02x03 - There's No Going Back

[bunniefuu]

OKA: When I got to ILM,
it was really interesting,

because the first impression was
like, "Hmm, this is not right."

You're making Star Wars.

It's all this, like,
huge Hollywood company.

I get there and I'm expecting
all this, like, wow, you know,

all the lights and
action and everything.

It's like a dentist's office.

JIM: The street that
ILM was on is Kerner.

And Star Wars had
been a big deal.

And when George moved
the business up here,

he wanted to keep it low-key

so that people wouldn't know
what was going on and so forth.

DENNIS: We had a door that
said Kerner Optical Company.

That was just a diversion so
people wouldn't be thinking,

"I don't see Industrial Light & Magic,
or I don't see Star Wars anywhere."

They walk past and go on to somebody
else, to the auto repair shop.

KNOLL: One of the things that
I felt like I could always say

when I was touring
people around ILM was...

just by the kind of ratty rundown
nature of the building that,

"Hey, we're putting every
dollar on the screen."

It's not going into
polished brass door knobs.

It's going on screen.

[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]

I got handed a script for
Pirates of the Caribbean.

I'll admit, my first reaction
when I saw the script was,

"Oh, my God, this
can't be any good."

I read through it, and the
script was pretty good.

And so my next thought was,
"Well, what about Hal?"

HAL: And so, he slides
the script across the desk

and it says "Pirates
of the Caribbean."

And I thought, "Oh, it's a movie
based on a theme park ride."

I don't know.

♪ Yo-h*, yo-h*, a
pirate's life for me ♪

How do you make a story
out of that, right?

Strike your colors, ya
bloomin' c*ck!

Show 'em your larboard side.

It just seemed like, "Okay, you
know, this is what I get handed."

[WHISTLING]

I love making a movie
that's not supposed to work.

That's the magic. The adventure is, like,
we don't know what's going to happen.

A guy is sh**ting and poking and
firing g*ns and doing all this stuff.

Gore's whole vision for the project
was offbeat and interesting and fresh.

So, yeah, that first meeting,

I came out of there just, you know,
a couple of inches off the ground.

It's kind of the punk
rock Western, right?

I mean, pirates
are kind of rogues.

They have a code, but
they're willing to break it.

In a corrupt world, there's
no place for an honest thief.

That aspect of the film was
what initially grabbed me.

The genre was
really nonexistent,

so it was super-exciting
to come back to it.

Fire!

[CANNONS FIRING]

I had grown up watching these old
classic movies from the '40s and '50s

of wooden boat in a studio tank,
and I just loved that stuff.

Suddenly, I had this script

where I had this
opportunity to build a tank

and build some big wooden
boats and sh**t them

kind of like in the Paramount
or 20th Century Fox lot.

And I thought,
"This'll be huge fun."

Out back here, the stage guys
built about a four-foot wall.

Super, super strong.
Lined it with plastic.

We filled it with water.

So we're having pirate
ships that are 35-feet long.

And these giant sets had
to have pyro and model

and stage guys with rigs to
pull the ships across and wind.

Talk about exciting.

MAN: Fire!

[CREW CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]

KNOLL: Hey, can I show
you something here?

VERBINSKI: Yeah.

This is your geography.

VERBINSKI: John and I have
a weird psychic connection.

My father was a nuclear
physicist, and so was John's.

And we found out years
later they knew each other.

I'm usually saying
to John, like,

"I need this tool that doesn't
exist to do something."

The dynamics aren't
gonna be what you want,

and then I'm gonna be
trying to get rid of it.

You get a lot more energy
from someone like that

when he starts to
become challenged.

VERBINSKI: Action!

KNOLL: One of the big
challenges on Pirates 1

was that these
pirates are cursed,

so that when they appear in moonlight,
they're these desiccated skeletons.

And when they're out of the moonlight,
they're actors in their picture costumes.

VERBINSKI: Action!

KNOLL: And they had to transition
from live-action to CG and then back.

And so I thought, "Well, let's
just sh**t it with the actor,

"and then we'll
sh**t a clean plate,

"and I'll just paint out
what I need to paint out,

"and we'll just kind
of deal with it."

Our paint crew got to be really,
really good at doing that.

Couldn't resist, mate.

VERBINSKI: It was important to
understand what's actually happening,

particularly as Barbossa
transitions in the moonlight

when he's explaining who we are.

It was a tight shot.

And we wanted to work
on that shot first

because we just knew it
would be challenging.

And if we could nail it, the
audience would buy into the effect.

So we did a little trick

where for about a half-second after he
transforms into our CG skeleton version,

we kept his real eyes in there.

