KMC Forums - ILM March Madness

ILM March Madness
March 28, 2005

"These meetings are getting so short now," says Visual Effects Supervisor Roger Guyett, as he finishes explaining a rough comp of a Mustafar sequence to director George Lucas. It's true; in the home stretch for ILM, the number of completed visual effects shots required per week has dwindled considerably from where we were just a few months ago.
"But these last few have some of the toughest shots," says John Knoll, fellow Episode III VFX Supervisor. For Knoll's unit of effects artists, these tough shots are mostly centered on Utapau. For Guyett's team, it's Mustafar. For Animation Supervisor Rob Coleman's team... it's over.

"That's it. The animation's done," said Coleman, on March 8th, the day of his last animation review with Lucas. "Well, except for some technical issues that might come up," he clarifies. It was the final piece of animation shown to Lucas for his sign-off. "It all comes down to this," says Coleman.

A plastic-looking gray-skinned rendition of Boss Nass -- not yet painted, not yet lit, not yet fully incorporated into the scene -- walks alongside Jar Jar Binks in a single shot. Though lacking a polished finish, the performance is there, and that's what Lucas examines. He signs off with no fanfare.

Quick, simple, and painless; if anything, de-archiving the 1999 Boss Nass model and getting him ready for a 2005 animation pipeline may have taken more effort than breathing life into his brief cameo.

But back to Guyett's comment about the brevity of these meetings. "Be careful what you wish for," grins Lucas. "There's still the DVD."

* * *

Though the review meetings have gotten shorter, the one that kicked off the month of March was exceptionally long. In February, Lucas was overseas for the ADR and scoring sessions (as reported in previous Post Notes). That didn't mean work stopped at ILM -- there were still weekly review meeting.

Lucas would connect to ILM from London, seeing HD dailies on the small screen. While he approved a lot of finished shots in this format, he was taking things on faith since the screen lacked the size to display all the details. "I'm going to trust that you guys have put in all that distressing and water stains up on the wall," he would say, for example, examining a Jedi Temple establishing shot. Such fine detail gets lost in the overseas translation.

So, when he was back at the ILM movie theater -- the proper place to be to judge the quality of finished shots -- he re-reviewed several weeks' worth of dailies to make sure they held up on the big screen. It was a fantastic showcase of hundreds of shots.

The ten coolest of the bunch, from where I was sitting:

General Grievous' spiked wheel bike in motion, churning up a rooster tail of dust as it tears through the Utapau street, with a bounding Boga-riding Obi-Wan in hot pursuit.

A true helicopter shot of Coruscant at night -- in the past, establishing shots have been slow swoops towards the targeted building. This instead was a traveling shot, flying down one of the rivers of traffic, capturing the shifting perspective of limitless avenues -- in the animatic of the scene, this was represented with a placeholder helicopter shot of some big American city. The final version captures the feel of such a shot, but on the enormous Coruscant scale.

In the showdown between Grievous and Obi-Wan, there's something we don't often see in Star Wars movies: extreme close-ups of eyes. Like a Sam Peckinpah movie, we get right in the character's face before the fight begins, and that's awfully close for someone as ugly as Grievous. The crud that fringes the sclera of Grievous' reptilian eyes is intensely detailed; Rick McCallum calls it the "sun dried tomato" look.

Grievous communicating with Darth Sidious via hologram. Lit only by the hazy blue glow of the Sith Lord's hologram, the shadows deepen in the pits and angles of Grievous' death mask.

Establishing shots of the tenth level of Utapau, high near the rim of the sinkhole. There, the Separatists have landed one of their Coreships and it clings to the cliff face.

The dark and spacious Jedi war room, located in the central spire of the Temple. This is different from the smaller amphitheater-style briefing room that was constructed practically in Sydney. This room is dominated by an enormous holographic tank that lights the principal actors in a moody blue. The actors in question, Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson, definitely have the facial contours to capture such lighting.

An over-the-shoulder shot of Kashyyyk scout trooper clones, wearing camouflaged armor, perched on an enormous branch sniping down at the incoming droids on the lagoon.

An overhead exterior shot of Padm�'s apartment , with her standing on her balcony while Anakin leans in the doorframe. Doesn't exactly sound spectacular, but what's amazing about this shot is that only the balcony and frame are practical -- we see the interior of her apartment in the adjacent windows, and it's all miniature, seamlessly integrated with the live action actors.

The base of the Senate rotunda, as the floor irises open and Palpatine's podium extends from the center, rising upwards into the massive Senate chamber. So that's how he gets up there.

The massive rake-like collecting arms on Mustafar's industrial facility wilting under the heat and stresses of the lava sprays. To see such a large structure shudder and convulse definitely captures the volatile danger of this planet's landscape.

Total number of Shots: 2,144
Finals: 2,063
Final Omits: 192
Shots Left to Go: 81