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00:00 Co-created by John Ridley and Carlton Hughes and starring Vera Farmiga and
00:04 Sherry Jones, Five Days at Memorial follows the doctors and the nurses
00:10 at the intensive care unit of a New Orleans hospital as they struggle with
00:14 treating patients during Hurricane Katrina when the facility is without
00:18 power for five days. Let's welcome from the show three-time primetime Emmy
00:23 nominee VFX supervisor Eric Durst. Eric's credits include Bong Joon-ho's
00:34 Snowpiercer, HBO's Perry Mason, Gods of Egypt and he's nominated with his VFX
00:39 team this year for outstanding special visual effects in a single
00:44 episode for Five Days at Memorial's episode day two. Hello. Hello. Good to be
00:51 here. Hi everybody. So tell us about the jump. There's some
01:00 intense shots in this show because you're recreating you know the awful
01:06 devastation here from the hurricane. What was your jumping-off point?
01:10 Do you have storyboards? Are you going off of archival footage? Well there was a
01:15 lot of archival footage that happened and a lot before, during and after
01:20 Katrina itself and then also the aftermath after the levees had breached
01:25 and you're seeing just the streets flooded and people in the streets, bodies,
01:31 people in the roofs, but there was no footage that was taken for the iconic
01:39 moments. For instance you look at the the Superdome without a roof and everyone
01:44 knows where that came from and then also the the Lower Ninth Ward where it's just
01:50 blown out. It looks like a bomb hit it and how did that happen? Because there's
01:55 nothing to really wrap our head around on that. It just occurred and so one of
02:02 the things that we wanted to do was go back forensically and really research
02:08 what those moments were because those are pivotal moments that really told a big
02:12 part of the story and we obviously had a lot of footage to know what the texture
02:18 and the look was like but and there are lots of different stories about people
02:24 have you can talk to many people and a lot of people will have different
02:29 thoughts on how the levees breached and the Lower Ninth Ward was taken out but
02:35 we went back and figured out what happened and then visualized that and
02:40 it's a pivotal point in the series itself because that is the moment where
02:46 it changed from Hurricane Katrina which wasn't as bad as everyone thought it
02:51 would be. Everyone was sort of like high-fiving each other because it's all
02:54 gonna be okay. It was a beautiful day and then in the background the levees
02:59 breached and then everything just went from there. So in the course in the
03:06 course of assembling this who are you typically working with? The
03:09 cinematographer? The production designer? Well we did a lot of
03:14 pre-visualization in this because the first challenge really was like okay we
03:19 have a city that's underwater and how do we do it and how do we frame this? So Matt
03:28 Wieland who is also a VFX sup on the show is very talented at visualizing
03:33 things and so he did a lot of the pre-vis and John Ridley and Carlton Cuse
03:40 were all searching what what this is gonna look like. So we would do
03:46 pre-visualization unlike normal pre-vis where you take a brief and you go away
03:51 and you put it together and you come back and you present it. We wanted to
03:55 feel like everyone was in the same room at the same time. So we built the sets,
04:00 had those all in Unreal so you could move very quickly around with the
04:04 cameras and this was during COVID protocols so we're all on zooms which
04:09 actually worked out better because we're all looking at the same thing at the
04:12 same time. And then we would go into these sessions basically blocking
04:18 sessions where you would block out sequences and that would put the actors
04:23 in various places, cameras and different things. We had the DP there as well,
04:28 Ramsey, and so we were all essentially in the same room and it was if we were on
04:34 the set on the stage at the same time virtually at this point but we worked
04:41 out all the choreography and then once we got to the real set everyone felt
04:45 like they had been there before. So it was remarkable sometimes you work things
04:49 out and then you get there and directors start changing things and your plans
04:53 fall apart. In this case everything held because everyone had participated
04:57 everyone had felt like they were part of that process and done their
05:02 searching for shots in a virtual space and then once we got there it was, I
05:09 don't want to say it's easy, but it was certainly less intense than it would
05:14 normally be. So for many filmmakers their film is never done, it's just never done.
05:19 Is it the same way in VFX? Is it like if you look, I mean that's some beautiful
05:24 work there with the debris and everything. Is a shot never complete?
