CINEFEX 100th Issue Round Table - Page 2

CF: Overall, would you say there is an ignorance of film history among some of the newer FX artists?

RICHARD EDLUND: Yes. A lot of the people who come into the VFX arena these days are not sufficiently schooled in filming. They need to go back and look at historical movies. There are fantastic shots in Metropolis and Citizen Kane!

JEFF OKUN: To a lot of them, the history of VFX is Star Wars. But Citizen Kane, Gone With The Wind - some amazing stuff was doen in those movies from the '30s and '40s. It is my firm belief that if you understand those old techniques, then you can use new digital techniques more effectively. A lot of the VFX supervisors out there today don't understand glass shots. They don't understand throwing a piece of tape across the lens and doing two passes to get an in-camera composite. Nobody coming up today has ever worked in a darkroom. Whenever I do my little speaking engagements I always ask - and nobody in the audience has ever touched film. They don't know what sprockets are! I guess it's not mandatory to know that; but I always take film with me, rip off pieces and pass them out, just so they'll know what it feels like.

ALEX FUNKE: I think all digital artists should go out and shoot film, and then study it - "Oh, I get it; that's what happens with a highlight that's three stops overexposed." They can be the most brilliant keyboard-and-mouse artists in the world, but they still need experience with real photography and the way film and images work.

IAN HUNTER: One of the common things that happens with people who are looking at monitors all day is that they have no sense of depth, no understanding of the simplest things like, "Those mountains in the background should be lighter than the mountains in the foreground, because they're off in the distance." To know that stuff, you have to be a keen observer of the real world, a participant in the real world.

JOHN DYKSTRA: You know what I did when I started out? When I was working at Doug Trumbull's place, we raced motorcycles, flew airplanes, flew gliders, we sailed, we surfed - you name it. We were out in the world, doing stuff! And we brought all of that real-world experience to moviemaking - as opposed to trying to make up a real world based on what you know about movies. Now, I'm not saying people have to go out and ride motorcycles. But you've got to know about the real world. You've got to figure out - is this table hard wood or soft wood? Is this part glass or plastic? How can you tell by looking at it from here? How does it feel? You need all that tactile experience. Learn how to use a camera, how to compose, how to use color and light in the real world, sketch, paint, force yourself to cross-train - all of those things bring verisimilitude to digital images.

CF: Once this generation of VFX supervisors retires, is the whole film aesthetic going to disappear?

JOHN KNOLL: Who knows? It may not be a bad thing. I'm sure the generation before me winces at some of the things I do...

DENNIS MUREN: The early CG guys here at ILM who ignored the film aesthetic entirely quickly found out that they wouldn't be employed very long - because the directors at that time wanted that look. But I'm talking 5 or 10 years ago. Now things seem to be drifting into a new direction, where it's OK to have a CG, non-photographic look. So maybe those early guys were just ahead of their time. We've had a lot of guys leave here to go work for the gaming industry, because their sensibility really is more in that world. Why be hindered by a background being out of focus? They see that as a problem. Whereas I see - aesthetically, it is a wonderful thing to use, because it focuses your attention where you want it. Their interest is more in just an assult of information. And my interest is more on focusing your attention for a moment to help the director tell his story.

CF: Just as the virtual camera can do impossible moves, the ability to do digital doubles seems to be encouraging ever more fantastic stunts - not only by superheroes, but by supposedly mortal, human characters.

DENNIS MUREN: Part of that comes from directors who are accustomed to playing games where the rules of reality are gone.

CF: We hate that.

DENNIS MUREN: I don't relate to it either - but we're getting old. And as our eyesight goes, what difference will it make? (laughs)

CF: But don't these kinds of unreal digital double actions make it harder for an audience member - no matter what their age - to empathize with the characters?

STEVE BEGG: I think so. I strongly believe that digital doubles have had a negative impact on action sequences, in that regard. When you see someone defying the laws of gravity and physics - which we've seen a lot in recent productions - I think the public feels as if it's been cheated.

ALEC GILLIS: To get involved in a film, you want your character to be an underdog and to have slim chances of overcoming his obstacles - but when he can overcome anything, I'm sorry, it doesn't work. In the last Matrix movie, there were hundreds of Agent Smiths fighting with Neo. Interesting concept. But then they fight and they fight and they fight, and pretty soon it is clear that Neo is indestructible and the Agent Smiths are unstoppable - so why are we watching this?

ERIC BREVIG: And, at the end of it, Neo just flies away! Why didn't he just do that to begin with? What - did you just remember that you could fly?

TIM McHUGH: I saw The Bourne Identity last weekend. In one scene, Matt Damon grabs this guy, throws him down a stairwell, and rides him down six stories, while shooting. I stared at it in disbelief. This was a realistic, gritty, spy drama - and here's a scene that wouldn't have worked in a Roger Moore Bond film! And I thought, "Well, now I don't trust these people for the rest of the movie." It was ludicrous. Now that anybody can do that - the Olsen twins can leap tall buildings in a single bound - it takes some of the magic out of it.

ERIC BREVIG: Same thing in Crouching Tiger. I love that movie, but it bothered me that there were no rules. The characters could just float up to the ceiling whenever they wanted. Well, if people can float up to the ceiling, they should just do that! They shouldn't be walking around getting into fights to begin with!

RICHARD EDLUND: But, at the same time, you could buy these gazelle-like people leaping up on walls and doing all these impossible things because they were staged well. If it's staged well and looks good, I'm more apt to buy it.

