As the Earth Crumbles


*As the Earth Crumbles*
Genre	Disaster, drama, romance
Directed by	Matt Richards
Produced by	Louis McCain Matt Richards James J. Reno
Screenplay by	Matt Richards Scott Steuben
Cast	Melania Condottori Matt Richards Rico Wasabi James Van Broeck Laura Huys Jay Simmons Anne-Marie Burdick Anne Palmer
Cinematography	Carl Wyatt (LCS)
Music	Edward Hannis
Production company	LMC Production Co., Ltd Malipa Studios Lovian Cinema Funding Ltd.
Distributor	Lovilago Film Transbaum Films
Runtime	124 minutes
Budget	L$16.8 million
Box office	L$38.9 million
Release date	October 20, 2017

As the Earth Crumbles is a 2017 Lovian epic romance disaster-drama directed, co-written and co-produced by Matt Richards, who also starred in the film alongside an ensemble cast. Based on the 1996 memoir of the same name written by Susanne Yeager and inspired in part by the loss of Richards’ father, the film follows a blossoming friendship and eventual relationship between a young single mother from the city suburbs and a grief-stricken Noble City firefighter with a dark past that is tragically cut short by the events of the 1993 Lovian earthquake.

One of the most expensive all-Lovian films ever made, As the Earth Crumbles received critical acclaim and was a major box-office success upon its October 2017 release, in addition to being commended for its respectful nature and historical accuracy. As the Earth Crumbles was also noteworthy for being a rare co-production between rival film studios Transbaum Films and Lovilago Film, with Transbaum handling the film's international distribution and providing some visual effects services. The film was widely praised for its direction, screenplay, emotional depth and acting, but attracted some minor criticism for some of its special effects.

A companion film entitled The Long Road Ahead was released on July 17, 2019.

Plot synopsis[]

In 1990s Noble City, ahead of the Great Sylvanian Earthquake, a lonely single mother is saved from an office fire by a mysterious firefighter with a troubled past. A friendship soon blossoms into a relationship, but past events and present circumstances threaten to pull them apart forever.

Inspired by true events.

Cast[]

Melania Condottori - Susan Becker, a 26-year-old single mother raising her young son James in suburban Noble City while trying to make ends meet at her supermarket job
Matt Richards - John J. "Jake" Wilson, a 44-year-old firefighter privately struggling with alcoholism and drug abuse following the tragic deaths of his family in a car accident he caused
Rico Wasabi - Captain Sadao "Scott" Kamiki, the Japanese-Lovian chief of the Noble City Fire Department and Jake's closest friend
James Van Broeck - Christian Schroeder, a Dutch-born photographer studying at Nobel University who is known to have photographed the disaster as it unfolded
Laura Huys - Annette Becker, Susan's 32-year-old sister from Newhaven who visits her on a weekly basis to care for James
Jay Simmons - Thomas Becker, Susan and Annette's staunchly religious father who resents his daughter for having a son out of wedlock and refuses to get to know his grandson
Anne-Marie Burdick - Emily Becker, Susan and Annette’s mother and James’ grandmother; Thomas’ wife.
Anne Palmer - Marie Nichols, news reporter for NTV-1
Thomas Parker - James Becker, Susan's six-year-old son who becomes close with Jake

Home video footage and archival photographs of Richards' real family were used to depict Jake's deceased wife and children.

Production[]

Writing and development[]

Matt Richards came across Susanne Yeager’s 1996 memoir As the Earth Crumbles at a Newhaven bookstore while filming the 2013 remake of Black Ops in July 2012. In his own words, he was “taken aback” and deeply affected by the book, having lost his father in the earthquake; he bought copies of it for his mother and siblings, as well as longtime friend William Harris. Richards also recalled seeing a televised interview with Yeager as part of an NTV-1 segment entitled Stories from the Earthquake, which was broadcast on the one-year anniversary of the event in July 1994. By coincidence, Yeager and Richards briefly lived on the same Newhaven street as children, but the two never met until Richards personally approached her later that month about optioning the novel. The two bonded over that coincidence, as well as their respective experiences in the earthquake, and eventually became close friends. Richards would invite Yeager and her family on-set on a number of occasions, initially to quell any doubts about their handling of her story, and later to satisfy her curiosity about the filmmaking process.

