The Meg (2018)
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In real life, Jason Statham is an expert swimmer. In the 1990 Commonwealth Games, he represented England in diving. Footage of him competing can be found online. Most of the shots of him in the water are real. A stunt double was used for more hazardous shots.
In the book, the megalodons are pure white, almost luminescent, from living in an environment with virtually no light. This coloring proved too difficult to render in CGI while still looking realistic, so the megalodons were given the same coloring as great white sharks - grey backs with pale bellies - even though this coloration would only make sense in an environment with light.
How and why there are megalodons (believed to have been a shallow-water predator) in a deep sea trench is never explained in the film, while the novels go in-depth with their evolution into an abyssal species (they migrated to the heated hydrothermal vents to escape the ice ages, over millennia gaining a slower metabolism and losing skin pigmentation in the process).
For the giant squid (Architeuthis dux) sounds, the sound editors parked a car in a quiet location at WB, and put microphones inside of the car (stereo mics and some contact mics attached to the windshield). Then went outside the car with two or three different types of plungers and started plunging the windshield. Sometimes they even used a dry plunger and sometimes a wet plunger with dish soap on it to make it slippery and slurpie. The sound editors even came up with some really cool material for the cups of this giant squid. So they would do a hard plunge onto the glass, and then pull it off.
In the book, the Meg only attacked at night since living in the deep water made its eye sensitive to light. It only attacked in daylight when it had been blinded during the course of the book. The movie, however, had the Meg in daylight with no consequence.
The young boy on Sanya Beach who begs his mother to be allowed to go swimming is another homage to Jaws (1975). His mother is wearing a similar swimsuit to the one Alex Kintner's (the second victim) mother wore in the original film.
Eli Roth was attached as director before being replaced by Jon Turteltaub. Roth left due to creative differences with the studio, namely that he wanted the film to maintain both its R-rating and a $150 million budget. It was also rumored that Roth, on top of writing and directing, also wanted to play the lead role of Jonas, but the studio believed he did not have the star power.
(at around 53 mins) At one point, Jonas jumps into the water and starts singing to himself, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..." This is Dory's song from Finding Nemo (2003).
The film is based on the book "MEG: A Novel of Deep Terror," the first book that author Steve Alten ever published.
In 1997, when the book was first published, Disney bought the film rights for almost $1 million. The project went into turnaround after Disney caught cold feet about competing with Deep Blue Sea (1999). Steve Alten, frustrated at the lack of movement, wrote his own draft, which he showed to Nick Nunziata, who then delivered to Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro took the project to Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin, who brought on Jan De Bont.
The supposed megalodon teeth dated to just before the ice ages found by the HMS Challenger are now believed to be much older, but a mineral coating around the fossils slowed their decomposition so that they appeared fresher than they really were.
"When we modeled the Meg using correct shark proportions, it looked too sleek and thin, with a too-small dorsal fin," comments Adrian De Wet. "So we had to adjust proportions to Jon Turteltaub's taste, which meant a fatter shark, with smaller eyes and a larger dorsal fin. There were many iterations of the Meg body shape, from long and sleek to shorter and fatter. Too much of a bulbous shape destroys scale and makes it look like a tuna fish or a giant guppy. Too lean and sleek makes it take on the appearance of an eel."
(at around 1h 30 mins) The scene where Meg is pulling one, then two, then three of the floating docks is a subtle homage to Jaws (1975) with the barrels.
Adrian De Wet notes that real great white sharks can almost look too 'smiley' when they appear head-on, as if with a big grin. So the Meg was designed with a mouth that was less turned up at the sides in order to be scarier. The shape and proportion of the giant shark had to be addressed as well.
Despite being gigantic, the megalodons can still attack suddenly and out of nowhere. Sharks are still ambush predators. As a result, their fins normally only break the surface when they're swimming around or chasing prey down. When they go on the offense, they go underwater and strike from nowhere.
In the book, Jonas is trying to fix a broken UNIS system. In the film, however, he is trying to save a submersible carrying his ex-wife.
When Disney Hollywood Pictures first bought the rights to the novel in 1996, they hired Tom Wheeler, television writer and producer to write a screenplay for the movie. However, his script wasn't considered to be very good so Disney hired another screenwriter Jeffrey Boam, who was most well known for writing scripts for films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Lost Boys (1987), Innerspace (1987), Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) and Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), but his screenplay was also rejected for same reasons as Wheeler's.
