MAKING ECLIPSE: ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse began shooting on August 17, 2009 in Vancouver and continued for 11 weeks in numerous locations around British Columbia. Many of the forested locations in the movie were remote with limited accessibility.The huge production featured a large main shooting unit and a full 2nd unit which shared responsibility for the three main action sequences: the opening ravine chase between the Cullens, the wolves, and Victoria; the training sequence where Jasper coaches the rest of the family and the wolves to prepare for; third, the dual location finale battle sequence between the Cullen/werewolf alliance and the newborn vampires in the wilderness clearing, as well as Victoria/Riley vs. Edward/Bella/Seth on the snowy mountaintop. The fight team, stunt team, practical effects team, and visual effects team worked diligently to put the hard-hitting scenes on screen safely and aid the actors working with the virtual wolves. Plus, much of the film's action takes place outdoors in character-specific weather.
All of the actors involved in the complicated action sequences undertook many weeks of specialized physical fight training. The actors and stunt performers worked tirelessly to perform specifically designed beats up to the point where the realm of possibility and physics forced the visual effects department to take over.
In addition to telling a love story in a contemporary setting about supernatural vampires and werewolves, filmmakers had the added constricts of honoring the elements established by author Stephenie Meyer in the novel, plus taking in to account the creative decisions made by the filmmakers of the previous two films, while still keeping the storytelling fresh and exciting. Sets like the Cullen House, Bella's house, Jacob's house, Forks High School, and the meadow - featuring vampire sparkle - are pre-established elements. In addition, filmmakers had to contend with costuming a very large cast of over 3 dozen main or featured characters and dozens of stunt players, plus the added production challenges of multiple back stories from several eras and fans eager to find out every detail.
"Towards the very beginning of the film we see that Victoria's back and she's coming for revenge. A chase starts and Victoria's going back from Cullen territory to Wolf territory. We can't go onto each other's side," explains Taylor Lautner. "But Emmett gets a little carried away and goes onto the Wolf side, and Paul, the hothead, gets into this little fight with him. It is the perfect way to start the movie off, because Victoria's in the middle of it. She's causing this chaos and the Cullens and Wolves are going straight for the throats."
This first act adrenalin moment gives the audience a really good sense of how explosively powerful the mythical creatures in the story really are. "Ultimately, we realize they're are chasing her along this ravine. When they're about to catch Victoria, she jumps across to the other side and they stop. Why aren't they following her? You realize that that's the demarcation between the vampire territory and the wolf territory.
So just when we think she's escaped, boom - the wolves are on her tail. You have this double action of the Cullens chasing her on one side and wolves chasing her on the other, and she's hopping back and forth over the ravine. It's going to be a pretty fantastic sequence," comments producer Wyck Godfrey.
"The ravine chase was alluded to in the book, but I felt we really need to see that ravine chase," comments director David Slade. "I did some story boards to block out what it would be like if the Cullen's and the wolves actually chase Victoria on screen.
Melissa embraced my drawings and wrote the sequences. So it's something which is quite small in the book, that I felt would be a really fun thing to see. On screen, I want to see vampires and wolves running at extreme speeds, jumping from one territory to another territory. It's a great way of setting up the rules of the resident territory boundary."
Main unit typically began the dialogue and simpler stunt work on the action sequences "but then we'll hand off all of the big action beats with the crane rigs and the wire gags to 2nd unit director E.J. Foerster," explains Godfrey. The work weeks of each unit were staggered to allow Slade to attend 2nd unit shooting on his days off.
"E.J. Foerster is one of the things you want - he's like a Swiss Army knife that does everything," laughs Slade. "He was wonderful. E.J. has done so much stunt work that he has this brain that just knows exactly what he needs. He was tasked with doing some of the bigger stunts that take like seven hours to set up for one shot. All of our shots meshed, all of our cinematic vocabulary held. E.J. was completely and utterly on the same plane mentally and would always be asking, what more can I do? What else can we do to help? 2nd unit just went for it like soldiers and it was a pleasure to work alongside them."

How to capture vampire speed
"One of the biggest challenges of the movies has always been to capture vampire speed," adds producer Wyck Godfrey. "One of the things that David and E.J. came up with was we want to do this in-camera. We really want to show these vampires flying through the woods at the phenomenal speed that Stephenie Meyer describes in her books."
"We thought a lot about vampire speed - really brainstormed how can we approach this issue of the physics of showing something that has legs that can move so fast, you can't see them. We thought the fact that an insect beats its wings a thousand times in a second and how that looks," relates Slade. "So we figured how out how we can get people running at 40 miles an hour and interacting and doing it for real. I wanted it to be super human, not supernatural. The idea that it's total fantasy was something I wanted to avoid. I kept the camera at human eye level because I wanted to ground the film in a personable believable space."
