Dramatic Embellishments--It's Not Just For Fishing Stories Anymore

by Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox SCENE 1 // TROUBLE APPROACHES
For this shot sequence, the visual effects supervisor used a helicopter to take photos above New York Harbor. They pasted these images to the interior of a digital sphere, creating a 3-D backdrop for 360-degree camera pans. After adding stormy skies and a digital Liberty, they went to work on the water. Artists started with a foundation of featureless water, then added layers for chop, whitecaps, foam, sea spray, etc.--about 30 in all. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

We admit that our critical examination of rapid-climate change disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow contained a fair measure of glittery Hollywood flair. But it doesn't take a paleoclimatologist to realize that abrupt climate change can't really happen in a week, and our writer Matthew Teague didn't actually climb a mountain of skulls in Africa to find that out. Even though we indulged in a measure of dramatic exaggeration, the original source material shocks the reader with plausible conjecture. Peruse the cruel truth in the Pentagon report--authored by the Oracle of the Future (a.k.a. futurist Peter Schwartz)--which outlines the global impact, such as sudden food and water shortages, that rapid climate change could provoke.