When New Line Cinema took over the project in 2005, another script was written by Shane Salerno, writer of both Alien Vs Predator films, and Jan de Bont was involved in it as director and Guillermo del Toro as producer, but ultimately it was canceled once again.
When New Line Cinema took over the project in 2005, another script was written by Shane Salerno, writer of both Alien Vs Predator films, and Jan de Bont was involved in it as director and Guillermo del Toro as producer, but ultimately it was canceled once again.
The names of the submarines are 'Origin' and 'Evolution' referring to Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' which explains his theory of evolution.
The animators looked at how the jaws behave when a shark attacks, what the gills are doing when it turns in anger, how fast is the tail moving to propel the massive body, and added the extra few percent to exaggerate the action, creating a shark that is not only believable, but also terrifying.
When Meiying encounters a megalodon for the first time, she's wearing an angel outfit. In the books the main megalodon featured in most of the sequels is named Angel.
In the novel, Jonas became a paleo-biologist after his final diving venture (where he allegedly saw a giant white shark's head), which is how he's able to immediately identify the giant shark as a megalodon. In the film, he never actually sees the megalodon in the beginning, and became an alcoholic afterwards, but is able to immediately identify the megalodon on first sight nonetheless.
Winston Chao plays Bingbing Li's father, but he's only 13 years her senior.
Author Steve Alten's daughter appeared as an extra in the film.
(at around 42 mins) When explaining the Megalodon to the group using a presentation, there is a photo of a man standing in the jaws of a Megalodon. It has the likeness of Matt Hooper from Jaws (1975).
At one point, director Jon Turteltaub did ask the question, "Would it be appropriate for The Meg to make a growl or roar?" That opened up the door for Erik Aadahl, Ethan Van der Ryn and Jason W. Jennings to explore that avenue stating: "The megalodon shouldn't make a growling or roaring sound, but there's a lot that you can do with the sound of water being forced through the mouth or gills, whether you are above or below the water. We explored sounds that the megalodon could be making with its body. We were able to play with sounds that aren't animal sounds but could sound animalistic with the right amount of twisting. For example, if you have the sound of a rock being moved slowly through the mud, and you process that a certain way, you can get a sound that's almost vocal but isn't an animal. It's another type of organic sound that can evoke that idea."
Megalodon generally isn't considered to be in the genus Carcharodon anymore, usually it's considered a species of the extinct genus Carcharocles.
Water sequences were filmed in two tanks built in Kumeu, New Zealand. One was relatively shallow but with a large surface area, and contained a high 200-foot greenscreen on one side for water surface shots. The second smaller tank, a deep water tank was circular and covered by a 'blue sky' roof and lined with blue pool liner. "This tank was for underwater action shots, such as when Jonas battles the Meg underwater in the third act of the film," says Adrian De Wet.
The name of the Yorkie in this movie is Pippin. The Labrador in Jaws (1975) was named Pippit.
The opening of the film features Jonas attempting to rescue the crew of a sunken nuclear submarine, assumedly sunk by the megalodon itself, which Heller served on. Presumably, this is a nod to the first novel, where the Navy attempted to kill the megalodon by hunting it via submarine. Didn't work out so great there either. For bonus points, Heller's brother was a crew member of the sub in the novel.
The name of the boat at the end of the film is "Charlotte." This is also the name of the ship that the character Benjamin Franklin Gates searches for in National Treasure (2004), which was also directed by Jon Turteltaub.
(at around 42 mins) Kronosaurus gets a quick cameo while our heroes are looking up details on the megalodon. Kronosaurs would first appear in the second book (the revised edition of the first novel also includes one in the prologue).
With a $130-$178 million production budget, and a $140 million marketing budget, the film will need to gross $300 million to break even.
Adrian De Wet stated "The creature is described in the books as looking like a huge albino great white, And while it makes evolutionary sense for it to have ended up albino and blind after countless millennia in the total darkness of 10km deep, Jon Turteltaub felt that that didn't work for his vision. Instead he wanted it to look gnarled, textured, aggressive, moody, and dark, most definitely not a great white."