Director David Slade worked with his 2nd unit director, stunt coordinator, fight coordinator, special practical effects supervisor, visual effects supervisors, and production designer to make a "magic carpet" concept work to achieve the extreme speed.
"We figured we could get people running at least 40 miles an hour using this magic carpet we made. We also called it the rag, and later, it became the death sled," laughs Slade. "It was essentially a very long, very, very, very tough belt, attached to the back of a truck, which would go flying down a pathway through the woods with stunt guys and actors on it, and the camera vehicle would go blasting through the woods parallel. When everything was going at top speed, the actors would start running, and what you got on camera was a person running 40 miles an hour, which looks really fast. It is real, so it'll look real."
Stunt coordinator John Stoneham, Jr. adds, "It's a four foot wide piece that we tow on a computerized winch that just hauls people along through the woods. The ride needs to be fairly smooth, because they are running flat out."
"It's like at an airport and someone's on the walkway alongside of you. They're walking, but they're going faster than you… it's that same concept," explains visual effects supervisor Kevin Tod Haug. "You see the wind on them with arms and legs pumping. So long as you're not seeing their feet, it feels like they're actually going very fast. But in fact, they're going as fast as humans can run plus the 30 or 40 miles per hour the truck is adding. So, we established that vampires run about 45 to 50 mph, they never get tired, and they can always run at top speed."
"The actors trained on this treadmill and then we drove them through woods with foreground trees and you've got your actors literally running at full speed, but everything in the background is whizzing by," adds Godfrey. "So for the first time in these movies, we're really seeing vampires running through the woods at an impossible speed, using the real performers."
"Generally speaking, the best effects are the ones that are taken as far as they can be practically," says Haug. "So you start with what can an actor or a stunt person actually do? Do it as much as you can practically in front of camera, because that's probably the better way to go. Then visual effects steps in where you can't go any further. There has to be some tension, some difficulty. David really wanted us to make sure that you could feel the gravity, the weight, and all the cues of speed that you would normally get out of somebody going that fast."
"The scale of what we're doing in the chase sequence is unlike anything I've seen done before for a running chase. Vampires live in the real world, but they can do more, but they do it only when they need to or when it's appropriate. I've seen this scale of work done for car chases and airplane chases, but for a foot chase, it's pretty exceptional," comments Haug. "Every cut has to be in a different location essentially, because they're moving too fast. A foot chase tends to be across a roof and down the street, so you can do a lot of it in the same location. You can't do that when your vampires are moving at almost 50 miles an hour. So, you have to treat it like a car chase through the woods."
James Tichner served as visual effects supervisor for 2nd unit. "Victoria is teasing and testing both sides of the wolf zone and the vampire zone on her infiltration run. Our 2nd unit director E.J. Foerster, his mandate for this sequence was fast fast fast! This is a car chase. We're going to shoot fast and furious… we're going to get numerous set-ups.
We believe that we have the most set-ups in a scene ever in the history of Vancouver film. I think we did almost 200 set-ups in that chase sequence."
"We have broken the sequence into three parts: the beginning is where we're racing through the woods and we establish a lot of parkour action. We shot plates that pull us through the woods on various locations," says Tichner.
"Let's say the plate shot in the forest is 200 yards long and Victoria is supposed to run through it in two seconds," adds Haug. "What you do is squeeze the size of it down on the green screen stage and create a giant green block Tinker Toy set up. Then a stunt woman parkours through that environment on wires in two seconds. You figure out what all the corresponding heights and variations of the elements in the shot are -like the trees and boulders and elevation changes. So, using the computer, when you put her in the real environment, she hits all the marks that she's supposed to hit and it looks like she ran 200 yards in two seconds instead of 50 feet."
Parkour - also know as free-running, bouldering, or buildering - is a mixture of gymnastics and street acrobatics in which a person moves through an environment with efficiency and speed. The sport was featured in a human chase scene in the Bond film Casino Royale.
"Victoria leaps and bounds through the woods like a deer or an antelope would and the human equivalent of that is parkour. In Eclipse, it's more like bouldering, which is a mountaineering version of parkour," adds Haug.
Tichner continues, "In the second part of the sequence, Victoria spans a ravine, which is actually a plate shot filmed on Vancouver Island. So in post, elements from the location and the green screen are composited and animated in 3D space using a fairly complicated CG process."