CF: That was obviously a stylistic choice in a very stylized movie. But why are we seeing so much of it even in supposedly realistic movies, like The Bourne Identity scene that Tim mentioned?

ERIC BREVIG: I think there are two culprits. One of someone just not thinking through the laws of physics. It's expensive to run physics simulations on digital doubles and make them look as if they are really getting banged up and all that. It's a lot easier just to animate them the way you think they would probably behave - but that has a tendency to look wrong. The second is the director who insists his character would survive a fall from a 10 story building. Hulk was a good example. Hulk could jump half a mile - and I don't think anybody other than Ang Lee thought that was a good idea. But that was his vision.

ROB COLEMAN: Directors are always asking animators to make CG characters do these physically impossible things - things that, in reality, would rip their shoulders out of their sockets. We're all dealing with directors who are telling us, "I know no one can do that, but I want to see it!"

ROBERT SKOTAK: And even your average moviegoer who might think these things are impressive knows it's a digital effect. It's like a cartoon. It's like Wile E. Coyote getting flattened, and then showing up in the next shot ok. It makes these films dramatically lightweight, and it calls attention to the fact that this is an illusion, done with machines.

CF: Right, it's the magician giving his tricks away. Instead of doing something that is photoreal and believeable, you do a handoff from a real actor to a digital double doing something a person couldn't possibly do - and so the audience knows it's a digital double.

ROB COLEMAN: Believe me - if I can speak for all the 'magicians' here - we hate it when we are pushed to do that. It comes from directors wanting to see something 'they haven't seen before.' But when a character breaks the laws of physics, you are breaking the illusion. Nobody is going to believe in that character if he does these amazing things. And, worse, they are not going to believe that this character is in peril. If he can leap 65 feet from one building to another, he is no longer like us, and we can't empathize with him. We have a bit more leeway in a Star Wars movie, because it's a fantasy and our characters are Jedis and we don't know the extent of Jedi powers. But I think they have leapt around too fast in the previous movies; and George is sensitive to that now. I think the idea with digital doubles used to be, "If we get them across the room faster, people won't notice that they're digital doubles." But we've found that if we slow them down, they're more convincing.

Yeah, this part is great. It really goes into the way you experience a film in the moment as opposed to the 'data' you get out of it. Data being just the stuff you see on screen. Conceptually, the Burly Brawl is cool. But dramatically, it's totally inert.

CF: There's a psychological element to the obvious use of digital doubles, as well. Does a stunt sequence have the same impact on an audience when they know that real stunt people didn't do it?

ROBERT SKOTAK: Probably not. There's no balls to the CG stunt, no real danger. It's not the guy who actually went off a cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me. It's just something that was done on a machine very similar to what's sitting on my desktop at home. So, yeah, it loses a certain amount of awe and impressiveness.

NICK DUDMAN: The audience has become completely desensitized, in my view. When you saw a stuntman slide down a wire between two jets in Cliffhanger, you could tell it was a human being doing it, and you felt exactly the same exhilaration that you feel if you go to the circus and watch somebody walking along a tightrope. The minute you take away the angst of that, then what is happening to the people on screen has less importance to the audience.

PADDY EASON: Think of the criticism of the last few Jackie Chan films. A lot of fans were disappointed to see any CG effects in a Jackie Chan movie, because they felt his main selling point was that he did all of that for real, and there was real physical danger to him. That has been his selling point over the years. So, when any hint of bluescreen or a wire removal comes in, they feel short-changed.

MATT BUTLER: The studio publicity on XXX implied that Vin Diesel did all his own stuntwork, because they knew it would disappoint the audience if it came out that stunts were performed by a digital double.

ERIC BREVIG: I'd rather see somebody do something that is half as dangerous, but they really did it and you can tell, than see the best, most amazing feat performed by a synthetic double. If you use a digital character and the audience isn't aware of it, they will still get that rush of, "Oh, my god, somebody really did that." That's fine. But if you push it and forget that you are trying to fool someone...

CF: Is there a similar danger in the use of crowd replication? Will there always be more impact in seeing Lawrence and his men storming Aquba than there is in seeing a CG army storming Troy?

CRAIG BARRON: I thought the work in Troy looked pretty good. But you're comparing Troy to Lawrence of Arabia, one of the best movies ever made! And that Aquba shot resonates because it was the focal point of the whole picture - the audience got to see how the big guns could not be turned around from the sea. If David Lean were making films today, he'd be using digital visual FX!

ROBERT SKOTAK: I don't know - there's just something about Cecil B. DeMille getting up there with his bullhorn and yelling at 10,000 people.

CF: Movies can't afford to do that anymore.

SKOTAK: Money is a problem - but there are still times when you want real people. So pick your moments. Instead of staging such a huge battle, you stage a battle where the individual encounters are so striking, so interesting, so horrifying, you don't have to do the whole thing. Maybe you have 1,000 people instead of 10,000, and you stage most of it with them. That could be more compelling than seeing thousands and thousands of synthetic people to the horizon.

ROB LEGATO: You put 50 people in a scene, maybe I buy it. You put in 500 - now I know it's a trick. You put in 10,000, forget it! I've lost the impact of knowing it is real. It's no longer this big David Lean production value. It doesn't mean anything to me anymore.

