To faithfully recreate a 50-year-old real life plane crash and remarkable tale of survival, the filmmakers behind Society of the Snow combined LED and green screens with multiple practical sets of the plane’s fuselage and put them all 2000+ metres up a mountain, writes Adrian Pennington.
That the mountain they used was in Spain’s Sierra Nevada rather than the Andes didn’t detract from the effort in terms of organisation, getting the crew and filming equipment there, and adapting to constant changes in the weather.
“We wanted the audience to feel they were really at the Valle de las Lágrimas (Valley of Tears),” explained cinematographer Pedro Luque of the crash location to IBC365. “When the survivors saw the movie they were amazed at how accurate the production was.”
Society of the Snow depicts the crash of Flight 571 and its aftermath — from the day Uruguay’s Old Christians Club rugby team left for a match in Santiago, Chile, to 72 days later when only 16 of them finally came home. Their story has been called...
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