foolishly fire more missiles into Evil, the sphere spits out a ball of flame that engulfs the craft.
The Evil effect was realized with Renderman, Prisms, Alias and proprietary software manipulated by a crew of CG artists overseen by digital effects supervisor Karen Goulekas. "We worked for a long time to develop the look of the crust and lava, and the activity that occurs when they meet," Goulekas says. "We developed a three-step process to create the look of the surface that greatly reduced rendering time. First, Paul Van Camp wrote a fractal generator to create fractal-animated texture and displacement maps of lava and crust. Then, additional twisting and bulging was added on top of these maps in Elastic Reality, a 2-D morphing program. Finally, the resulting maps were fed into a Renderman Shader to apply the crust and lava and their accompanying displacement on a sphere based on height fields, which condensed six hours of render time to a half hour per frame."
Evil often appears to be a deceptively simple presence, but Goulekas found the amorphous anomaly terribly complex to animate: "It wasn't easy to control the lava and the crust, because Luc wanted Evil to do some really specific things: when it closed up, it had to crust over and turn black, after which the crust had to rotate. The hardest thing was making Evil get angry and grow when the missiles were shot at it. Luc didn't want it to just scale up, which would have looked as if we were zooming in on a sphere, and neither did we. Using math expressions, Paul Van Camp came up with a way to expand it in a very non-linear fashion so the ball became more amorphous and felt as if it were actually growing."
As Evil encroaches, Besson returns to outer space sporadically throughout the film. After the film's protagonists — cab driver Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) and the cryptically beguiling Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) — meet on Earth, they take a space shuttle out of New York City and rendezvous with a spectacular 2,000' pleasure ship (the Fhloston Paradise) hovering above the surface of an idyllic water planet. Their mission: rendezvous with an alien opera diva aboard this futuristic Love Boat.
The diva sequence begins as the space shuttle docks with the orbiting cruise ship, which sports a garish paint job in a hue that Stetson terms as "candy apple blue." Naturally, the reflective nature of the paint made the 8' miniature difficult to shoot. As with all of The Fifth Element's models, Bill Neil shot the Fhloston Paradise using the backlit UV technique Digital Domain pioneered on Apollo 13. The frontlit beauty, key and fill passes were filmed against black; a backlight pass was then shot, with a screen painted with UV-sensitive paint positioned behind the model. When hit with a Kino Flo, the screen fluoresces a very narrow bandwidth frequency of red, making the model appear as a black silhouette against red. The backlit image only registers on the red layer of the film, creating a perfect matte while allowing a fair amount of reflective glow to extend beyond the model's surface — an extra touch that would have been lost using traditional greenscreen techniques.
Neil had concerns about how the intensely blue spacecraft would appear when photographed. He recalls, "It was quite shiny initially, so we found a good balance between gloss and semi-matte, where it picked up the light nicely and still had some sheen to it. I did some lighting tests, wedging the miniature to see how it behaved in the light, and found that by overexposing it significantly, it just got richer and richer. It was strange; the paint itself actually glowed. I played around with the exposure until I found a look I thought was suitable to a tropical environment."
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