ALEC GILLIS: I am personally tired of seas of armies running across the battlefield and crashing into each other. It's desensitizing and it's boring. I had the same reaction to one of the earlier Star Wars movies, where there was a sea of TIE Fighters coming towards you - okay, now they've just gone too far.

ROB COLEMAN: But crowd technology has allowed us to have epic pictures again. Those army shots in Troy really worked. The battle of Helm's Deep in LOTR - oh, my god! There were a couple of shots in Return of the King where I actually gasped. The shots of the Riders of Rohan coming up to Minas Tirith, with that huge army out in front of them - my brain was telling me 'visual effects,' but it didn't matter. It literally took my breath away.

CF: How do you extract that aspect of 'obvious CG' in shots like that, so that the audience can look upon those crowds and get the same feeling they got from the old DeMille or David Lean movies?

IAN HUNTER: It all goes back to the observation of reality and imperfection. If you watch the battles and fight scenes in old movies like Spartacus a few times, you start to see the two guys in the background who are wearing watches and not really fighting very well. So, I think what the crowd simulation people need to work on is having bored extras fighting not so well in the background!

MATT GRATZNER: My favorite thing in the LOTR movies - and if you watch the DVD, you can see it - is a sequence toward the end of the first film, when the orcs are coming down to the river and there's a big climactic battle. There is this great Cablecam shot flying over all the orcs running down these steps - and there's one guy who's kind of tiptoeing! Here's this orc brought up from the depths of evil, and he's afraid he's going to fall down the stairs! And it's great. It's great that they didn't go back and fix that digitally. It was great that they had some guys in costume, and that it wasn't all CG. You get that kind of thing with real people. You get guys in 100 pounds of costume and make-up and uncomfortable shoes, making sure they don't trip down the stairs.

CF: Are these huge CG crowds just the flavor of the month? Are we going to see less of them in the future, or more?

JOHN KNOLL: There are fads in the VFX industry, and crowds are the new fad. But like any other fad, the novelty will wear off and it won't be used just for its own sake, to show off the technology. The dog will wag the tail again.

ROB LEGATO: When zoom lenses came out, everybody used zoom lenses - and the first time you saw a zoom, it was pretty novel, and that was great. But then, everybody was zooming too much, and it drew too much attention to itself., and you just didn't want to see it anymore. As soon as any new thing comes out, everybody overuses it.

PHIL TIPPETT: Remember flying logos in the '70s? Wow, computer graphics with flying logos. Remember morphing? Yeah, morphing, that's cool. More morphing, more morphing. Now it's 10,000 charging guys - and, to me, they all look like the same 10,000 guys! Did they go to central casting and get the same 10,000? It's a technology that is out of the can, and it works because it plugs in. But to me it's like, "Yeah, yeah, I've seen that a million times before..."

NICK DUDMAN: I liken it to make-up FX, when suddenly someone discovered that you could put balloons underneath prosthetic pieces to make the skin bubble. Dick Smith does Altered States; and for the next five years, every movie with make-up FX - and I was guilty as anyone - had people's skin bubbling and bulging. Even if it wasn't particularly necessary - 'Hey, look how clever we can be!'

ROB LEGATO: Eventually, people with taste decide to use that new thing in a tasteful way, buried within a shot, without calling attention to it - and it works really well because they put it in its proper place. It's not the be-all, end-all.

CF: What do you see as the next step in crowd replication technology?

MARK STETSON: MASSIVE is the ideal, and I think the next step will be a more simple implementation of it. Right now, the extensive motion capture work you have to do to create your agents for MASSIVE - that's a big endeavor, and it takes a substantial movie project, like LOTR, to justify it. So simplification of the process will be the next great step, I think - being able to carry over motion capture created specifically for one film to the next. MASSIVE is playing with that, packaging stock agents with the software. Not a bad idea.

CF: The point about the impact on an audience of real crowds and real stunt people versus CG crowds and digital doubles could be made when it comes to digital sets. That huge vista from Lawrence of Arabia - you could probably replicate that digitally. But would it have less of an impact on the viewer, knowing it was a synthetic image, rather than something David Lean shot out in the desert for two years?

MATT BUTLER: I think so. I think people feel gypped. They would prefer to look at an original painting than a replica - even if the replica is a better painting.

JOHN VLIET: Lawrence of Arabia never fails to astound me. I look at it and think, "God, that was hard to do!" But the bulk of the theater-going audience doesn't really care. Most of them are like: "Yeah, so what? It's a guy in the desert wearing sheets!" They haven't made one of those movies in a very long time; and we're not going to see them anymore. And, as a purist, as someone who thinks those kinds of movies are really cool, I'm going to miss that. But I also think looking at pyramids is really cool - and you'll notice that nobody is building pyramids anymore, either.

CF: Given the economics, you're right - no one will ever make a movie the way David Lean shot that one. And digital sets and landscapes will be the cost-effective way of setting movies in exotic locations. But will those digital sets and locations ever really look as real as those that are photographed?

COLIN GREEN: In my opinion, 100% CG fantastical landscapes don't have the same sort of vibrancy and true sense of space you get when you actually build the set or go to the real location.

PHIL TIPPETT: The only completely convincing, realistic virtual world I've seen, where I was just completely sucked into it, was Master and Commander. The work in that was just unbelievable. And part of that was - I remember reading that Peter Weir got on a big boat and sailed around Cape Horn. There was a palpability and an understanding of the real experience that was pulled across all of those shots - and there were a shitload of greenscreen shots in that movie. But they were really good, partly because they came from an understanding of the real experience.

