For G.I. Joe’s 2009 jump to the big screen, director Stephen Sommers told Digital Domain he wanted the visual “big and bad.” Visual Effects Supervisor Brian Grill and his team took that to heart in creating some of the movie’s most jaw dropping sequences, including a frenetic chase through the Paris streets leading to destruction of the Eiffel Tower. In the Paris street scene, Digital Domain’s artists created CG cars and characters and seamlessly integrated them with practical effects and live element to create a chaos of crashing vehicles, explosions, and super-suited humans with extraordinary speed and bounce. Through extensive research with structural engineers and a new combination of fluid simulation and volume rendering, Digital Domain brought down the Eiffel Tower – visualizing the destruction via a weapon that ‘ate’ metal and eroded the worldwide icon bit by bit, crumbling and crashing it in a physically accurate manner.
