This is the second scene taking place in the now-expanded Bunker of Evil. Amanda enters though an airlock door and skates past some rather exotic equipment on her way to deliver the Mona Lisa to Kim Jong-un, who is in party mode with Vonky Trump. Amanda is suddenly intercepted by Ambassador Rodman who grapples at her from inside his cage.

The bunker set is 2x2x4 feet in size. The walls are removable and symmetrical so it was pretty easy to flip it around to give the illusion of an 8-foot long set. That’s 48 feet long at 1:6 scale. This set also has an open grid ceiling, which is supported by a special reconfigurable frame I built in place.

The special effects were done with 10 pounds of dry ice over two days, both inside the airlock and atop the supercomputer’s cooling tower. Dry ice is rather difficult to work with as you might imagine. It boils best when dropped in hot water, but it doesn’t last long. And then you have to dump all that water every few frames so it doesn’t flood your set. But the effect worked, as Amanda skated fearlessly through the blasts of steam and who knows how many industrial toxins.

The biggest problem was capturing the blinking lights on my TerraMaster D5 data center, a RAID array. I used its startup sequence for the best LED activity. But it uses a Thunderbolt 3 cable which maxes at 3 feet. So I had to move my main iMac Pro behind the bunker set, then run the cable through an access hole just to get the blinky lights I needed. And that was super frustrating because it meant I had to control Dragonframe from my iPad using a Remote Desktop app. Between that and the dry ice, this scene nearly snuffed out my will to live.

This scene was my homage to the WOPR supercomputer scene in WarGames.