Boxoffice-November.2001

—
"LORD" OF ILLUSIONS
FX Master fim Rygiel Conjures Middle
Earth Creatures With CGI Hocus-Pocus
/yiu' One Ring has the power to make its wearer invisible, but
W that's nothing compared to the magic of "The Lord of the Rings"
^f effects team, which produced an army of semi-sentient Ores with
V some ordinary household pixels. "We had this program called
Massive, which basically is an artificial intelligence crowd z - epbcation program,"
Jim Rygiel, visual effects supervisor for the "LOTR" trilogy, told
BOXOFFICE in a phone interview from New Zealand, where he has been
finishing his labors on "The Fellowship of the Ring" and starting work on
the next installment, "The Two Towers."
"It's pretty amazing, to say the least. If 1 had to animate 10,000 Ores in
the old days, you would literally have to take 10,000 guys and move them
around, move their arms, and it would take you 10,000 days to do that!
With this Massive, you [utilize] motion capture, a technique where you
take reflective markers and stick them onto a person. That person then
does some acting in a room, and the computer is capturing all their
motion in real time and transposing that data into 3-D data in the computer.
You then take that data and stick it onto a computer guy, and that
computer guy will move exactly like the human.
"We have full battles where we have 10,000 Ores and 10,000 Gondorian
soldiers running toward each other, clashing in battle. Ores stabbing
Gondorians, Gondorians stabbing Ores, they're falling down, they're
dying. But the cool part is they ail do it by themselves. We don't have to
do any of it. They just know that they hate each other. In the computer. I
can't even explain — you'd have to talk to the guy that invented it."
HAL being unavailable for comment, Rygiel explained the best he
could. "Basically, this program gives the computer nodules vision and
hearing. They can see if the thing that's in front of them is an Ore or a
Gondorian. If it's a [fellow] Ore and they're catching up to it, they run
around it. If it's a Gondorian, they go into battle with it. And they also
have hearing. We had crows cawing, and they [react to] the cawing."
Massive provides each computerized character with its own height,
weight, speed and other vital statistics that inform how it will move and
act. "The first step that [the Massive programmers] do is, they build the
brains of the Ores or the Gondorians. And these brains are the messages
that say, 'Go and attack Ores. Don't attack Gondorians; attack Ores.' And
'Run at an Ore' So they can see where the Ores are, with their vision that
they have, and they can run toward the Ores. And if an Ore is running
behind a hill the Gondorian will change his direction and head for the Ore
that's running behind the hill. So they'll literally [seek] each other out."
With this Asimovian technology upon us, what are the chances of artificial
intelligence coming to bite us in the butt and lay waste to our planet?
"I don't have that pessimistic an idea," said Rygiel. "You can't say anything's
not going to happen; who the hell knows? But I think we're just
going to get so reliant on computers to do things for us.
"There's a book by [Ray] Kurzweil, and his theory is that it's not that
robots or computers will take over the world, but that we'll have things so
driven by computers and not manned by humans. For instance, you'll
have agricultural farms in Saudi Arabia that will be totally computer-controlled—you
won't have to have anybody there, and we're sitting on the
Riviera drinking our Mint juleps, and you won't know that something has
haywired and the farms are all dying.
"Then, by the time you realize it, the food supply is so dire that it'll
affect civilization. So I see it as more of that sort of thing, where computers
will more break down and go haywire than actually get the brain to
attack." Is Rygiel just trying to divert us because he's these creatures'
daddy? "Yes, you see, I control them all from New Zealand," he laughed.
"Just remember that always." Christine ]ames
BOXOFFICE: And wearing a mask of
your face!
well.
WOOD: That was pretty strange as
BOXOFFICE: How accurate was it?
WOOD: It was pretty accurate! It was
kind of ghostly. But it was also quite
cool as well, because we all got to stand
back and watch people of real Hobbit
size walk around and. essentially, they
were Hobbits. So, for us, it was kind of a
joy to watch them go through our scenes
in the wider shots, because they were the
real Hobbits and, in some ways, I think
we were the scale doubles.
BOXOFFICE: But just to see someone
looking pretty much like you— what's in
your head?
WOOD: There were a lot of strange,
new experiences for all of us in this
movie, so it was just one of the many
after a while. But it was certainly bizarre,
especially to have a picture [taken with
me and] my smaller self. I remember one
day I noticed this kind of bin, and inside
the bin— I opened it up—there were all
of the Hobbit faces. And we took a picture
of it, because it was so bizarre! It
looked so eerie! Because nothing was
filling the faces. They were just these
blank expressions.
BOXOFFICE: Sounds like one of those
snuff films. Hannibal discards or something.
Did you keep your skin?
WOOD: I didn't, actually. I don't
think they had enough for anyone to
steal a copy.
BOXOFFICE: Did you get to keep any
of your wardrobe?
WOOD: I
haven't as of yet. There are
a lot of things I still have my eye on.
Although I do have the One Ring.
BOXOFFICE: Do you? Where do you
keep the One Ring?
WOOD: My One Ring is
at the moment.
in the office
BOXOFFICE: That's not very Middle
Earthian.
WOOD: No, it's not, but I can't wear
it, for fear of losing it or someone taking
it. The thing is, if I tell everyone I
have the One Ring —which I've already
kind of done, foolishly. 1 think—then
everyone's going to want the One Ring.
So it's kept away.
BOXOKKICK: You're just in Fmdo's
position! Instead of Ringwraiths, there
are rabidfans.
44 Boxoiiki: