The_Hollywood_Reporter__February_07_2018

Academy
Sci-Tech
Awards
Feb. 10
Beverly
Wilshire Hotel
A VFX MASTER ISSUES A WARNING
Jonathan Erland, this year’s recipient of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, worries that
the overuse of visual effects doesn’t always serve storytellers By Carolyn Giardina
C
inema is going through massive
changes,” acknowledges visual
effects technologist Jonathan Erland, who
will receive the Gordon E. Sawyer Award,
an Oscar statuette, at the Academy’s
Scientific and Technical Awards on Feb. 10
at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “But then,
100 years ago things were technically in a
state of chaos, and it’s interesting that
100 years later they are in a state of chaos.”
The innovator himself personally
has witnessed many of those changes. The
U.K.-born Erland, 78, initially trained as an
actor — he appeared in the 1965 pilot for
TV’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. — but soon
transferred into effects work. He was part of
the team that created the Charles Eamesdesigned
audio animatronic puppet theaters
for the I.B.M. Pavilion at the 1964 New York
World’s Fair, and he also worked as a miniatures
model-builder during production of
1977’s Star Wars.
In addition to serving on the Academy’s
board of governors, he was a founding
member of the Academy Science and
Technology Council and has been honored
with two previous Sci-Tech awards.
Erland welcomes the newest technologies,
citing developing laser projectors that
enable high-dynamic-range imagery as
well as the potential for variable frame rates
that give the cinematographer a broader
range of creative tools. But
he also issues a warning —
today’s movies use too many
razzle-dazzle visual effects
Erland
too indiscriminately. “The
VFX world, which is capable
of some quite extraordinary accomplishments
in terms of putting images on the
screen, is suffering somewhat from what
I would call the commodification of VFX,” he
says. “So you see films with a lot of VFX in
which the VFX are not necessarily advancing
the storytelling. That’s a shame. It’s
more effective when a very powerful art
form like VFX is being used to enhance the
storytelling process.”
Fresh off Star
Wars in 1977,
Erland (center)
and fellow
model makers
Paul Houston
(left) and
Lorne Peterson
created
spaceships for
TV’s Space
Academy.
HOW DINOSAURS LED
TO CREATING GOLLUM
The wizardly Joe Letteri, busy with all those
Avatar sequels, will be honored with the
Visual Effects Society’s George Melies Award
King Kong. The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum. Avatar’s
Neytiri. The Planet of the Apes’ Caesar. These are just
some of the iconic digitally created characters that have
been brought to the screen with the help of Joe Letteri,
four-time Oscar winner, Weta Digital’s senior VFX supervisor
and 2018’s recipient of the Visual Effects Society’s
Georges Melies Award.
In fact, it was the opportunity to play a role in creating
the tragic Gollum that brought Letteri, 60, to Peter
Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. He had worked as a CG
artist on 1993’s Jurassic Park, where, he explains, “I became
interested in what made something like a dinosaur look
realistic — some of that was the detail that you see in the
dinosaur skin. I also started learning about cinematography
and lighting.” Seeing those creatures come alive onscreen,
he realized the next step was to use similar techniques
to create a character, and “Gollum was the
perfect opportunity to do that.”
While Gollum started with Andy Serkis’
performance capture, the challenge for Letteri
was “creating a facial performance that would
believably convey human expressions. I had
never had to work with a character that was so
humanlike, delivering a compelling performance
onscreen right next to other actors.”
His work on Avatar took it all one step further,
since performance capture was combined
with virtual production while the actors were
effectively working with digital sets, allowing
director James Cameron to shoot as if he were
filming a live-action movie. On the upcoming
Avatar sequels, the process has become “more
integrated than anything we have been able
to do in the past and is a much more realistic
representation of being in that world,” says
Letteri. “That’s great for the actors, great for the director,
and it’s great for us because we know what the film is
that we’re trying to make.”
Having set the bar more than once, Letteri admits that
it now keeps getting raised higher. “If you could do one
Gollum, you must be able to do a whole planet full,” he
notes. “Figure out how to do something new, and it quickly
expands into having to do lots of them. That’s still hard to
do; it’s still a very artist-dependent medium.” — C.G.
16th Visual
Effects
Society
Awards
Feb. 13
The Beverly
Hilton
Lifetime
Achievement
Award
Jon Favreau
THE SILENT CHILD
A deaf 4-year-old, isolated from the world
and her hearing family, is taught sign language
by a caring social worker.
WATU WOTE: ALL OF US
The Kenya-set tale follows bus passengers who
are attacked by a terrorist group demanding the
Muslim passengers identify the Christian onboard.
Letteri
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
73
FEBRUARY 7, 2018