25 Years Later: Independence Day 2 - VFX Breakdown

Independence Day: Resurgence, is a sequel that was made and is set, 20 years after the events of the previous 1996 film, Independence day. Ironically enough, the film, with the slogan "We had twenty years to prepare, so did they" seems somewhat underprepared. It received poor reviews and didn't do very well at the box office.
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Originally it was planned to make two sequels with Will Smith returning as Steven Hiller but Fox was having trouble negotiating his salary for the two films and so two scripts were written, one with, and one without Will Smith. Eventually, Smith was deemed "too expensive" and so they used the one without. When watching the film you can't help but get the feeling that the cast was chosen to try to please everyone, to "cover all the bases" and this makes it very hard to feel empathy towards the characters, on the plus side, thanks to the incredible VFX work, you do feel that there is actually an imminent danger and that the alien threat is very real, even if you don't really care whether they survive it or not.

The Aliens.
Director Roland Emmerich wanted the aliens to have the same iconic look and feel as the aliens from the 1996 film because he felt it would bridge the 20-year time gap and add believability to the creatures, so the VFX team worked on 2 different types of aliens, the colonists, and the soldiers, both were based on the practical puppets made for the 1996 film, but in this film, they would be fully CG. Perhaps the most challenging part of the aliens were the tentacles that whip out from their backs.

The Alien Queen.
Weta Digital was given the task of creating the Alien Queen, building Area 51, and supplying all the shots involving the two.
The Alien queen appears in two different ways in the film, firstly within the mothership where she's a huge 140ft tall [42.5m], 4 limbed character, and later when she's an even bigger 220ft tall [67m] character after she gets inside her biomechanical exo-suit and heads out to battle.

The Mothership.
Scanline VFX was given the task (among others) of designing and building the mothership and supplying all the shots pertaining to it, just to be clear, the mothership is absolutely humongous! approximately 2796 miles in diameter [4500km] and another 1242 miles [2000km] when its legs are fully extended. Working from a previs model from Uncharted Territory, they found that since the design was somewhat symmetrical, they could cut the mothership into pie sections and work on them individually. While working closely with the director and production VFX supervisor, and using concept artwork and photographic reference material from the original film, they decided upon the "Look" for the mothership and detailed modeling could then begin.

An iconic effect that they wanted to repeat was the "Cloud Tank" effect that they used in the original film when the alien ship enters Earth's atmosphere, however, since the alien ship in this movie was so much bigger than the original, the cloud tank effect in this film had to be huge! After 2 weeks of look development, they decided on a look based on the original, but modernizing it using the latest simulation technology.
Going for realism the team had decided to simulate the effect in one giant simulation.

The Moon.
MPC was tasked with the action-packed opening scene based on the moon. For this scene, first MPC had to build the moon. This consisted of 2 main lunar environments, the "Van de Graff crater" and "The Sea of Tranquility". MPC paid special attention to detail using NASA reference material, concept art, and Hubble telescope photography to recreate the moon as accurately as possible. MPC also built hundreds of assets for the moon base including buildings, moon buggies, fighter jets, a moon tug and other lunar vehicles and of course, the 984ft [300m] Moon cannon.

When the Mothership plows into the moon's surface, lunar dust and debris are thrown up, MPC actually researched the properties of the moon's surface and studied samples of lunar rocks to ensure their simulations were at least, geologically similar. The Live-action plate for this scene was shot in front of a bluescreen with Liam Hemsworth and Jeff Goldblum hanging on wires to emulate the gravity difference, but when the destruction starts both actors were replaced with full Digidoubles created from photographs and detailed scans of the actors.

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