Then he does a little half-blink

and it switches to all
CG from that point on...

to kind of keep that little piece that
we knew the audience was staring at

for just a little longer over
the border from real to digital.

You best start believing in
ghost stories, Miss Turner.

You're in one.

And it really worked.

- [LAUGHS]
- [ALL LAUGHING]

Hal had started as a
stop-motion animator.

He really connected
with the work.

My upbringing, uh, the most important
part of it was on a ranch in Colorado,

about a million miles from
anything film-related.

That gave me a strong
identification with Luke Skywalker,

both in terms of the fantasy
narrative of Star Wars

and being far, far from the
bright center of the universe,

or whatever Luke
says about that.

Well, if there's a bright
center to the universe,

you're on the planet
that it's farthest from.

- [HELICOPTER WHIRRING]
- [ROARING]

[SCREAMING]

HAL: I was living on a pretty
steady diet of midnight movies,

horror, sci-fi,
fantasy, mystery...

most of the old
Universal horror films,

everything by Ray Harryhausen.

The sort of birthplace of the
idea of being an animator for me

was seeing the original
King Kong on TV.

I was outraged at Kong's
treatment in the film

and asked my mother to help me draft
a letter to the local TV station

who I held accountable
for his death.

In 1988, I started on Will Vinton
Studios doing stop-motion clay animation.

And they were blowing up

because they had gotten this
account, the California Raisins,

which were kind of a blip on
the cultural radar in the '80s.

♪ Ooh, I heard it
through the grapevine ♪

HAL: My goal was to ultimately
come down to the Bay Area

and work for ILM.

So joining ILM ultimately
was huge for me.

VERBINSKI: We were huge
fans of Ray Harryhausen

and Jason and the Argonauts.

But a lot of that stuff's
locked off. They're miming.

We didn't want to
lock off the camera.

[PIRATE GRUNTING]

GORE: We wanted to
liberate the camera.

When you've got, you know,


and you're handheld and they're all
doing this sort of choreography,

you want to make it feel
like there is no plan,

that you're literally reacting.

That guy's head's
bouncing across the floor,

that's just happening, so you
want to respond intuitively.

That was probably the
biggest challenge.

KNOLL: The only thing
that really made sense

was to go ahead and sh**t the
actors in their picture costumes

and then match move them
as closely as we could.

[BABBLING]

[GROANING]

But that process was really fraught
and difficult and error-prone.

There were times when the characters
were only going to be the skeletons

where we did do
some motion capture.

We just shot it on our stage here with
some of our animators playing the roles.

[SCREAMING]

All right. Looks good.

We were right in the
finishing months,

and Ray made one of his
period visits to ILM,

and he sat at my desk and I showed
him some of the shots from Pirates.

And he had a big
smile on his face.

He just got a big kick out
of it and really enjoyed it.

For anyone who grew
up on Ray Harryhausen,

and particularly folks who then
subsequently did stop-motion as a job,

you know, nothing
could be more perfect.

JOHNSTON: So, by the time
Revenge of the Sith came along,

you were already in
a digital pipeline.

- But George kept pushing the envelope.
- Well, yeah.

Revenge of the Sith is when we really
started to use a lot of digital doubles.

In this particular shot,

we're going to have to
create a digital Obi-Wan.

Here you can see we start
putting in the cloth sim,

so we're thinking about how the cloth
is going to be reacting to the throw.

And here's the final shot.

We now have a digital stunt
double doubling Ewan McGregor.

George was always
pushing the envelope

in terms of what he
wanted from his fights.

[LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, HUMMING]

And Revenge of the Sith had, I
think, more sword-fighting in it

than any of the other films.

[LIGHTSABER HUMMING]

Anytime you see someone
leap or jump or flip,

it's highly likely that it's
a fully digital character.

The other thing we did
was head replacements.

So there's a fight between
Palpatine and Mace Windu...

where Ian, as amazing as an actor he
is, he was like, "Guys, I can't... I..."

He could barely... You
know, he can't swordfight.

So they had a stunt
double doing it,

but then it didn't look
enough like Palpatine.

So we had a digital
head that we put on.

So that was some of the big
innovations that we were doing.

[LIGHTSABERS CRACKLING]

The scale of the
show, it kept growing.

Not unlike the Star
Wars to Empire to Jedi.

I think on Episode I, it
was just under 2,000 shots.

[ENGINE REVVING]

And then, Episode II
was a little over.

[SHOCKWAVE REVERBERATING]

And I think Episode III
was like 2,500 VFX shots.

[LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, CRACKLING]

So I was trying to work out
technique for all the sequences.

[ENGINE WHINING]

This is a very, very succinct
collage of early ideas for Mustafar.

