Part 2

"Medusa and Poseidon are absolutely stunning and represent some of the hardest work on the project. Luma's passionate artistry and technological brilliance combined with the easy manner and can-do attitude you maintained throughout the project have impressed me beyond words." ~Kevin Mack, Visual Effects Supervisor, Percy Jackson and The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

For the main character of Poseidon, Luma brought out its superstar fluid dynamics team to handle the task of transforming the God of the Sea to and from human form. Using Real-Flow and customized dynamics rigs, Luma was able to dissolve the actors’ body into and out of a rushing torrent of water. To make it even more challenging Poseidon enters our world as a giant of mythical proportions and has to shave off some water weight to come down to human size.

Bridging the gap between fantasy and reality

Justin Johnson, Luma’s Digital Effects Supervisor on the project, states “We had to really pay attention to the volume of water contained in his different sizes so that the proportion of water leaving his body made sense when bringing him down to human scale.” The team also had to create the effect of Poseidon emerging from his underwater kingdom. For this shot, the actor was shot dry moving against a green screen and the artists at Luma had to come up with a creative solution to achieve that “wet look”. “We created really precise match move geometry to track to the actors face, then we used this to run Real flow simulations to create water sheeting off his skin,” Cirelli explains. Poseidon also emerges from the sea, god-sized, so they had to create surrounding fluid simulations in order to sell the effect of such a large scale object emerging from the sea. “The effect is more like a submarine emerging from a dive rather than a swimmer in a pool,” adds Johnson.