Creating a reservoir as big as Lake Superior, the Three Gorges Dam project flooded the homes of over two million Chinese living along the Yangtze River. As part of two Discovery Channel/Learning Channel documentaries... a look at the impact of the biggest construction project since the Great Wall of China... London based production company, TransAlantic Films asked Home Run Pictures to create visualizations of what the dam would look like when the 20 year project was completed.

Flowing camera moves and a soft pallet of colors were employed to create several minutes of animation that would blend with the incredible wide screen footage shot for the rest of the film. Getting source for the task was difficult, the engineering drawings were considered secret... to generate accurate terrain for the site, we found a map source gathered from old USSR military archives. And the time zone difference made any direct discussions difficult.

Animators Tom Casey, Brian Schutzman, Dawn lohmeyer and Desiree Roy spent six months creating views of the site from the few existing artists sketches and engineering diagrams. A specially coded terrain program was used to create the accurate and realistic landscape with particle based clouds and water simulations... and extensive use of the early internet [1998 timeframe] allowed the five time zone separated companies to quickly review progress during production.