The making of Supervolcano

Supervolcano took two years to be brought to the screen. In the process of making the film, major scientific bodies consulted by the production were prompted to consider their response to a possible super-eruption for the first time.

Here, the series producer, Ailsa Orr, explains how the idea for the drama first came about and tells the story of how the project was finally brought to fruition:

"The idea originated with a Horizon documentary produced in 2000," says Ailsa.

"The reaction to that programme in this country, and of course the States, was amazing and Michael Mosley, the executive producer on Supervolcano, had the idea to dramatise the story.

"We thought a dramatisation would help people get their head around it because some of the facts are so extraordinary and visuals so dramatic that you really have to see it to believe it."

From the outset the major priority for the drama was that it was based entirely on scientific data to ensure the scenario was factually accurate.

Therefore the opinions and advice of key scientists were sought from the start, and the decision was taken to base the eruption in the film on a real eruption which happened millions of years ago at the park.

"We started by examining data from the first super-eruption at Yellowstone which happened 2.1 million years ago," Ailsa says.

"We also looked at the evidence of the last supervolcanic eruption on the planet which happened at Toba in Indonesia, 74,000 years ago.

"As far as scientific consultants went, the first port of call was Bill McGuire.

"Bill is a leading expert in the field of natural disasters. There is limited published material available on this phenomena and Bill helped us understand what supervolcanoes are.

"It's a relatively new science that people are only just starting to talk about and understand."

Bill came on board as series consultant.

It was equally important that the production spoke to the people who would be directly responsible for handling the catastrophe if it were to happen.

"A critical early step was going out to Yellowstone and meeting the scientists who run the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory (YVO)," agrees Ailsa.

"The three key people involved in running the YVO became the basis for the film's three central characters.

"Rick our protagonist is based on Dr Jake Lowenstein, the main scientist at Yellowstone; Bob Smith who oversees the Yellowstone operation from the University of Utah became Jock, our British character; and Hank Heasler, who is based at the park itself, became our character Matt."

The input of the YVO scientists was critical when it came to understanding how the scientists in the drama should handle the threat of a super-eruption.

But were the scientists at Yellowstone a little worried about panicking their visitors by showing the effect of an eruption?

"They were incredibly helpful," says Ailsa. "Yes they were a little nervous about inadvertently causing unnecessary alarm but they were absolutely dedicated to helping us get it right."

Based on the dramatic scenario, a team from the University of Utah along with the UK Met Office were able to give their estimates of the size of the area which would be affected by volcanic ash produced by the eruption.

"From this, we created an 'ash projection map' which took into account wind direction and time of year of our eruption.

"Every time we refined our storyline we would send it back to them for approval so they were very closely involved and had to be," explains Ailsa.

Once the experts had provided their projections, Ailsa and her team talked to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who have responsibility for handling national disasters in the United States.

"FEMA had no contingency plans for a disaster on this scale; the largest disaster they've ever had to deal with was 9/11 and that stretched their resources to the limit.

"Our scenario would affect an area 10 million times greater than 9/11 did.

"FEMA were extremely interested in working with us to come up with a theoretical contingency plan as to how they might deal with it.

"They gave us data on how many people would be affected by the eruption in the US."

But it wouldn't only be people in the United States who would suffer from the consequences of a supervolcanic eruption - the effects would have an impact on the world.

The UK Met Office were instrumental in helping the team to understand how climate change would unfold following a super-eruption.

"One of the main gases ejected in an explosive eruption is sulphur dioxide which forms sulphuric acid when it gets into the stratosphere," says Ailsa.

"From there, it begins to spread around the world. The Max Planck Institute in Hamburg helped to model the spread of the sulphuric acid around the globe.

"We're talking about catastrophic amounts of sulphuric acid circling the world within just a few weeks. It forms a veil that blocks out sunlight, causing temperatures to plummet.

"The Met Office models predicted a drop of about 15 degrees across Europe and 20 degrees in the southern hemisphere, the monsoon would stop, crops would fail and somewhere in the region of one billion people would die through climate change and starvation."

Once the scientific projections had been obtained and the production team had a good idea of how a supervolcanic eruption would unfold, work could start on the script.

"We chose Eddie Canfor-Dumas because he had written Pompeii - The Last Day for us previously, and we knew he would construct a story that stayed faithful to the facts," says Ailsa, again emphasising the importance of factual accuracy.

The scripts, written by Eddie, were approved at every stage by all the scientific bodies consulted: the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, FEMA, the Met Office and even the US Geological Survey who oversee the observatory.

With the writing underway, work began on the all important visual aspects of how to create the impact of an eruption on screen.

Once again the scientists were the key to this process.

"The first thing we had to get right was to understand the dynamics of a supervolanic eruption - how it would unfold, what it would look like," says Ailsa.

"It's very difficult to know for sure because nobody has ever seen a super-eruption happen but we consulted with a lot of scientists and the consensus of opinion was that a super-eruption is not just one big massive eruption but a series of separate eruptions that occur around the rim of the caldera (crater).

"Only towards the end of the eruption process do they all converge into one.

"Once this scenario had been signed off by the scientists, we got a storyboard artist to visualise it so everyone was clear on what we had to create in the film."

