Traditional And Digital FX Combine To Make Summer Movie Magic

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STEALTH
"I'm addicted to visual speed," says Rob Cohen, whose previous adrenaline rushes came from directing The Fast and the Furious and XXX. His latest film, Stealth, stars Josh Lucas as a fighter pilot who, fearing that unmanned aircraft will render human pilots obsolete, refuses to send one to destroy a terrorist stronghold in densely populated downtown Rangoon. (The city's stand-in for the film is Bangkok.) Instead, Lucas's character takes on the mission himself, piloting a hypersonic AFG Talon jet--a fictional, supersleek stealth fighter constructed of graphite, fiber, ceramic and metal.

The terrorists are holed up in a building capped with a 14-ft.-thick, steel-reinforced roof. The only way to penetrate it is with a high-speed impact. So the pilot unleashes the Talon's rear pulse-detonation engines--based on a real-life experimental NASA program--then divebombs the structure, dropping a fictional truncheon bomb traveling at hypersonic velocity and pulling up just before the blast. The scene demanded one of the most sophisticated miniature effects ever attempted. "I'm a pilot myself," visual effects supervisor Joel Hynek says, "and Rob is a speed nut, so we were both having a good time on these shots."

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BIRD OF PREY: The high-flying Stealth centers on the fictional AFG Talon fighter, shown here on the deck of the real aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln.

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TOP GUNS: Jamie Foxx, Jessica Biel and Josh Lucas as fighter pilots in the action flick Stealth.

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ABOVE THREE PHOTOS BY COLUMBIA PICTURES 2005

THE BIG BANG: In the movie Stealth, a fighter pilot must bomb a building housing terrorists. The film's special effects crew worked for three months to create a realistic miniature that appeared to implode. Here, footage of the model's collapse is superimposed on a shot of Bangkok. Computer-generated dust and debris were added later to heighten the effect.

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PHOTO BY GEOFF BAUMAN

MISSION IMPLODABLE Part 1: Stealth's special effects crew constructed this 20-ft.-tall miniature of a 20-story building in Sydney, Australia. At one-tenth scale, the miniature was the right size to convey the building's destruction realistically. To make it appear to implode, designers rigged it to descend into a 25-ft.-deep understructure below "street level."

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PHOTO BY SWEN GILLBERG

MISSION IMPLODABLE Part 2: For the big implosion scene in which the Talon bombs the building, a lever was used to release cables in rapid succession, which split the building into three sections. The center collapsed first, followed by the columns on either side. "Each column was on an elevator and would just slide down into shafts below the supposed ground level," visual effects supervisor Joel Hynek says. After the columns collapsed, the thick concrete roof plunged into what had been the center of the building.