VFX Voice - Fall 2017

VES 20TH ANNIVERSARY
Life of Pi (2012). Rhythm & Hues crafted a stunningly convincing
photoreal CG tiger, among other animals, for Ang Lee’s Life of Pi.
The effect was made even more complicated because the tiger had
to co-exist with a young boy on a lifeboat in the open ocean. The
visual effects teams also had to solve water simulations and the
tracking of characters – shot in water tanks – on the moving waves.
(Photo copyright © 2012 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.)
“My films have gone from having no visual effects to being
completely visual effects. When I started off in independent
film, ‘visual effects’ wasn’t even a line item. You were lucky to
raise barely enough money to film the script, and visual effects
were new and expensive. … The Jungle Book was truly a creative
partnership between film and visual effects. The Lion King takes
that partnership a step further, as the production and characters
are all completely virtual. By including the effects artists in every
step of the process, with meaningful collaboration, I have found
that these new capabilities open up vast storytelling opportunities.
Innovation in film has always been the dance between building
new tools to tell a particular story and then allowing these new
tools to inspire new stories that could never be told before.”
—Jon Favreau, Director
“There’s no way to quantify the importance of visual effects
in the films I’ve been involved in. VFX have become as crucial
and ubiquitous as any element. Just as one relies on a fine actor
to deliver a moving performance, or world-class DP to shoot a
film beautifully, one depends on their visual effects supervisor to
provide anything that’s necessary to help believably tell the story.
I’ve been especially lucky in that Roger Guyett is a true storyteller.
That Venn diagram is critical in a VFX supervisor. A film needs
someone who is a technical wizard, certainly, but also someone
who understands the inside-out intention of a sequence, scene
or shot. But VFX have become as critical as any element of the
making of a film.”
—J.J. Abrams, Director
Back to the Future (1985). Industrial Light & Magic model shop
supervisor Steve Gawley works on a miniature flying DeLorean for the
final scenes of Back to the Future. The film featured extensive miniature
and optical effects from ILM, which progressed into complex motioncontrol
shots, split screens, early digital wire removal and paint effects
for sequels to the Robert Zemeckis movie. (Photo copyright © 1985
Universal Studios. All rights reserved.)
“Moving image, in all its formats, has been with us no more than
130 years. Its evolution has been exponential, and along the way
there have been two great milestones – the advent of sound in the
‘20s and, since the late ‘80s, digital visual effects. These are the
‘tools of enchantment’ which allow movies to be utterly persuasive,
and to be working in a time when this digital dispensation is
flourishing is one huge privilege. ... It had been 30 years since the
last Mad Max movie and everything had changed. Although we
shot old-school live action, not one frame (in 2015’s Mad Max: Fury
Road) was left untouched by VFX. Apart from epic dust storms,
landscapes and such, we kept continuity of skies, erased the safety
harnesses of our cast and stunt performers, plus removed the
wheel tracks of previous takes. The plasticity of the image was
impossible to imagine all those years ago. Making the movie felt, in
some ways, nostalgic, yet most of it could not have been accomplished
before this era. For me it was a kind of time traveling.”
—George Miller, Director
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). Turning Brad Pitt into
an old man, and then reversing his aging, required CG characters and
de-aging effects that were unparalleled on the screen at the time. This
image shows a completely synthetic character made by Digital Domain
based on life casts of an older actor and facial motion-capture of Pitt.
(Photo copyright © 2008 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.)
“Alien was the first I got involved with visual effects, which
included a little matte painting, and all the universes done with
skilled hands and a bristle brush randomly sprinkling stars onto
black color board, and then we just photographed it. Prometheus
was my first long-range planning to capture ambitious events in
other universes, and I marveled at the artistic skill set, and the
importance of digital animation in helping to guide this story.
76 • VFXVOICE.COM FALL 2017