Joining Industrial Light + Magic for The Lost World Jurassic Park — he had previously worked on Independence Day — Buenos Aires born Pablo Helman worked as a digital effects artist on the likes of Men In Black, Contact and Deep Impact before graduating to the role of Visual Effects Supervisor on Episode II, Terminator 3, Master And Commander and The Bourne Supremacy. On War Of The Worlds, he was co-visual effects supervisor along with Dennis Muren. Here, he talks about the strange and eldritch arts that make the film look so good…

How did you and Dennis divide up the duties?
The reason why we needed two people on the project was because this project was only going to take about twelve weeks. To start with we divided the location work in kind of a 50/50 split. So the idea was that Dennis was going to take the tripods for the intro section, the rise of the tripods and the ferry boat sequence, and I was going to take the aliens, the probe and the end of the war. Because work was so compressed we kind of went back and forth and worked together.

What was the most challenging thing?
One of the things that Steven wanted was to have the tripods have three legs, which is actually really funny because some of the shots are really wide and you see the tripods going back and it looks like they’re flying. Also the size of the tripod changed and evolved because Steven wanted to make sure that these creatures were 150 feet tall. Of course, that’s one of the challenges that we have in CG, in visual effects work. Every time you have a scale that is so huge, 150 feet against a 6ft man or woman or whatever it’s kind of a very difficult thing to do.

Is it difficult not to make them look awkward?
That’s also something we’re dealing with. You take a look at the design of a creature and you do spend a lot of time looking at movement and emulating something that you already know. In this case, Steven wanted something that wasn’t completely mechanical, so we did put some of the natural and fluid movements.

The aliens turning the bodies into dust is a completely new idea. How did that come about?
When you’re working on a project this big there’s always four or five concepts that you know are going to eat you alive, that you’re going to spend a long time on. That is definitely one of those concepts. I think Steven had this idea that whenever these rays were killing people he didn’t want to see any blood, any gore; this was going to be a horror movie for kids. So this idea for completely vaporising bodies was kind of clever. We knew that with 12 weeks to go we couldn’t do that with CG as a simulation, so we decided let’s do the actual ray assimilation and particles and then let’s shoot some elements in which we blow up a dust made hard of bodies. The other thing that is really incredible there is the way Steven thought of the clothes floating. He thought that was a soul-like moment, all these clothes floating really, really slowly.