In an early scene, Joe Lamb and his filmmaking friend Charles sneak out with a few other kids in the middle of the night to shoot a scene for a zombie movie at a tiny, abandoned train station. Scanline helped with the train crash and Pixomondo worked with us on the bus attack sequence.” Then we completed some of the work with help from a group of partner companies. We supervised all the visual effects and designed the heavy scenes here at ILM.
is very visual-effects savvy he had planned the whole movie to work within the constraints of a super-short schedule. “We shot for three months, until Christmas, and then post pretty much happened over a five-month period. “Shortly after the completion of the teaser, the script was ready and we started shooting the real movie in late September 2010,” Libreri says. ILM, which had created effects for Abrams’ Star Trek, became involved early, helping the director create a teaser trailer about 14 months before the film’s release. used to make Super-8 movies when they were kids.” And the funny thing is that Larry Fong and J.J. and I were the same age as the kids are in the movie. “When we were filming it, I’d see these plastic models in the kids’ rooms that I made when I was a kid,” says Kim Libreri, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. Thinking of this movie as a multi-layered homage filled with easter eggs is an understatement. 1978 saw the classic zombie movie Dawn of the Dead released. It was two years after Super 8 producer Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas’s first Star Wars. Abrams set Super 8 in 1979, the year he turned 13 and the year Ridley Scott released Alien. In Super 8, a group of friends making an amateur zombie film find themselves in the middle of a sci-fi monster movie adventure starring, in addition to the young cast, spectacular and finely integrated visual effects.