PATRICT TATOPOULOS: The dangerous thing about creating environments in CG is that because you can do anything, you can lose track of that sense of reality. For example: in architecture, buildings have to be built according to the realities of engineering and structure. You can design a building in CG that ignores all those structural elements - but people won't buy it. So I think that when you do CG environments, you still have to figure out the mechanical aspects of things. Don't think of it as a CG building or environment. Think about - 'If we had to build this thing in the real world, how would we do that?' It has to be grounded in reality.

ROB LEGATO: I have a theory about this. Say you're looking out this window, to a scene outside. That building, which was built in 1910, is right next to a building that was built in the 1960s. There's a palm tree over there that has been there a long time. Everything out there has a story to it. When people create a synthetic background, there is no backstory. They don't put in the 1910 building, because they don't think of it. They don't put in the 1960s building, because it looks kind of funky. The palm tree, you might put it there, but it would be art-directed to be in just the right place, not in the place it just happened to be in the real world. Whereas, New York has a certain style to it - good and bad - and there are buildings and things next to the other things that I wouldn't put there if I was art-directing it. But if I photograph New York, I have no choice. Those things are all there - and that choice that I couldn't control is what gives it life. A synthetic environment has no history to it. It's just a generic, soulless facsimile to fool your eye into thinking it could be a cityscape. But it's not a real cityscape, not a real landscape molded by windstorms and rain, and at some level you know it, no matter how well it is done. I don't like it, and I don't hate it - it just leaves me cold.

KEN RALSTON: But synthetic sets have always existed - look at a matte painting from a movie in 1930. OK, that's not a 'digital backlot,' but it's an 'analog backlot.' It's the same trick. There are times when you have to create whole worlds - like in Contact. That digital environment was an island of fantasy proportions. I have nothing against that. I think it's very exciting if it's used in the right way.

MARK STETSON: Look at a film like Spider-Man - the cityscape work on that was fantastic! I remember thinking to myself, 'If Luc Besson could see this, he would want to make a Fifth Element 2 - and I want to be there when he does.'

CRAIG BARRON: I think virtual worlds are very credible at this point - they just have to be used more effectively. Too often, they are just sort of there, sitting flatly as an image. They have to become more a compelling part of the filmmaking process if we're going to get shots like Lawrence attacking Aqaba.

CF: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and much of the recent Star Wars movies were shot on bluescreen stages, with synthetic environments added in postproduction. What do you think of that approach?

STEPHANE CERETTI: I think sometimes it makes directors a bit lost. It's not like Cleopatra, where they built all of these big sets, and everything was just there. Now, directors have to think forward to what is going to be there, and it is sometimes difficult for them to imagine all that.

RICK BAKER: Actors, too. I don't know that it's necessarily a good thing to have actors acting on a bluescreen set. Actors are funny that way - they kind of need visual stuff to play off of.

PHIL TIPPETT: Working on an all-bluescreen set would have to beat an actor down. I can't imagine he would be able to draw the enthusiasm that he does from walking onto a cool set or being out in the middle of an amazing landscape.

JOHN KNOLL: I've heard different theories on that. Some stage actors say that it's not that different than acting on a stage, because you frequently have to ignore distractions on stage and play to things that aren't really there. But I have heard that complaint from actors, and I understand it. The essence of acting is reacting, and if there's nobody or nothing there, it is hard.

ROB COLEMAN: I'm sure it makes actors long to go off and do a costume drama.

RICHARD EDLUND: You'd have to be nuts to be able to act a whole movie in a green room! Are you going to get good drama with actors working within that kind of environment? When you look at actors who have been shot against green and they are walking along, talking to some monster, they look lost.

CRAIG BARRON: I've noticed that - the actors' eyes look glazed over on some of the big effects shows, like they don't know where to look, or what's really going on.

PADDY EASON: The actor gives off all kinds of little physical cues to the fact that he is standing in front of a bluescreen. His body language is different in a constrained studio space than it would be on a real location. The direction of his gaze, how expansive his gestures are - all those thing are subliminal cues that can make the audience pick up on the fact that he was shot on a bluescreen stage.

CF: Some actors seem to be better at it than others. We've heard that Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were great at it in the Men in Black movies; same with Jude Law in Sky Captain.

ROB LEGATO: Leonardo DiCaprio did some very nice things on bluescreen for The Aviator. He did his job as an actor, which was to create reality out of unreality. Actors do that all the time. They do intimate love scenes talking to a dot on a C-stand. We're asking them to do the same thing in a bluescreen environment. The breed of actor coming up will be more comfortable with it because it will be commonplace, just part of the fabric of making movies.

BROOKE BRETON: This is where previz can come in again - it can literally put the actors into an environment and show them exactly where they are in space, so that they understand what they are moving through. It can make it more of a virtual reality experience, putting them in that place and giving them a context to work in.

CF: You're talking about the Encodacam thing, being able to see a prevized environment in playback, with all of the camera moves and everything?

BROOKE BRETON: Or maybe it would be a virtual reality headset that they could wear, walk around the previz 'set,' then take it off and say, 'Okay, I got it.'

CF: As films are shot with fewer set pieces, and more extensive bluescreen, what technical difficulties do you face?