And as we developed it more,
things got a little bit darker.

What's interesting now is that
the model shop is doing a build

that's not too dissimilar to
this, uh, at a very large scale.

PETERSON: When I was presented, you know,
"Here's the storyboards for Mustafar,"

just now I was thinking,

"Well, we've used the
word big and really big.

"And Mustafar was, like,
really, really big."

You know, and it's... We don't
quite have words for that.

LUCAS: It's meant
to look like hell.

And that's sort of where
Darth Vader comes from.

KNOLL: My CG supervisor
was pushing for,

"Hey, we can do this stuff
in computer graphics.

"We can do lava.
It'll look great."

And I had had enough experience
seeing fluid sims being done

that I was skeptical that we were going
to get enough resolution out of it,

enough detail.

Scott Farrar had done a movie
called Congo back in the mid-'90s...

where they had done
lava using Methocel.

And that was... I felt like
a pretty good way to work.

And so, I pitched doing
Mustafar as a big miniature.

That was...

I think the miniature was 40-feet
wide by about 30-feet across.

PETERSON: It was probably not
quite as long as a tennis court

and not quite as wide.

Not only was it a huge sculpture to do,
you know, out of these huge foam blocks,

but there were, you know, hundreds of them
sort of built like big building blocks.

And we built all the lava channels
with clear Plexiglass bottoms

so that you could have
this translucent Methocel

and under-light it to get
the glow coming up from them.

Yeah. That's orange.

And then, off to the side, we
had someone you couldn't see

that would be shoveling
burnt cork of various sizes,

from half-inch to
eighth-inch to two inches.

And so, the lava when it came down,
would have that black crusty thing on it.

I don't know quite
how to describe it.

It's like a ballet that
everything has to come together,

you know, to make that set work.

But it worked out
incredibly well, I thought.

George was very satisfied.

It was very gratifying for the model
shop to do something like that,

and have George so
satisfied with it.

[GRUNTING]

[LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, CRACKLING]

LUCAS: No, I think
that looks great.

Very good.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

DAVIS: At the end of Revenge
of the Sith, that was it.

We were done with the Star
Wars movies for a while.

In 2006, I got laid off

because things had gotten
really quiet at the studio.

LUCAS: We knew we were going to
build a new ILM at some point.

And the opportunity at
the Presidio came up

and I said, "Well,
let's get that."

I just wanted a beautiful
place for people to work.

KNOLL: There was no visual
effects business model

that could ever support
building a building like that.

Um, George spent a lot
of money building that

that he knew he was
never going to get back.

LUCAS: So when they saw it,

they realized that the old way of
doing things was going to be gone.

DAVIS: We were really unsure
as to what was going on.

And then they had a meeting,

and they invited us all back
to the practical division.

That's when they gave
us the announcement

that the practical division
was being sold off.

- JOHNSTON: How did that feel?
- Oh, it was heartbreaking.

I had always
imagined, you know...

once I got that job at
ILM, I would retire there.

The sale of the
model shop was...

[SIGHS] It was the
end of a great era.

There was no going back.

When I came to ILM, ILM was
pretty much the only game in town.

MORRIS: There was a
long period of time

where we dominated the
visual effects industry.

I'm Jim Morris. I'm the
general manager at ILM.

These folks are some
of the key people.

DAVIS: The plus side of ILM having
such incredibly talented people

and having so many of them...

Pretty much everywhere I work, I do
run into a couple of people from ILM.

And if you look at all the
visual effects companies

that are out there now,

the majority of them have
been started by people at ILM.

MORRIS: It's funny, back when I
started, we'd sit around saying like,

"One day, every film is going to need
the stuff we do in visual effects."

Later, it became, "Be
careful what you wish for."

You know, suddenly you've
spawned all this competition.

There had been some people doing some
simple CG in commercials and all.

We were still way ahead.

But we were in competition.

ILM was seen as sort of
like both the pinnacle,

but also sort of as the champion
you wanted to take down.

KNOLL: A lot of companies were
trying to buy their way into it,

offering people double
and triple their salaries,

which was really great for them,
but it was really hard for us.

BROMLEY: There was
some poaching going on.

And, you know, people are going to be
disgruntled from time to time, right?

JOHNSTON: Anyone ever try
to poach you away from ILM?

Yeah, I had a few people
wanting to take me.

A couple of offers
over the years.

But nothing was quite
as compelling...

as being here in this
storied facility.

JOHNSTON: Who were the major new players?
And did ILM feel the competition?

There were a number of companies
that got to be really, really good.

- [g*nshots]
- [b*ll*ts WHOOSHING]

KNOLL: Especially
in the early 2000s.