"Our parkour people are amazing. We've got these great gymnasts, who either on their own or with a little bit of help from trampolines and air rams, are able to do some pretty amazing action. It really looks like Victoria is leaping across this 75-foot wide gorge and it looks normal, like she should have really been able to do it. The stunt woman actually leaps across what a human can leap across, and you can feel the wind on her and see her muscles doing it. All of that's correct, it's just her leap was actually nowhere near as long," laughs Haug."
"Victoria's a leap-er," agrees Stoneham. "So we had to build three different rigs in three different remote locations. All the backwoods locations are very challenging for the rigging aspect. To fly people around we use wire winches, ratchets, air rams, descenders, and decelerators and it all has to be prepped before the shooting crew arrives," says Stoneham.
Tichner concludes, "The third part of the chase is when Victoria does her final jump back over the ravine after the wolves almost got her. She ends up out in Cypress Falls over in West Vancouver, where the big standoff takes place between Paul wolf and Emmett."
"It's this huge gorge with a waterfall, but you can't even see it coming in the woods," adds Huag.
"We had the actors do as much of the action physically as they could, so the audience is not pulled away from the story by noticing effects. Towards the end of the ravine chase, Emmett is knocked down by Paul wolf and dunked into the water. Kellan Lutz actually had to run like hell towards a ravine with a harness that stopped him from going off the edge from behind. That was scary for him, but totally safe. It was really fun for us to watch because of his wide eyes at the last second," laughs Slade. "Kellan was actually really tough and really mean. Anyway, we dumped him in the river nine times, and he did do that like a man. Every time, he was just up for more and he was a total hero about it. It's great because it wasn't a stunt guy, it was Kellan."
"Once we did a test, it became really clear that the magic carpet was working really well and that we needed to do more of it, from more kinds of angles. This show is my first time working with E.J., but it's an experience I'll long remember. He's an Energizer bunny," laughs Haug. "E.J. was relentless finding places that were the right scale for a foot chase."

Filming in real locations
"One thing about the Twilight franchise is that everything is based in a real environment. Viewers can identify with it because everything's believable," adds Bannerman. "We had to sell the beats that we had to sell. That's why we go into the real forest. That's why we go into real gorges, if we can find them. That's why we go to real cliffs. That's why we go to real rivers. That's why we go to real mountain peaks."
The location for Victoria's second and biggest leap across the ravine was the hardest to find of the whole show. "In order to sell the idea that they could run flat out, you had to find a ravine that doesn't have trees growing right up to the edge of it and the two sides are clearly delineated. It also has to be open enough on both sides so you can actually see the chase happening on both sides. Finding a place that would photograph and really show that action was really a challenge. Scouting ate up most of 2nd unit's prep time. It went right up into the first days of production and E.J. was still looking. I think he looked at almost every mountain ravine in British Columbia," laughs Haug.
Filmmakers finally located a ravine that fit the bill, but it did come with some added accessibility challenges. "We found a beautiful gorge over near Nanaimo to shoot the visual effects plates needed to give us the background canvas to paint this chase scene on," says co-producer Bill Bannerman. "But Nanaimo is on Vancouver Island, a two-hour ferry ride from the mainland. Plus, the only way to get everything into this river was to use a helicopter. Crew, infrastructure, and equipment, plus a boat to work from - all had to be airlifted to the remote river gorge. No roads."
"We were this close to just using a matte painting, right up until he found the beautiful gorge on the island," adds Haug. "It's clearly real and the perfect location for the storytelling, but not an easy location logistically."
"Many locations in this franchise are very difficult to get to - locations have to reflect the integrity of the literary material," comments Bannerman. "When the script reads Exterior Forest, we actually would go as deep as we could into a forest that would sell the environment."
"One thing about the Twilight franchise is that everything is based in a real environment. Viewers can identify with it because everything's believable," adds Bannerman. "We had to sell the beats that we had to sell. That's why we go into the real forest. That's why we go into real gorges, if we can find them. That's why we go to real cliffs. That's why we go to real rivers. That's why we go to real mountain peaks."
The script describes the vast range of wilderness settings with location directions such as Exterior Forest, Exterior Spooky Forest, and Exterior Mossy Forest.
"It was a challenge to make the various wooded scenarios look quite different. A forest can be a forest can be a forest," says production designer Paul Austerberry. "So, for example, Ext. Spooky Forest had these crazy trees with moss on them. Even the local crew hadn't seen a location like that. We also found interesting rocks, uneven terrain, and of course, water features like rivers help break it up visually. I was worried all the locations would all become the same if they weren't quite strikingly different. So, the location scouts were scoured every wooded area in the greater Vancouver area. Every weekend, both E.J. and I went hiking in all different kinds of places, trying to find the appropriate and different kinds of forest. It didn't read like much in the script, but it was a big part of this picture."

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