PADDY EASON: Lighting is often the thing that stymies perfect insertion of real characters into virtual environments. It is really hard for a DP to light bluescreen material, particularly if he doesn't really know what the environment is going to be. There have been a few rays of hope in terms of techniques like those being done by Paul Debevec, who has suggested using virtual environments to drive exotic lighting rigs - to use CG environments to light live action.

CF: Has this Debevec technique been applied to realistically light a bluescreen environment?

PADDY EASON: I don't know if it's been used for anything other than technical demos. In the demos, there is a hemispherical lighting grid, and it looks great. But getting that scaled up big enough to incorporate people moving around, I don't know. It would mean that filmmakers would have to be quite disciplined in terms of defining their environment before they shot the characters; but I can see that happening.

JOHN KNOLL: As of right now, thought, it is still really difficult to do good lighting on your subject in a completely blue environment. I may get the lighting on the character the way I want it, but by the time I've done that, the bluescreen is virtually useless because it's no longer extractable. So, on the Star Wars movies, I always argue for having some set there - 'Can I have a floor? A little piece of wall?' When you have a set, you can do all kinds of nice things with lighting that are much harder to do when you have a completely blue environment.

CF: What counter-arguments do you get when you ask for a piece of set and they say 'no?'

JOHN KNOLL: That it's not worth it. It's three shots, and they're not going to build a set for three shots. And I understand that. But when there are enough shots - when we can do 20 out of the 28 shots in this sequence entirely against the set if we build this bit of wall and this table - then I think it's worth it to build that set. It gives us an anchor down the line, a little piece of something to establish the look.

KEVIN MACK: On The Grinch, we decided early on that we would build just so much, and then tent the whole damn stage in bluescreen. But it was still a huge set, so it gave the actors enough real stuff to interact with and feel as if they were in a real place. This idealized strategy of, 'Oh, we don't need to build any sets, we're just going to have everything be bluescreen' winds up costing so much money, they're modelling telephones and trying to track them into people's hands. It's insane. They'll build only half a desk for an office scene. They'll do a CG cubicle and have to put CG maps on the walls. It's like, come on! Print a map, hang it on a wall!

CF: Is digital technology going to get to a point where you won't need bluescreen or greenscreen to extract an image?

JOHN KNOLL: Roto is already much better - both because of experienced people and computer assist. We did very little bluescreen on Pirates of the Caribbean. We made a conscious choice to roto - and it made all kinds of things better, in my opinion. We didn't have any of the lighting constraints you get with bluescreen, so it could be lit like any other shot in the movie. We had total freedom of where the characters moved and what direction that camera was pointed. It is a viable alternative to bluescreen.

CF: Let's talk about a sub-category of virtual settings - what is, probably inappropriately, called 'digital matte painting.'

CRAIG BARRON: We should have called it 'environment creation,' or something like that, because they're not really matte paintings anymore. But they're called that because we don't have a better way to address it.

CF: To the matte painters who made the transition from brush and canvas to CG environments - what have been the advantages of the new approach?

SYD DUTTON: It allows us to realize dreams. I used to dream about flying through cities, for example - and now we can actually do that. We never could have done that before.

KEVIN MACK: The computer just removed an unnecessary barrier between the vision and the execution. I'm a painter, and I still paint, but I like painting on the computer better. On the computer, I'm actually painting an image, instead of smearing colored goo on a surface. That's not to diminish how magical it is to smeared colored goo on a surface and make a wonderful piece of art. But that is pure craft. I'm more interested in the concept, in the end result, than the craft it takes to get there. Working with a computer has its own craft, of course, but it is a little more direct.

HARRISON ELLENSHAW: What I love about it is that you don't have to agonize over the 'make it look real' part. If you want to paint grass, you run outside with your digital camera and photograph some grass and bring it back in and import it. And the matching - it used to be a pain in the butt to match grass to grass and sky to sky. You'd paint it blue, do the wedge, send it to the lab, it would come back - 'Well, I almost got it.' Add a bit more blue, send it in again... it would never match! But in the computer - ahhh. You go 'ping,' and it matches!

CF: Is there anything that actually worked better the old way?

HARRISON ELLENSHAW: What I find most difficult is that, before, you had a geographic sense of the entire matte painting as you worked. As you worked on one part of the image, because of your peripheral vision, you would see the rest of the painting. And that sense of where everything was helped you to place the elements in a successful composition. You don't have that same sense when you have to scroll across your painting on a screen. Even if you reduce it down to see the whole thing, as soon as you zoom in, you lose it again. That's the biggest disadvantage to digital. And it's a significant one.

CF: How do you get around that?

ELLENSHAW: The best way to get around it is to block the thing out on something that is three or four feet wide, just to get a sense of it. Do all the things that you used to do in the days before digital. And then you scan the sucker, get the sky to match, put it all together, and bingo, you're done.

CF: What role do you see matte painting playing as we progress into the future?

SYD DUTTON: I think it will play a tremendous role. We're going into a phase where there will be a real blur between what is 3D and what is a matte painting - that's the future I see.

CF: Are digital environments just another fad, or are they going to become the norm?

MATTHEW BUTLER: I think we'll see more digital environments, because there is a perception that they save money. But I'd like to see those real numbers. On the production side, they say, 'Everything we don't have to do, we save.' But what they don't do on the production side has to be done on the digital FX side - and that's not free! It saves headaches on the set with the actors, and that's a positive thing - but how much do you pay for that at the back end? Not just financially, but in terms of what it looks like? Is it really better? Many times, we just wind up replicating reality anyway. If you can shoot reality, why are we spending all this time and effort replicating it in CG? I don't get it. The very best you're going to get is what you could have shot in camera.

