Inside Men in Black III's Chrysler Building Time Jump

In the long-overdue new installment of the Men in Black franchise, out May 25, Will Smith's character Agent J finds that the only way to travel back in time and save his partner is by jumping from the top of the Chrysler building. Here's how the VFX team created the illusion of New York City time traveling beneath the tumbling agent.

Wilson Webb
In Men in Black III, out May 25, Agent J (Will Smith) has to travel back to the 1960s to save Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones). And the only way to make the time jump is to jump—off the top of the Chrysler building. As J freefalls from the iconic skyscraper, the city of New York beneath him transforms back to its 1960s appearance. It was up to visual effects supervisor Jay Redd to make this temporal transition happen.

First, his team needed to create a rough previsualization of the scene (a primitive, video game–quality version of the action), which they did by combining shots of Smith "falling" against a blue screen in a soundstage—an illusion created by buffeting the actor with wind from fans—with a digitally created body double. Redd and Ken Ralston also researched the New York skyline, even going to the top of the Chrysler building to snap photos. "We built a very simple model of the Chrysler building and the surrounding buildings on the computer," Redd says. This stage allows director Sonnefeld to map out the scene and get a rough feel for what cameras he wants to use before dishing out the money to actually shoot it.

To make NYC itself look like it was traveling back in time, animators at Sony Pictures Imageworks built three digital versions of New York City—not perfect representations of the Big Apple at three different times, but rather three historically nonlinear versions of the city made of jumbles of buildings and images from divergent eras, all the way back to the time of the city being built. "We jump back pretty far and then to 1969 where J is intending to go," Redd says. "There are iconic images there that most people will recognize right away—like the Depression or (World War II)."

That wasn't the only artistic license animators took with NYC. For example, New Yorkers might notice that when J peers over the edge of the present-day Chrysler building, some landmarks, like Grand Central Terminal and the MetLife building, just aren't there. "The reason for that is when you jump off the side, you want to create a sense of peril, a sense of vertigo, a sense of speed," Redd says. "Because the buildings are far away and they're short, I'm just falling against sky and that's not very exciting. You don't get the sense that he's falling quickly. You want this feeling of things rushing by the camera and changing the space that he falls between. We were manipulating building position a lot during the sequence."

Another thing animators fudged to create excitement: The height of the Chrysler building itself. At 80 stories tall, it simply wasn't high enough to sustain the time-jump sequence. "[At that height,] falling would take no time at all," Redd says. "It would be like 7 seconds later you're on the ground. So that's not very fun." To make the fall more dramatic, and longer, animators manipulated the size of the building. "Sometimes it's 80 stories, sometimes it's 400, sometimes it's 200 stories," Redd says.

Redd estimates that the minute-and-a-half-long sequence took 18 months to 2 years to create, with hundreds of animators working to build all the details of the digital New York, from the buildings' gargoyles to panicking crowds (not to mention 3-D conversion). "It's amazing how long it takes to work out the details in some of these complex shots," he says. "And yeah, some of these things fly by the screen in 10 seconds or so. But it really is an exciting, crazy, wacky sequence."

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