By using Viewport 2.0, Imageworks could turn around versions quickly in a kind of 'post-vis' workflow. This included shots that ultimately did not make the final cut of the film. Artists would quickly roto and matchmove plate photography of the actors filmed in a water tank (against an underwater bluescreen) and then hand that over to animation and layout. There was no lighting or compositing done for these early deliveries, but the results were more than good enough for the filmmakers to review shots, after which Imageworks could move onto generating finals with more precision through its traditional pipeline.
Jonas was a DSV pilot for the navy in the original book whereas in this one he was a rescue diver (though the film's Jonas retains the original's status as an Ace Pilot of submersibles). This is used to concisely explain why he in particular is chosen for the rescue mission despite being considered insane: he's the only man to ever perform a rescue that deep and survive.
In addition to the shark itself, Imageworks had to imagine an underwater environment, parts of which required vast amounts of coral. The studio had developed a scattering tool for plant life on Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) called Sprout, and this was also employed on The Meg for the underwater coral.
Since real sharks can't make sounds, but Hollywood sharks do, director Jon Turteltaub wanted to approach the sound of the megalodon in his film. Before the film was even shot, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura said the most important thing in terms of sound for the megalodon was to sell the speed and power. Sharks don't have any organs for making sound, but they are very large and powerful and are able to displace water. Sound editors Erik Aadahl, Ethan Van der Ryn and Jason W. Jennings used some artistic sonic license to create the quick sound of them moving around and displacing water. Of course, when they breach the surface, they have this giant mouth cavity that you can have a lot of fun with in terms of surging water and creating terrifying, guttural sounds out of that.
Although Jonas never actually sees a Meg in the beginning, he DOES see the bite imprint in the hull from one of the Meg's attacks. A little research afterward could have helped Jonas figure out what attacked the sub - and would offer some explanation why he turned to drinking, after realizing what it was.
In its early stages of development, the film was touted as a George Clooney vehicle.
(at around 1h 30 mins) During the climactic scene in the film with hundreds of people on a beach and a megalodon in the water. There's one character inside a "zorb" ball - an inflatable hamster ball for humans that's used for scrambling around on top of the water. At a certain point, this "zorb" ball pops and that was a sound which Jon Turteltaub was obsessed with getting right. Erik Aadahl stated: "We went through so many iterations of that sound. We wound up doing this extensive balloon popping session on Stage 10 at Warner Bros. where we had enough room to inflate a 16-foot weather balloon. We popped a bunch of different balloons there, and we accidentally popped the weather balloon, but fortunately we were rolling and we got it. So a combination of those sounds created the"'zorb" ball pop."
Director Jon Turteltaub wanted something that looked prehistoric, so the Meg was designed with a mouth that was less turned up at the sides in order to be scarier.
The movie was considered an early favorite for the Golden Raspberry Awards (also known as the 'Razzies' or 'Anti-Oscars'), including Worst Picture, but was only nominated for Worst Remake, Rip-Off or Sequel. The organization attributed this to an error that may have influenced the voting. Normally, only paying members of the Raspberry Award Foundation can vote for the films to be nominated, but due to a technical glitch, non-paying visitors on the website were also enabled to cast their votes.
Given its shark is 70 feet long, believability was already pushed to the limits. Still, that did not deter production visual effects supervisor Adrian De Wet from closely referencing real shark behavior and using that as a leaping-off point for the film's Megalodon.
(at around 1h 27 mins) At the beach you can see some children riding a "banana" boat. This is most likely a nod to Jaws: The Revenge (1987).
The Meg marked the return of noted producer Gerald R. Molen to Hollywood filmmaking.
Cliff Curtis was in the similar Deep Rising (1998).
The Meg is the first ever Megalodon based film to be released in theaters. Previous films about this animal were made for television or released straight to video.
The scene with the giant squid could be an allusion to The Beast, a novel written by Peter Benchley, who also wrote Jaws (1975).
Actresses Bingbing Li and Ruby Rose both appeared in films from the "Resident Evil" franchise. Li appeared in Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) and Rose appeared in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016).
The megalodon might be gigantic and has too thick of a hide for the bullets to pierce, but it's still startled and backs off when shot.