NED GORMAN: Whether or not we see more digital sets will depend, I think, on what happens with Sky Captain. If that does well, it's going to herald a new thing. People will realize that the digital backlot isn't so much having a bunch of digital sets that you can pull out and use over and over - which is what the term often refers to - it will be building a movie around bluescreen performances. Physical production will wind up being a bluescreen cove on Stage 10 for three months. If you can get Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow to do that, and you can get Tom Hanks to do Polar Express, then the studios are going to start thinking it's a good idea. Even if Sky Captain doesn't go over big, it will be one of those fulcrum films that pushes a new concept. Tron was one of those. It wasn't as big a hit as they were looking for, but everybody in the industry knew it was an important film. Same thing with Final Fantasy. It wasn't as successful as they'd hoped, but everybody in the industry looked at it, and thought, 'Hmmm...'

PHIL TIPPETT: Look at what happened when sound came in. They had been making some great silent films, but then sound comes along and a bunch of crappy sound films come out until it gets to a point where it's a bona fide craft. Same thing with color. I think Star Wars and Sky Captain are harking back to those types of historical turning points. We've got a new kind of tool, and everybody is learning to use it. So the pictures right now might not be the best, but they are pioneers for a kind of cinema that is sure to come.

Happy to hear that you're enjoying the article as much as I did. I've only been adding to this sporadically when I have nothing to do at work. So it's no biggie since I do it at my own leisure with no threat of deadline.

I also get to practice typing accurately.

CF: What do we stand to lose - if anything - as films become more dependent on synthetic camera moves, characters, and settings?

ROBERT SKOTAK: Overall, I think that synthetic images are promoting a sense of illustration in visual FX. You come upon the castle in the mist, and it is the idea time of day, it is backlit, the mist is just so... It's that massaging thing again. It feels too much like an animated film, because it is all pretty, all controlled. It's a style that's already becoming tiring.

STEVE BEGG: I think we lose the spontaneity and immediacy of conventional filmmaking techniques if we become too dependent on synthetic images. And, you know, when you enter a completely controlled environment, the weaknesses of the filmmaker really become more evident - because the director has godlike control over the images, and the movie is still a piece of crap! You are far less forgiving in a synthetic situation than you would be if the director gave it his best shot in a real-world environment and just didn't quite get there.

CF: Are we sacrificing the audience's emotional involvement in movies by making them increasingly artificial?

MATT BUTLER: We are, but I don't know if that's the fault of the content's being artificial, or the fault of how it's done. We've all been moved by a Disney cartoon, and that is clearly synthetic.

TIM McHUGH: Look at the Pixar movies. They're fantastic. Each time I go to see the next picture, I say: "Well, it won't be as good as the last one.' But then, it is! I'm always amazed by their ability. It's the storytelling that gets you.

JEFF OKUN: You could have made those Pixar movies in any medium, and they still would have worked, because the story was there. The fact that they were made in the digital medium is coincidental, almost. There is a section of Hollywood that is waking up to the fact - because they've had so many flops - that when a movie has a good story, it seems to make money, regardless of the FX.

CF: The FX don't even have to be that good, if the story is there.

BILL TAYLOR: That has always been the case. One of the best movies ever made, North by Northwest, has some matte paintings in it that are real pokes to the eye, frankly. But it doesn't matter, because the audience is always with the movie.

TIM McHUGH: In the original Star Wars, there are some matte lines, and some of the contrast is off, and there are a few comps that I'm sure were raced out of the lab at the last minute, dripping wet - and I don't care in the least. I loved the movie the first 20 times I saw it; and it still holds up today.

MATT BUTLER: It is amazing what we as humans will forgive if the underlying story carries us through. Look back at early television shows - no one cared that they were crap. We will overlook so much if the plot and the story are good. We just need more directors who really know how to maximize and handle synthetic content.

CF: Do you think CG synthetic content is seen as having less craft behind it than the synthetic material generated by classic Disney animation or old-style matte paintings?

STEVE JOHNSON: I think the more people understand that what they're seeing is something that was designed on a keyboard, the less involved they are in it. Because, after a point, it all becomes math. It takes the magic away from the process. The magic of special FX is - how did they do it? But when the answer is always, 'They did it digitally,' it becomes pretty washed out and gray. You're not being tricked. You're just watching something with zeroes and ones.

TIM McHUGH: 20 years ago, we actually rubbed elbows with grips and gaffers. We went out on sets and looked through the camera and got up on a crane that was dangerously close to the power lines. I'm still coughing up the smoke from Blade Runner. The process of producing FX shots has become much more polite, now. But are we missing something because of that? When people ask if they can visit my shop, I say: 'Yeah, but you'll be really bored. We look like a typing pool.' It's a dozen people sitting around computers, staring at screens. Do movies play differently because of that?

CF: It goes back to that idea we were talking about with digital doubles and stunt sequences - it may be that the audience enjoys something more when they know the physical effort that went into it.

ROB COLEMAN: It's interesting... Some of the kids on my animation team had never seen any of Ray Harryhausen's stuff. So we screened it for them, and they were saying: 'Ah, man, that doesn't look all that great! You guys go on and on about this stuff?' And I'm like: 'Hey, listen! This was incredible! This stuff took our breath away! One guy, no assistants! Why don't you try animating something straight ahead, all day, without looking at it, and we'll all review it tomorrow in dailies. Then talk to me!'

