Ile Saint-Hubert (Film Universe)

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Ile Saint-Hubert
Appearances
Geography
LocationAtlantic Ocean
Administration
OwnerInGen (Formerly)

Ile Saint-Hubert is an island 227 miles off the northeastern coast of South America and home to InGen's former Research Facility.

History

InGen Research Facility

  • Emergency Supply Shed
  • Laboratory 03
  • Qualtech
  • Service Road K2
    • Fuel Depot
    • Emergency Dock

Production Notes

Ile Saint-Hubert will appear for the first time in Jurassic World Rebirth.

Pre-production

David Koepp’s script for Rebirth described a tropical island with rocky shoals, shoreline caves, mangrove swamps, grassy plains, waterfalls, and steep limestone cliffs. Prior to hiring Gareth Edwards, the producers were looking at locations in Dominican Republic, Mauritius, Panama, and Costa Rica, with a strong lean toward the latter. But Edwards persuaded the producers to consider “the very primeval” wilds of Thailand, which is where he filmed The Creator. It was an easy and immediate yes. “When we did the research and saw the landscapes, it felt like this would be perfect for our new Jurassic world,” producer Patrick Crowley says. “We sent pictures over to Steven Spielberg, he said, ‘We’re done! That’s the place.’”

During pre-production, just days after locations were signed off, Vickery and Ciudad’s teams traveled to all the key locations around the world to capture environment data, an uncommon practice, but one that enabled the film crew to plan the movie more efficiently. This early groundwork meant the teams could begin building the digital environments seen in the film months before shooting started. It also gave director Gareth Edwards precise digital versions of each location, helping him plan and block his shots with accuracy well in advance. The early collaboration between VFX, art department and SFX ensured that the physical sets matched perfectly with the digital builds feeding into the VFX pipeline. Blending multiple locations from opposite sides of the world into single environments was a major challenge, especially since many key locations—such as the facility, the T-Rex river Rapids and the entire Island—didn’t exist in reality, with only small portions built practically. VFX became the glue that held all the elements together.

Production

Post-production

VFX enhancements were used in almost every environment featured on Ile Saint-Hubert, according to visual effects supervisor David Vickery. “Gareth Edwards warned me early on that even though we were going to remote locations to shoot our island, he would want to augment the scenery and add to it where needed,” Vickery says. To prepare for this, Vickery and Ciudad captured environment data during their location scouts. Using proprietary NERF-based technology developed at ILM, this allowed them to create full 3D environments directly from 360-degree video footage. This gave Edwards and the VFX team the ability to review potential locations in full 3D at the end of each day and plan which ones were best suited for the film.

To film reference for the panoramic shots of our huge prehistoric vistas around the island, the VFX team traveled to some of the most remote and extreme locations they could find. “I found a spot called Dragon’s Crest,” Vickery says. “It looked perfect in pictures, but it was 1,700 feet above sea level. It took four hours to hike there with all our camera gear and drones, and we wanted a dawn shot!” Some other locations were even harder to reach, requiring an hour by boat with no sign of human life for miles. Conditions were tough—members of the team were bitten by insects badly enough to end up in hospital (everyone’s fine!)—but the results made it worth it. Using real-world locations combined with digital extensions proved key to building the believable and awe-inspiring world seen in Rebirth. “About 600 shots in the film take place on the ocean, and only 15 percent of those use any real water—we replaced or created the rest digitally,” says Ciudad. “Matching all these different water looks—tank shots from Malta, real locations in the Mediterranean and Thailand—was extremely challenging, but the goal was simple: make it impossible for the audience to tell the difference.”