05:29 Can you keep perfecting it? Sure, I mean I look there and I see all kinds of
05:34 things but fortunately like Bill was saying it's like you look at it in
05:40 context and it's like oh it's okay. And then as far as making it seamless, you
05:48 know because this is a very dramatic series, seamless with the regular
05:53 footage that was being shot, the VFX shots with the regular footage. Can you
05:58 talk about that? So that one didn't overpower the other. Yeah, so in this
06:03 case the visual effects, we wanted to be as accurate as possible and also this is
06:08 an event that took 1,400 American lives and so we had to be very careful about
06:14 how to do it and not have spectacular shots and they had to be impressive like
06:21 the the levee breaking and powerful but they also had to be emotional. So let's
06:26 let's say for instance the levee breach. As that happened we wanted to have the
06:34 feeling of what it would be like to look at it so we start out objectively so
06:39 you're going over the the the the levee as you would in a helicopter if you were
06:45 in a newscaster looking at it dispassionately and then as they breach
06:50 we get closer to it and closer and closer and then all of a sudden we get
06:55 swept in and then it's almost like we're on a boat and if you've ever been in
07:01 rapids you know that there are points where you just don't have any control
07:05 anymore so then you're getting closer and then it's almost like at the end of
07:09 the shot it's almost like you don't have a boat anymore and you yourself are in
07:13 the water and being dragged underneath so we really wanted to get that
07:16 emotional component in that because that got you gave you a feeling of what it
07:22 would be like to be in that situation where you had no control over the
07:27 physics of this mass of water. And that levee breach shot how how long did it
07:33 take to put together? That took about nine months. Wow. And a lot of it was just
07:38 researching and figuring out how it was put together again this is where there's
07:44 no documentation of it really I mean everyone had stories of what happened so
07:48 we had to sort of go back forensically and one thing I learned I thought I
07:52 thought levees breached like they just exploded or cracked or something like
07:57 that I didn't really understand how it worked but what happens is that you have
08:01 these panels there anywhere from 8 to 12 feet long and all these panels next to
08:06 each other and then if this is if this is the wall itself the water starts to
08:13 go over the top of it to the backside and because the water is is there it
08:22 starts to reach into the foundation of what's holding this up and you can
08:27 imagine like you have these these smallish walls really holding up the
08:32 force of the ocean and how powerful that is and then when you get to a tipping
08:39 point where the foundation just gives way and it just flops over so as it
08:45 flops over that's why you have this a giant wave that comes out and and
08:49 destroys everything in its path. How many shots in this particular episode? VFX shots?
08:56 This well there were about 800 shots throughout the whole series and I think
09:03 episode 2 which is where that takes place there were probably maybe 60 shots
09:09 or something like that but they were all big shots. How does this stand up next to
09:14 other series and films you've worked on as far as the VFX the demand for VFX?
09:19 I think this is the highest bar that we've had this was based the story of
09:25 Five Days at Memorial was based on an article that Sherry Fink wrote she was a
09:30 investigative reporter and she won the Pulitzer Prize for this and basically we
09:36 have three minutes and five seconds left so I'll quickly do this okay so what
09:42 happened in the in the story is that the the hospital Memorial Hospital was owned
09:49 by a corporation and so there were no plans no contingency plans of what would
09:54 happen if there was a flood so obviously the flood happened and they had no
10:01 relationships with like National Guard or any boats or anything like that to
10:07 any way to get out of it and the power went out it was a hundred and fifteen
10:12 degrees inside the hospital itself and you can imagine having ventilators are
10:17 being run by generators which are run by batteries which are draining there's
10:22 very little water to get to the helipad on top the helipad hadn't been used for
10:27 30 years so they didn't even know if it would have enough structure to hold the
10:32 helicopters so they finally flagged down some helicopters just sort of like
10:39 waving and and finally got some to come and it did hold but you didn't have an
10:44 elevator so they had to take patients one at a time it sometimes took 30 to 40
10:49 minutes for one patient to bring them up this rickety staircase to the top and
10:54 have them being evacuated by helicopter and then next to the hospital is the ER
11:00 area ER ramp and that was where a lot of the staging happened where there would
11:07 be boats that came in and grab people but in the end after five days everyone
11:13 had to evacuate but they couldn't get all the patients out and so the
11:18 investigators that shot that you saw where the people are in the boat going
11:21 towards the hospital that was investigators that went to the hospital
11:26 a week later and went in went to a chapel and they found all these like 40
11:33 bodies wrapped in in cloth and they discovered that 35 of those people had
11:40 been euthanized and it's a the whole story is about what would you do you
11:47 have a you have a patient that is 400 pounds they can't get them out you have
11:54 to evacuate you do you leave them there or do you transition them I guess for
12:00 the lack of a better word and so that's what happened that's really the the
12:05 centerpiece of the story it's very powerful story Eric Durst VFX
12:10 supervisor for five days at Memorial
12:15 you
12:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]