Another weapon in Imageworks' arsenal was Ziva Dynamics' muscle- and skin-simulation plugin, Ziva VFX. The software takes a physically-based approach, which means more accurate looking skin sliding and movement straight out of the plugin. "If you build your skeleton accurately, that's the starting point," says Sue Rowe. "The system the guys have written will then make the muscles and skin move in the correct way so you don't have any intersections and it won't fold in on itself. What was interesting was, it's also flexible. So if I wanted to have the shoulder of the shark shudder, but in a really extreme way, we could push it to that if we wanted."
Ólafur Darri Ólafsson plays a character named "The Wall". Earlier, in True Detective (2014), he played a character named Dewall.
Production design was done by Grant Major, who is famous for his work on The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
When asked how they made being underwater feel uncomfortable Erik Aadahl stated: "That's an interesting question, because it's very subjective. To me, the power of sound is that it can play with emotions in very subconscious and subliminal ways. In terms of underwater, we had many different flavors for what that underwater sound was. In that scene with Jonas going above and below the water, it's really about that frequency shift. You go into a deep rumble under the water, but it's not loud. It's quiet. But sometimes the scariest sounds are the quiet ones. We learned this from A Quiet Place recently and the same applies to The Meg for sure." Ethan Van der Ryn stated: "Whenever you go quiet, people get uneasy. It's a cool shift because when you are above the water you see the ripples of the ocean all over the place. When working in 7.1 or the Dolby Atmos mix, you can take these little rolling waves and pan them from center to left or from the right front wall to the back speakers. You have all of this motion and it's calming and peaceful. But as soon as you go under, all of that goes away and you don't hear anything. It gets really quiet and that makes people uneasy. There's this constant low-end tone and it sells pressure and it sells fear. It is very different from above the water." Aadahl elaborated: "Turteltaub described this feeling of pressure, so it's something that's almost below the threshold of hearing. It's something you feel; this pressure pushing against you, and that's something we can do with the subwoofer. In Atmos, all of the speakers around the theater are extended-frequency range so we can put those super-low frequencies into every speaker (including the overheads) and it translates in a way that it doesn't in 7.1. In Atmos, you feel that pressure that Turteltaub talked a lot about."
Whenever the scene goes underwater, director Jon Turteltaub wanted the audience to feel extremely uncomfortable, like it was an alien place and you didn't want to be down there. Whenever it's underwater the sound had to do that sonic shift to make the audience feel like something bad could happen at any time.
Jason Statham plays a character called Jonas Taylor. Jason is an anagram of Jonas. This is a coincidence, as the name comes from the novel, which was written nearly 20 years before Statham was considered for the role.
Both Rainn Wilson and Bingbing Li have appeared in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), respectively.
Sound editor Ethan Van der Ryn stated: "In regards to perspective in that scene regarding the giant squid when you're outside the submersible, it's a wide shot and you can see the arms of the squid flailing around. There we're using the sound of water motion but when we go inside the submersible it's like this sphere of plastic. In there, we used Atmos to make the audience really feel like those squid tentacles are wrapping around the theater. The little suction cup sounds are sticking and stuttering. When the squid pulls away, we could pinpoint each of those suction cups to a specific speaker in the theater and be very discrete about it."
To enable Imageworks to turn around so many shots for the third act so quickly, Sue Rowe employed several new methods. The first was to rely on Maya's Viewport 2.0 to work on high-quality but still early versions of the shots directly in the viewport without the need to render. "The reason I really liked it is that it was super fast," states Rowe. "You can add fog as depth and you can put spotlights in. You see, when you distill everything down that you need for an underwater movie, it's pretty much about bubbles and particulates."
When asked how were they able to build the tension of an impending attack, or to enhance an attack, sound supervisor Ethan Van der Ryn stated: "It's important to feel the power of this creature, so there was a lot of work put into feeling the effect that The Meg had on whatever it's coming into contact with. It's not so much about the sounds that are emitting directly from it (like vocalizations) but more about what it's doing to the environment around it. So, if it's passing by, you feel the weight and power of it passing by. When it attacks - like when it bites down on the window - you feel the incredible strength of its jaws. Or when it attacks the shark cage, it feels incredibly shocking because that sound is so terrifying and powerful. It becomes more about feeling the strength and power and aggressiveness of this creature through its movements and attacks. Wiith Jason W. Jennings adding: "In terms of building tension leading up to an attack, it's all about paring back all the elements beforehand. Before the attack, you'll find that things get quiet and calmer and a little sparse. Then, all of a sudden, there's this huge explosion of power. It's all about clearing a space for the attack so that it means something."