Having got to this stage, Ailsa and the team were then in a position to talk to a visual effects company:

"We decided to go with a visual effects (VFX) company called Lola, who we worked with on Pompeii - The Last Day. We really liked the method they suggested to recreate the eruption process.

"While other VFX companies wanted to use particle-based systems (essentially all the effects would be computer generated), Lola wanted to create the column and pyroclastic flows by using real, live elements.

"Their special effects team constructed a massive 'cloud tank' - a transparent water tank into which bleach could be injected under real pressure, filmed at high speed.

"The result was eruption columns and clouds that looked and moved like the real thing. Then they added the other CGI elements onto it."

Another strong 'character' in the film is Virgil - the virtual geophysical imaging laboratory, a holographic, 3D model of the park.

"Virgil was a clever idea that the director Tony Mitchell came up with," says Ailsa.

"His first question when he came onto the project and was looking at photos of Yellowstone was, 'But where is it? Where is the volcano?'

"We had to explain to him that supervolcanoes exist beneath the ground, that they're almost impossible to spot.

"He wanted a way to show the viewers where the volcano is in relation to Yellowstone, and Virgil was the answer to that - it became a character in the film.

"Virgil doesn't actually exist but it could some day - it's our one nod to the future in the film."

Virgil was an instant hit with the scientists advising on the project.

"They all said they would love to have a tool like Virgil to bring all the information about the park together into one model. It would really allow them to see how all the small things that happen all over the park are related, and to what overall effect. They really think Virgil is great!"

Casting was the next critical part of the process.

"We deliberately went for actors who weren't particularly well known," Ailsa says. "Gary Lewis who plays Jock is probably the best known actor in this country, although he does mainly features and not a great deal of TV work.

"The rest of the cast are Canadian - we knew we were going to be filming there so it made a lot of sense to cast there. And we were really lucky - our brilliant casting agent and the director Mitch found us the cream of Canadian talent, including Michael Riley, who plays Rick our central character."

The filming took place in Vancouver. Ailsa explains:

"We chose Vancouver because it gave us the wide range of locations we were looking for in a setting that doesn't look dissimilar to Yellowstone, for example, the beautiful forestry commission building that was used as the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.

"It's a very film friendly place - nothing is ever impossible there!

"An added bonus was Vancouver's Emergency Response Unit which we used as our FEMA HQ in Washington.

"Luckily Vancouver doesn't get many emergencies so the possibility of being booted out right in the middle of filming for a real emergency was limited!

"Vancouver worked for everything except for the big wide establishers of Yellowstone itself, complete with all its geysers, mud pots and hot springs.

"Yellowstone Park is really strict about filming so we only took the main actors and a small crew down and filmed for three days."

All the filming was completed before the tragedy of the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day but what did the actors, who were almost all from the North American continent, make of the fact that the volcano may erupt at any time?

Ailsa says they were initially sceptical.

"At first none of them believed it. They assumed that Supervolcano was a Movie Of The Week, a very low budget TV feature that is a big part of American and Canadian TV culture.

"We worked very hard to convince them that it wasn't and to introduce them to the concept of factual drama which isn't known over there.

"After a while they all got very interested in it. They'd go home after work and look up the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory on the internet and come in the next day saying 'It has erupted before! The script is right!'

"Michael Riley, who plays our main character Rick, got really into it. He used to call up Jake Lowenstein - the scientist his character is based on - in his breaks and ask his advice about the scene he was about to do.

"After the call he'd amend the script based on what Jake had said to him and then I'd be listening to the scene thinking, 'I've never heard those words before'.

"Michael would say, 'Oh Jake gave them to me, don't worry about it…'

"I'd have to go and check them out anyway but I was very impressed with how much he took the role to heart and the great relationship he struck with Jake. He really got to grips with his character and the pressure he would face in a situation like this."

The budget was another factor that had to be grappled with in Vancouver, especially as many of the Canadians employed were used to working on Hollywood feature films.

"We employed the very best we could afford," explains Ailsa, "but the whole infrastructure out there is to make big budget American feature films.

"Our construction manager, Dean McQuillan, had come straight from The Chronicles of Riddick where his construction budget alone was $136m.

"While our overall budget might be impressive by TV documentary standards it was paltry compared to what most of our crew were used to.

"We're used to making a little money go a long way - they're not, and they had a hard time balancing our expectations with our budget level.

"They read the script and thought we were joking. We kept saying, 'We're not joking, we're British, low key and low budget.'

"It was a continual struggle for the director and I to try to get the most out of them without going over budget.

"But we did it - and at the end the construction manager told us, 'I never thought you could do it. For the first four weeks I thought you were going to fire me because I kept saying it can't be done. Then I thought I'd just walk and then I thought, well I'll just stick around and see how it goes. And I must say I'm really impressed because you've actually done it!'."

For Ailsa, all the blood, sweat and tears were worth it when she saw the finished film.

"The big defining moment for me was a shot I only saw at the end - it comes half way through the second part. As a producer you're approving shot after shot and I thought it looked great. But one shot they saved to show me at the end.

"The first column on the volcano erupts and then the camera pulls back and you see another column erupt and then another and another and another and it's like Dante's inferno. Fifteen eruption columns and it just looks astonishing.

"That's when you realise what a super-eruption is and until that moment, I don't think you really can."