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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]

Five Days at Memorial | Visual Effects & Screen

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