The idea that was employed for shark was, adds Sue Rowe, "if you ever look at a thoroughbred horse and how their muscle shakes, it ripples down their body. And from that you know that this is a really muscular, powerful character. So we said, let's do the same for the Meg. You'll see a little twitch in the muscle or the gills. We definitely amplified those things using Ziva."
Similarly, there were moments when the filmmakers felt that some underwater shots were still missing something. Sue Rowe realized the 'secret source' were things she called 'streams', bubbles that matched the tail movement of the Meg, or even crept out of the creature's nose. "It just created this slight sense of movement underwater that we really needed," says Rowe. "I remember sitting in dailies and going, 'Give me more bubbles, give me more, more, more, more bubbles!'"
When asked how they builded up upon with Meiying's encounter with the Meg Erik Aadahl stated: "That's a fun scene because you have the young daughter of a scientist on board this marine research facility located in the South China Sea and she's wandered onto this observation deck. It's sort of under construction and no one else is there. The girl is playing with this little toy - an iPad-controlled gyroscopic ball that's rolling across the floor. That's the featured sound of the scene. You just hear this little ball skittering and rolling across the floor. It kind of reminds me of Danny's tricycle from The Shining. It's just so simple and quiet. The rhythm creates this atmosphere and lulls you into a solitary mood. When the shark shows up, you're coming out of this trance. It's definitely one of the big shock-scares of the movie." With Jason W. Jennings further elaborating: "We pared back the sounds there so that when the attack happened it was powerful. Before the attack, the rolling of the ball and the tickety-tick of it going over the seams in the floor really does lull you into a sense of calm. Then, when you do see the shark, there's this cool moment where the shark and the girl are having a staring contest. You don't know who's going to make the first move. There's also a perfect handshake there between sound design and music. The music is very sparse, just a little bit of violins to give you that shiver up your spine. Then, WHAM!, the sound of the attack just shakes the whole facility."
Few sharks are known to inhabit the abyssal regions - such as sites down to 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) or more. What moves within oceanic trenches more than 6,000 meters (3.7 miles) down is a true mystery. Aside from the scarcity of food, temperatures there could be another limitation to deep-sea living. There are sharks that inhabit deep parts of the ocean. Among them are goblin sharks and Greenland sharks, which tend to have low metabolic rates. That means they move slowly, much more slowly than the energetic predators of the movie. Although C. Megalodon cruised seas across the globe, it tended to prefer warm, shallower waters. It even used coastal regions for nursing grounds.
The animators built multiple types of coral, different types of rock and sand, and had some fish in there as well. And then clustered them altogether and covered it in coral with Sprout.
Imageworks had been able to craft a realistic shark and a realistic underwater environment, but there was still another element that was needed to help sell the shots: bubbles. More specifically, it was the cavitation of bubbles around submarines, propellers, and even the Meg itself.
One of the early things that the director and the picture editor Steven Kemper mentioned was that they wanted to make a character out of the underwater environment. They really wanted to feel the difference between being underwater and above the water. There is a great scene with Jonas (Jason Statham) where he's out in the water with a harpoon and he's trying to shoot a tracking device into The Meg. He's floating on the water and it's purely environmental sounds, with the gentle lap of water against his body. Then he ducks his head underwater to see what's down there. The sound editors switched perspectives there and it's really extreme. This deep underwater rumble, like a conch shell feeling.
Production VFX supervisor Adrian De Wet spent months with teams of effects artists refining the shape and proportions of the Meg.
One of sound supervisors Erik Aadahl favorite scenes, "was when you do not see or hear it, but because of this tracking device that they shot into its fin, they are able to track it using sonar pings. In that scene, one of the main characters is in this unbreakable shark enclosure just waiting out in the water for The Meg to show up. All you hear are these little pings that slowly start to speed up. To me, that's one of the scariest scenes because it's really playing with the unknown. Sharks are these very swift, silent, deadly killers, and the megalodon is this silent killer on steroids. So it's this wonderful, cinematic moment that plays on the tension of the unknown - where is this megalodon? It's really gratifying."
