How does one go about blowing up the world anyway? Pull it apart? Explode it? We kicked that concept around for about a month before deciding that it should blow apart, rumbling on it's tectonic plates along the ring of fire. Yep, I actually cut the Earth apart along real fault lines to aid in the realism or in this case "surrealism" of the shot.

It took me six months and about fifty composite layers in Toonz Xhseet   to totally wipe out our home planet. I started with a patch sphere and converted it to polygons (very dense) to maintain the texture placement after cutting it apart.   David Munier, (Senior 3D Animator) created the small shards using flock animation from Softimage, Kelly Nelson, (3D Animator) assisted in some of the particle effects.

The cool ships (VanGuards) fleeing from Earth were modeled and animated by Robert Kinkead, (Junior 3D Animator).

The exploding ship in this scene was done by Rhonda Graphics also located in Phoenix, AZ.

Note: It didn't take the entire six months, I worked on other scenes at the same time ;-)

I would like to add a special thanks to Tom Miller, (Department Supervisor) and Gary Goldman, (Producer) for trusting in my abilities and tossing me a bone with some meat on it.