Three young people enjoy the Night aboard a boat. Four old friends play cards in the house of one of them. Each one enjoys in his mode of the summer of Buenos Aires. Until a mortal snow falls on the capital of Argentina and kills thousands of people and isolates survivors.
As all the connoisseurs of The Eternalutathe toxic snowstorm is an inherent part of the famous graphic novel written by Héctor G. Oesterheld and illustrated by Francisco Solano López. Therefore, any audiovisual adaptation, in the format that was, would have to solve that dilemma.
Netflix and the producer K & S Films agreed that the recordings would develop entirely in Buenos Aires, the author’s city of origin and where science fiction history is deployed. The problem? Unlike True Detective: Night land (Filmed in Iceland), the second season of The last of us (Vancouver, Canada) or other great productions in recent years, filming would be made in a place where snow does not fall regularly. In fact, The last snowfall in the city dates from July 9, 2007.
“You do not have a base of which you will grab and accumulate,” says Nicanor Enriquez, supervisor of the special effects team (SFX). “Everyone always went to snow to a place where there was snow or approached a place to snow. We were from zero, start (to do) snow from zero. Then we had nowhere to grab ourselves.”
In October 2023, when the team has already exceeded the 100 days of filming (and Worship It is the only Chilean media visiting the filming), All solutions to that challenge have already been found and applied.
There are practically no day when the team led by director Bruno Stagnaro does not have to take care of artificial snow. Sometimes these are outdoor filmed scenes, and sometimes they are recorded scenes inside a study in which the Unreal Engine software, the same technology of The Mandalorian. Each sequence has its own particularity.
“As we all know, The snow of The Eternaluta It is not water snowbut it is precisely the first stage of an alien invasion, ”explains Enriquez.“ So that snow does not behave how conventional snow would behave, but has another texture, it has another color, it moves differently, it does not accumulate in the same way that snow is not transformed into water, it is volatile, it moves. And all that we had to transmit it and transfer it to concise and practical materials. ”
The supervisor of the special effects team shows the different materials they occupied to create the snow of the series. The first is salt salt, which they used in most of the filming. “What has a good thing is that it has a texture very similar to the snow, copy the traces and brands of everything that is touching at the same time is easy to reset,” he says.
They also used cellulose, although “When you get it, you can tell you have a different texture“For the scenes registered in the study, a space full of technological devices, they opted for the perlita, which” has the plus that it is a volcanic rock similar to ash and is very volatile. “
Meanwhile, for the moments when the snowfall had to be seen on the camera they turned to two more elements: special foam soap and ecosnowwhich they created especially for production. “When it interacts with elements that one sees that it is in the movement, it does not stick or not marked and is very good to the camera,” he says.
In the study, where a huge screen projects funds realistically, filmed sequences set in streets and places of difficult access. Pablo Accame, Virtual Production Supervisor with Ignacio Pol, states that “(we can) be all the time we want, At any time of the day we want”.
If they could work under a greater control regime, there was another kind of challenge outside. Enriquez exemplifies: in a space of between 2 thousand and 3 thousand m2 they took between six and eight hours to cover it in white, and then the shortest possible time had to be delayed to leave it immaculate.
“At the time of closing we have to, like any production, deliver the stage as they gave us (…) There is a huge cleaning team that is responsible for cleaning the scenographies (and delay) between four and six hours, ”he says.
All efforts point to the same thing: achieve the necessary conditions for viewers to believe that Juan except (Ricardo Darín) is going through an apocalyptic landscape.
Enriquez, who has a tattoo of The Eternaluta Since 18, he considers that the achievement of the series marks a before and after for Argentine production. “We are pioneers. We are as Juan except out for the first time In the first chapter to an unknown world, ”he concludes.
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