Visual effects studios are constantly being asked to deliver more shots more quickly than ever before. It can be a major challenge to get effects out the door for review, work to final them, and then deal with inevitable changes. Which is why Sony Pictures Imageworks visual effects supervisor Sue Rowe decided to tackle things slightly differently when she took on the challenge of helping to craft the third act of The Meg.
When asked what was the most challenging scene for sound. Erik Aadahl stated: "There's a rescue scene that takes place in the deepest part of the ocean, and the rescue is happening from this nuclear submarine. They're trying to extract the survivors, and at one point there's this sound from inside the submarine, and you don't know what it is but it could be the teeth of a giant megalodon scraping against the hull. That sound, which takes place over this one long tracking shot, was one that the director focused on the most. We kept going back and forth and trying new things. Massaging this and swapping that out it was a tricky sound. Ultimately, it ended up being a combination of sounds. Jay and sound effects editor Matt Cavanaugh went out and recorded this huge, metal cargo crate container. They set up mics inside and took all sorts of different metal tools and did some scraping, stuttering, chittering and other friction sounds. We got all sorts of material from that session and that's one of the main featured sounds there." Jon Turteltaub at one point said he wanted it to sound like a shovel being dragged across the top of the submarine, to which the sound editors took him quite literally. Eric Aadahl stated: "We went to record that container on one of the hottest days of the year. We had to put Matt (Cavanaugh) inside and shut the door! So we did short takes. I was on the roof dragging shovels, rakes, a garden hoe and other tools across the top. We generated a ton of great material from that. As with every film we do, we don't want to rely on stock sounds. Everything we put together for these movies is custom made for them."
When asked how they handle the sound of the underwater world Erik Aadahl stated: "Jay [Jennings] just put a new pool in his yard and that became the underwater Foley stage for the movie, so we had the hydrophones out there. In the film, there are these submersible vehicles that Jay did a lot of experimentation for, particularly for their underwater propeller swishes. The thing about hydrophones is that you can't just put them in water and expect there to be sound. Even if you are agitating the water, you often need air displacement underwater pushing over the mics to create that surge sound that we associate with being underwater. Over the years, we've done a lot of underwater sessions and we found that you need waves, or agitation, or you need to take a high-powered hose into the water and have it near the surface with the hydrophones to really get that classic, powerful water rush or water surge sound. Jason W. Jennings further revealed : "We had six different hydrophones for this particular recording session. We had a pair of Aquarian Audio H2a hydrophones, a pair of JrF hydrophones and a pair of Ambient Recording ASF-1 hydrophones. These are all different quality mics - some are less expensive and some are extremely expensive, and you get a different frequency response from each pair. Once we had the mics set up, we had several different props available to record. One of the most interesting was a high-powered drill that you would use to mix paint or sheetrock compound. Connected to the drill, we had a variety of paddle attachments because we were trying to create new source for all the underwater propellers for the submersibles, ships and jet skis - all of which we view from underneath the water. We recorded the sounds of these different attachments in the water churning back and forth. We recorded them above the water, below the water, close to the mic and further from the mic. We came up with an amazing palette of sounds that didn't need any additional processing. We used them just as they were recorded. We got a lot of use out of these recordings, particularly for the glider vehicles, which are these high-tech, electrically-propelled vehicles with two turbine cyclone propellers on the back. We had a lot of fun designing the sound of those vehicles using our custom recordings from the pool." Eric Aadahl stated: "There was another hydrophone recording mission that the crew, including Jay, went on. They set out to capture the migration of humpback whales. One of our hydrophones got tangled up in the boat's propeller because we had a captain who was overly enthusiastic to move to the next location. So there was one casualty in our artistic process."