ROBERT SKOTAK: When I saw Nightmare Before Christmas, I had to catch my breath, realizing how difficult it was to do. I was speechless. How the hell did they do this? I was awestruck by the work and dedication that went into it. So, yeah, if the Sistine Chapel had been painted with spray paint and a big stencil, but it still produced the same image, would it lose something? I think so. I think being aware of the sheer artistry of people like Ray Harryhausen - one guy sculpting, animating and setting up shots - that's extremely impressive. When you have hundreds of people and a $25 or $30 million budget, it's much harder to see the artistry in it.

RANDY COOK: You can look at Ray's stuff, and say, 'It doesn't look real' - but isn't it still a greater achievement? You have to contextualize the time in which an achievement was made. Since it is much easier to do blurred animation now, for instance, anybody can do blurred animation. Since it's much easier to set a couple of keyframes, more people can call themselves animators. I have great admiration for today's animators; but they don't necessarily have the discipline Ray had when he was sculpting his own monsters, creating his own puppets, snipping the foam off seams, doing all the lighting himself, all the design himself. So I think it's illegitimate even to make the comparison, because he wasn't doing the same thing we do today. He was doing something much more difficult.

VAN LING: I get the feeling that a lot of younger practitioners look at Harryhausen's or Willis O'Brien's work today and say: 'Oh, that was kind of quaint. That's what my Dad and Granddad thought looked real - hah hah.' But I look at it - my God, they were doing things that were phenomenal, things that you can do with a push of a button today. I think that some of today's artists, if you threw them on an island with the old equipment and said, 'Make a movie,' they would not survive.

CF: Harryhausen and O'Brien are probably the epitome of hand-crafted filmmaking - one guy's vision carried all the way through to the end. We're now at the other end of that spectrum, with many artists working on different aspects of a single shot. How do you maintain a sense of artistic ownership in that kind of assembly-line atmosphere?

STEPHANE CERETTI: Well, at Buf, we're not organized like an American company. We do not split the work. Usually, our guys do their shots all the way through. They start with tracking and matte extraction, they work on 3D, compositing, rendering, lighting - very often it is the same guy doing everything. So each shot becomes his shot, and he really has a connection to it. He wants to make it right. And he is proud of it.

PHIL TIPPETT: In our company, too, we have struggled to give the craftsmen and the artists some level of ownership over their work. So we try to organize things along those lines. We try and build everything on sequence, so that everybody has more of an understanding of how a shot works into a scene, and how that scene works into the larger fabric of the picture - so they can understand their relationship to the whole as opposed to that tiny mosaic part. That is a problem with computer graphics. The technology is so counter-intuitive and so complex and constantly changing, it's a fight. It's a war against the machine to maintain that sense of old-world craftsmanship.

VAN LING: I know freelance artists who've had offers to work at the larger facilities, and they've refused primarily because they want to be able to have that pride of ownership. That's getting tough, because the FX done today are more assembly-line. Due to the volume, it is more efficient to split up the work, have each person do his or her job, then slip it under the door into the next room. It's like putting in lug nuts at the auto assembly plant. And that's sad. Because one of the magical aspects of visual FX has been that sense of hand-crafting. It's not just assembling widgets.

CF: Let's focus on 3D animation for a bit. It's probably the sexiest aspect of digital technology, in most people's minds. To start off - what digital characters do you feel typify the state of the art of computer animation?

RICK BAKER: I was blown away by Gollum. I couldn't sleep after I saw that movie because I was so excited by that character. Yes, there had been some good CG character stuff before that. That stuff in Jurassic Park was great. But those were still dinosaurs stomping around. Gollum was a real character. That's what excited me.

JOHN VAN VLIET: Gollum was terrific. His motion matched his mass. He moved as he should move. He had the personality that was telegraphed by his motions.

RICHARD EDLUND: To me, Gollum was the most exciting visual effect to happen in the last decade - a totally believable CG character.

ALEC GILLIS: Gollum was absolutely beautiful. One of the things that impressed me was that when he moved his eyes around, you could see the rippled texture of his eyeball - which you don't usually see in computer animation. They had that down beautifully.

STEVE JOHNSON: Gollum was amazing...

STAN WINSTON: Gollum was a beautifully done thing...

PHIL TIPPETT: The psychological aspects of Gollum were really compelling and fun...

DENNIS MUREN: Gollum was a character you could engage with...

GOLLUM! GOLLUM!! GOLLUM!!!

CF: Gollum is cited by nearly everyone as the best CG character to date. To those of you who worked on LOTR - to what do you attribute Gollum's success?

RANDY COOK: I attribute a lot of it to the fact that he was the best written CG character. He was written as a star turn, a scene-stealer. There was also a lot of collaboration between Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, me, the animators and Andy Serkis to make sure that performance was just right - take after take after take to ensure nothing was too big or too small. And there was also all the sculpture and texturing and subsurface scattering and hair work and compositing. There was a lot of stuff, other than the animation, that went into the success of that character. But without his being written as an interesting character in the first place, Gollum wouldn't have been that successful. It was really the first great part to come along for a CG character.

RICHARD TAYLOR: What I appreciate is that Gollum only exists today because of the efforts made with Jar Jar Binks and other CG creatures that have gone before him. It is so easy for people to be critical of a CG character - but how incredibly ambitious and groundbreaking have been the efforts by artists around the world to bring these new and unique creatures to the screen. Our work has built on the backs of that earlier work.

