Top, the Drej in one of their forms. Below middle, the ‘Matt Damon’ character, Cale; also (bottom) with Valkyrie pilot Akima (Drew Barrymore).
There is nothing ‘soft’ about the end result, however, which is closer to Alien than Anastasia. Part of this effect is achieved by the harshness of computer-generated contrasts and the use of industrial lighting. “Everything is metal: there’s no plastic,” says production designer Philip Cruden. “We took a live-action approach to the design, so that a production designer on a live-action film could have built sets from our work. We created worlds that don’t exist.”
Apart from the destruction of the Earth (the Drej’s energy beam increases the speed of the planet’s rotation until it begins to break up), one of the set-pieces Cruden helped create was the journey through the Ice Rings of Tigrin - giant, 50-mile-long ice crystals which have clustered together to form a gigantic hall of mirrors. They function much like the minefields through which submarines have had to navigate in underwater action dramas, but on a larger and visually more interesting scale.
“We especially liked the reflective surfaces Phil came up with,” says POVDE’s Paul Martin Smith. “The house-of-mirrors effects let us play tricks on the audience and raises the intensity of the scene. We hope it keeps them on the edges of their seats!”
Like everything else in Titan A.E., the ‘sets’ - ranging from the cramped interior of the Valkyrie (“Think Corvette,” says Cruden) to the infinite vistas of space - were carefully prepared and researched, as though in preparation for making a ‘real’ movie.
“I’ve never worked on anything that’s had this amount of material that didn’t make it into the movie,” laughs Cruden. “We must have filled 20 books with research and sketches. But it was necessary. There’s an old saying among animators: ‘If you’re drawing from your head, you’re drawing the wrong thing.’”
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