When asked about the sub-bass sounds in that scene with Meiying's encounter with the Meg Erik Aadahl stated: You have the mass of this multi-ton creature slamming into the window, and you want to feel that in your gut. It has to be this visceral body experience. By the way, effects re-recording mixer Doug Hemphill is a master at using the subwoofer. So during the attack, in addition to the glass cracking and these giant teeth chomping into this thick plexiglass, there's this low-end "whoomph" that just shakes the theater. It's one of those moments where you want everyone in the theater to just jump out of their seats and fling their popcorn around. To create that sound, we used a number of elements, including some recordings that we had done awhile ago of glass breaking. My parents were replacing this 8' x 12' glass window in their house and before they demolished the old one, I told them to not throw it out because I wanted to record it first. So I mic'd it up with my "hammer mic," which I'm very willing to beat up. It's an Audio-Technica AT825, which has a fixed stereo polar pattern of 110-degrees, and it has a large diaphragm so it captures a really nice low-end response. I did several bangs on the glass before finally smashing it with a sledgehammer. When you have a surface that big, you can get a super low-end response because the surface acts like a membrane. So that was one of the many elements that comprised that attack." Jason W. Jennings stated: "Another custom-recorded element for that sound came from a recording session where we tried to simulate the sound of The Meg's teeth on a plastic cylinder for the shark cage sequence later in the film. We found a good-sized plastic container that we filled with water and we put a hydrophone inside the container and put a contact mic on the outside. From that point, we proceeded to abuse that thing with handsaws and a hand rake - all sorts of objects that had sharp points, even sharp rocks. We got some great material from that session, sounds where you can feel the cracking nature of something sharp on plastic. For another cool recording session, in the editorial building where we work, we set up all the sound systems to play the same material through all of the subwoofers at once. Then we placed microphones throughout the facility to record the response of the building to all of this low-end energy. So for that moment where the shark bites the window, we have this really great punching sound we recorded from the sound of all the subwoofers hitting the building at once. Then after the bite, the scene cuts to the rest of the crew who are up in a conference room. They start to hear these distant rumbling sounds of the facility as it's shaking and rattling. We were able to generate a lot of material from that recording session to feel like it's the actual sound of the building being shaken by extreme low-end."
Sue Rowe and her team looked at a multitude of cavitation reference (cavitation actually occurs when the propellers cause the water to boil and get ejected out the back). Noticing that the cavitation trail tends to be quite elongated, this was how Imageworks originally approached simulations in Houdini. However, at some point, notes Rowe, "the director saw a few shots where the cavitation actually rose up, rather than shoot out straight. He really liked this look, even though it wasn't necessarily physically correct."
Sue Rowe explained about The final frames, "This is what I always say to people who start out in the industry, the computer might solve it in a certain way, but if it doesn't look how the director ultimately wants it to look, then we just have to make sure it fits into the movie."
Imageworks provided quick versions of the shots using Viewport 2.0 to get sign-off before continuing.
"When the production supervisor Adrian De Wet and visual effects producer Steve Garrad came to us, they knew this third act was going to be tricky because story points in the climax of a film are always developing, and they knew they would need a really powerful engine behind them to get that work done," Sue Rowe tells VFX Voice. "So the deal we entered into at the beginning was, 'Hey, we're going to give you perhaps 400 shots, and we want you to turn them around really fast and then give them to editorial, and then we're going to hone it down from there.'"
Sound editor Jason W. Jennings: liked the scene in the submersible shark cage where Suyin (Bingbing Li) is waiting for the shark to arrive. "This turns into a whole adventure of her getting thrashed around inside the cage. The boat that is holding the cable starts to get pulled along. That was fun to work on. Also, I enjoyed the end of the film where Jonas and Suyin are in their underwater gliders and they are trying to lure The Meg to a place where they can trap and kill it. The gliders were very musical in nature. They had some great tonal qualities that made them fun to play with using Doppler shifts. The propeller sounds we recorded in the pool we used those for when the gliders go by the camera. We hit them with these churning sounds, and there's the sound of the bubbles shooting by the camera.
This is the second Jason Statham movie where he befriends a Chinese girl, the first being Safe (2012) with Catherine Chan.
The humpback whales Lucy and Gracie appear to be named for 1950s TV housewives Lucille Ball of I Love Lucy (1951) and Gracie Allen of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950). In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), the whales were named George and Gracie, with George being for George Burns.
Spoilers
Just before the Meg attacks Suyin in the plastic shark cage, you can hear a fast paced version of the cello theme music from Jaws (1975).