JON VAN VLIET: As a character, Jar Jar Binks should be killed on sight - but, man, he played. The fact that people hated him so much, that he evoked that kind of reaction - well, that's a pretty amazing reaction to get to a digital character.

ROB COLEMAN: That's exactly what George said to me. And I was like, 'Oh, okay... but can we please not have him in the next movie?' (laughs)

CF: What are your thoughts on the state of computer animation today, both in terms of the art and the technology?

ROB COLEMAN: I'm excited about it. For a long time, we had technicians in 3D animation. There was a period where all we talked about were technical issues. 'How come the enveloping is breaking on the shoulder? Why can't we get the such and such to render?' That kind of thing never comes up in our conversations anymore. Now we have actors in 3D animation again. It is all about performance. I don't have to think about the machine at all. I can just focus my animators on acting, performance, movement, weight, storytelling, editing - all the things that were expected of traditional animators at Disney in the glory days.

JOHN VAN VLIET: I think the 'Golden Age' of computer animation is just about to start, because these guys are really maturing. I've seen some really, really good stuff.

CF: Digital monsters and creatures have some of the same pitfalls and/or advantages we talked about in regard to digital doubles. Unlike puppets of the past, they can do anything, leap any building. That would seem to make for far better movie creatures - but has it?

BEN SNOW: Yes, but it can lead to problems, as well. The Mr. Hyde character in Van Helsing was conceived as this giant, for example; and because he was CG, the idea was to have him do stuff that a guy shot on a bluescreen stage could never do. But if a 10 foot-tall character is suddenly agile and doing impossible stuff that a real person couldn't, then he loses that believability. Because it is CG, you start justifying these outrageous moves and action - and you make it more artificial. That's the danger of it. And, with Mr. Hyde, all of that outrageous movement meant that we never got as good a look at him as I would have liked.

ROBERT SKOTAK: CG creatures can jump at camera from here to there in a zip - and, in theory, that seems like it should be frightening; and when we first saw it, it was. But when you see the Morlocks in The Time Machine - and I'm not taking anything away from the people who do this stuff - but the idea of these Morlocks in broad daylight jumping up at the camera and leaping, to me, that is not disturbing. It would have been more frightening if they had moved in the shadows, so you didn't quite know what they were. It's a matter of taste and restraint. Hold back. Play your moment when the moment is right. The effect shouldn't be throwing something in your face as a tour de force, as technical prowess. It should just be the right technique to get across a very disturbingly unique idea.

CF: There seems to be a push to proceduralize character animation. Is that a good idea or not?

PADDY EASON: I'm very keen on it. But the tools don't seem to have moved on much in the last few years - and so people are still keyframing things they shouldn't be. You've got creatures and characters that need to have weight and inertia; and a lot of the time, you look at animated creatures and you just know they're keyframed, because the physical reality of momentum and weight and so on just isn't there.

MATTHEW BUTLER: Some people say, 'Keyframes are for wimps.' Others say that if it is not hand-animated, it's crap. But neither of those statements is quite right. When you have a non-fantastic shot, something that has behavior and physcial dynamics that the audience is well-educated about, then you've got to keep it dynamically real, you've got to do it procedurally. If you've got a guy falling off the back of the sinking Titanic, his center of gravity had better look right and he'd better be falling at a rate governed by the laws of physics, or else you've failed. For something like that, I don't want to hear, 'That should be keyframed,' just for puritanical reasons, or because it is 'art.' Bullshit. I respect the hell out of great character animators like Andy Jones. I'm in awe of what those people can do. But where it is more appropriate to use automated procedures, we should do that. Conversely, if you're animating a fantastical thing, go for it. You don't have to be constrained by those same concerns. The bottom line is to make it look great, whether it's done procedurally or by keyframe.

ANDY JONES: I don't see procedural animation as being really strong for hero type work. The reason you animate that stuff is the same reason you have a particular actor play a particular role. You want that 'special performance.' Procedural, to me, means that anybody could come in and do it. But it's a great shortcut for things like jiggle and flexing of muscles, for wobbling extra loose skin or fat. And if it is driven off of the character, it's that much more believable.

JOEL HYNEK: I see no reason why even hero stuff couldn't be done procedurally, at some point. You'd capture all these personality 'rules,' which then could be applied to the CG actor or creature. I'm not talking about performance capture. I'm thinking more of a procedural route, where you would create a whole set of rules. Just like in Terragen you have a set of rules for how terrain looks and where vegetation grows and whatnot, you would have a set of rules for a particular actor, developed after watching him for a while and figuring out what he does - situations where he tweaks his ear, etc. You could just study somebody and write a whole set of rules about this person's personality, and wind up with an 'actor in a box,' so to speak. Someone will do that someday.

BRIAN VAN'T HUL: I think the next step in AI will be to say, 'OK, I've got my digital character here, and I've typed in the line of the script that he needs to say.' And I'll hit a button and he'll say the line, but - 'Ah, no, it needs to be a bit more angry.' So I'll just push this little anger slider from .3 to .32. Push the button, say the line - 'Yes, that's better.' It will be just like programming particle systems.

A little break in order to post links to some VFX blogs that a friend recommended to me. 2 interesting pieces:

The Backlash Against CGI

Photo-Real and Realism in VFX