At a Lovilago Film dinner later that year, he proposed adapting it into a self-directed film. Despite studio heads being receptive to the idea and to the story treatment developed by Richards and former Blackburn University classmate Scott Steuben, the concept was shelved for several years owing to financial constraints, Richards’ lack of experience as a director of such films, and a general lack of enthusiasm for a disaster film after the failure of the studio’s 2006 film Tension, which also dealt with the earthquake. Although Tension had turned a profit for the studio upon its release, it was widely-panned and highly controversial for its portrayal of the earthquake; it was expected that the new film would be unfairly compared to it, hurting its box office totals and affecting the studio’s profit margin in turn.

Filming[]

Filming ran from January 16, 2016 to June 18, 2016 and much of the film was shot in chronological order. Despite the film being set in and around Noble City much of it was in fact shot in Richards' hometown of Newhaven, with the production team being drawn to the city by tax incentives offered by the Kings state government. Newhaven locations such as the Newhaven Shopping Center or the Newhaven City Hall were often digitally altered in post-production or replaced outright with CGI (computer-generated imagery) to stand in as corresponding Noble City landmarks. In spite of the effort put into masking the fact that the film was shot in and around Newhaven several shots do betray the actual filming location, with local road signage and storefronts being clearly visible on occasion.

Many scenes depicting the earthquake were shot on bluescreen soundstages, with sets built on rockers that would simulate violent seismic wave action. Several actors reported feeling nauseated by the effect, including Richards himself, who suffers from motion sickness; owing to the potential for serious injuries, an ambulance crew was on standby at all times while the rockers were being used. To ensure a scientifically accurate depiction of the earthquake, several geologists from the Blackburn University, Noble City were consulted and invited on-set to monitor filming; the film’s scientific advisor was Dr. David Noble, deputy head of the geology department at Blackburn. For scenes depicting the tsunami, four separate water tanks were constructed at Malipa Studios in Newhaven, with depths ranging from 1m (3.2 feet) to 3.5m (11.6 feet) and hundreds of gallons of water pumped into them. To prepare for the challenge of filming underwater, the actors underwent extensive free diving training for two months before filming.

Despite the tragedy of the story and the significant technical challenges involved in telling it, Richards went out of his way to make the shoot “emotionally palatable” for his actors, hosting pizza parties and game and movie nights on a regular basis. Anne Palmer, who has a bit role in the film as newscaster Marie Nichols, remarked in an interview that “[Richards] is literally the nicest director I’ve ever worked with.” Overworked and under considerable stress by the end of the filming schedule, at the urging of his cast and crew Richards reluctantly agreed to let his assistant director Stacey Salter take over, and took a several week-long sabbatical, taking a road trip across the United States before visiting relatives in California.

Visual effects[]

As the Earth Crumbles features 285 visual effects shots—a record for a Lovian film—with most being painstakingly computer-animated; the effects are of such a high standard that they have been described by notable critic Jacob Darrow as "the best [effects] you'll ever see in a Lovian picture." Faced with the daunting task of producing special effects that had not yet been achieved in Lovian cinema, assistant director and visual effects supervisor Stacey Salter invited several American special effects experts to consult on the film. While most of the animation was done by Transbaum's in-house effects division, several shots were farmed out to two companies in Brunant owing to a lack of industry talent in Lovia and a tight schedule.

A hugely detailed 3D model of Noble City was created from scans of the miniature city set used for 1998's Cops and reference images taken throughout much of 2015, with more recent architecture removed and replaced with what stood there before according to a historical chronicle of Noble City buildings. Rigid body physics and fracture modifiers were then applied to select buildings to simulate the effects of an earthquake. The tsunami was a mixture of practical water and CGI.