(at around 1h 7 mins) The scene where Jonas realizes from the Meg's bite pattern that it's too small to be the one that left the teeth-marks on the station is a nod to Hooper's similar realization about the tiger shark in Jaws (1975).
(at around 1h 40 mins) In the book, the Meg gives birth to three pups, two of which die. The lone survivor, Angel, would be the poster child for the next "Meg" books. In the film, a baby shark is seen escaping the dead sharks mouth, presumably the offspring.
The megalodon is relatively docile while swimming near the beach full of people, seeming more curious than anything. Then everyone sees it and panics. That many creatures making movements like prey in distress promptly causes it to go completely berserk and enter a feeding frenzy, as a real shark would. It's noticeably more aggressive and erratic during the following final confrontation than it has been for the rest of the movie.
At the end when the shark is killed the same sound effect is heard that was used in the original Jaws (1975) when the shark was killed and also in Duel (1971) (also directed by Steven Spielberg) when the truck goes over the cliff.
As in the original novel, one of the characters is Jonas' ex-wife - but unlike the book's publicity-hungry Maggie, Lori is both friendly towards Jonas and immediately volunteers to help take out the Meg when it becomes apparent the crew are going to have to do it themselves.
The Megalodon in the movie is 75 feet (23 m) long, and the species as a whole is given a size range of 70-90 feet (21-27 m). Real Life Megalodons were about 50-60 feet (15-18 m) long, which looks to be about right for the smaller Megalodon.
The Gliders used in the climax are named for Richard E. Byrd and Ernest Shackleton, two early explorers of the Arctic and the Antarctic.
The megalodon consistently ignores smaller prey if larger prey is readily available and primarily attacks what is making the most noise or emitting the most light at any given time. This includes completely ignoring the small dog in the water in favor of the large, noisy, splashing crowd of people nearby, as would be expected of a real life predator. The exception to this is when it's enraged or driven into a feeding frenzy.
The megalodon counts as non-malicious, since it doesn't specifically target humans over other prey, being shown to devour giant squids and whales at other points in the film; they just happen to be available once it reaches the surface and a few times it only kills people seemingly by accident. It actually only attacks the beach-goers when they panic and begin causing a lot of movement and activity, which causes it to go into predation mode. Near the end, a recording of whalesong is enough to get it to leave a crowded beach alone, although it had already killed several people by then.
Breaking from the stereotype of action/horror movies, the lone black character, DJ (Page Kennedy), doesn't die first to show how serious the situation is.
In the book the Meg is killed when Jonas drives his submersible down the throat of the meg and slices its heart with a fossilized Megalodon tooth. In the film Jonas slashes the Meg and stabs it with a harpoon and lets hundreds of sharks devour it.
The first Meg dies in a similar way to the shark in the original book Jaws (which was changed for the film version of Jaws (1975)). As it's going after Brody in the water, it suddenly succumbs to the injuries inflicted on it by the Orca crew. It dies and sinks into the depths. In The Meg, as the first shark is going after Jonas and Suyin, it dies from the poison injected into it and sinks into the depths.
Heller's dislike of Jonas in the earlier part of the film parallels the novel - unsurprisingly given he thinks Jonas caused the deaths of his friends and the outlandishness of his story. Unlike the book's Heller however, who remains hostile to Jonas throughout, the film's version apologises outright to Jonas once the truth of the matter becomes apparent, becomes a vital member of the team hunting the Meg and performs a Heroic Sacrifice to save Jaxx, attracting the Meg to eat him so she has time to reach safety.
As regards her role, Suyin is roughly comparable to Tanaka's son DJ in the novel; she doesn't believe Jonas about the truth of the Meg and proves in over her head on the ocean floor. Here she survives and lives all the way to the end.
When the second shark attacks it is very similar to the movie Lake Placid (1999). The hero's believe they killed the lone prehistoric creature but are subsequently attacked by the second unknown creature.
The effects team built a Meg buck for use underwater when Jonas interacts with it. For instance, for the beats where Jonas stabs the Meg in the eye, a physical, life-sized replica of the Meg's face, or at least the part that Jason Statham has to hold onto and climb up. So when the animators locked down the design of the Meg, they went to a fabricator and they made a full-sized half face. However, they soon discovered that it could not be pulled around underwater at any considerable speed because of the massive water resistance and drag forces involved.