MUREN: Some of the work that
was coming out was really good.

Every year, it got
better and better.

[ROARING]

Wētā, I would say, is
our biggest competitor.

There's a lot of similarities in the way
we approach our companies and the work.

You know, part of that is Joe
Letteri running the company.

He was a senior effects supervisor
at ILM before he went to Wētā.

My title is technical director.

And I'm responsible for the way
things look up on the screen.

The reason I went, really,
was to work on Gollum,

because he was just a favorite
character of mine from the books.

My precious!

There were a couple things that
were revolutionary about Gollum.

From a believability point of view,
we needed the skin to look like skin.

So there was a technique

that we were just starting to
develop at ILM before I left

called subsurface scattering.

You don't have any friends!

Nobody likes you!

The light goes in,
scatters out the sides.

That's what allowed us to
make Gollum look so lifelike.

[GROWLS]

For achievement in
visual effects...

JADA PINKETT: And
the Oscar goes to...

Jim Rygiel, Joe Letteri, Randall
William Cook, and Alex Funke

for Lord of the Rings:
The Return of the King.

Thanks everyone at Wētā Digital
for that burst of creative energy.

It's funny, because
everything is top secret

while you're
working on the film.

And as soon as it comes out,
we just all talk about it.

So everyone knows what you did
as soon as the film comes out.

We come from such a small
community to start with

that we still maintain
these friendships.

So we all build on
each other's work.

Gollum probably made it a
little bit easier for ILM

to pitch a digital version of Davy
Jones. And they upped the game on that.

This is Davy Jones.

The first time Gore talked to John and I
about a Pirates 2 and 3 with Davy Jones,

he's like, "I've got this CG character.
He'll be in a lot of the movie.

"He's going to be super-important. I
want you guys to be thinking about that."

It was going to be his Gollum.

VERBINSKI: Early on, I
just started thinking that

what if being out on the Flying Dutchman
over time was like a curse, a disease,

that you started to kind of
grow parts of the ocean floor,

becoming the dregs of the ocean and
become part of these characters.

So that was fun.

And early on, just doing
sketches of all those characters,

it was joyous.

And then, we knew we
needed the devil himself

to sort of rule
over all of them.

And calling in a really good friend
and amazing artist, Crash McCreery,

to come in and do, like,
"Okay, let's design Davy Jones

"knowing that that's the
fundamental premise."

On Pirates 1, Geoffrey Rush gets
to play Barbossa as Barbossa,

and only transitions into a CG character
in these sort of handful of shots.

Davy Jones, he's going to be digital for,
virtually, well, every frame that he's in.

So really, the question became
less about motion capture

and more about emotion capture.

So you do this, but then this
is sort of stuck out there,

- and it seems like there's...
- Yeah, yeah. I see.

VERBINSKI: Bill Nighy was
going to be Davy Jones.

He did not want to give up
the thought behind his...

the window to the soul.

I don't want to give up
anything in his performance.

And that was sort of the challenge
to John, really, and the team.

How do we get rid of this conflict
of visual effects and actor?

You will watch this.

HICKEL: We knew we were going to
have a great actor in the role.

We wanted them to act on set face
to face with all the other actors,

and for that performance to be the
performance that's in the film.

This had to be something robust.

It had to be field portable
and low-footprint on set.

And it was Hal Hickel who asked,

"Hey, if these guys are
going to be CG all the time,

"then they can be
wearing anything, right?

"Can we put some kind of
tracking marks on them

"to make that process a little
more technically accurate

"and not as labor-intensive?"

They came back to us
with the IMocap system.

Damn you.

My working costume is a deeply
attractive grey tracksuit.

People have seen the actors,
of course, in these grey suits

with the little
reflective ba*ls on them.

We came up with a
slightly different suit.

And for one thing, it had
these bands instead of ba*ls.

And that was just about how we were
planning to track their motion.

KNOLL: Carefully designed tracking
marks that would let them recover

both position and orientation
and scale of all the joints.

And this meant that the
cameras could be operated

however they wanted
to be operated.

They could be lit any way
the DP wanted to light them.

And we could be standing in
two feet of water in a lagoon,

or we could be on the deck
of a ship in pouring rain.

Everybody could just ignore that
we were doing visual effects,

just sh**t the movie, and we'll
do what we need to do later.

VERBINSKI: Fortunately, we had Bill,
who can walk on set in a spandex outfit

covered in dots with little
polka dots on his face,

and you can show him the
picture of Davy Jones

and he's like, "Got
it. I'm that guy."

And suddenly, you feel like you're
a time-traveler in your pajamas.

He's just bringing everything.

Bill would do these amazing
things with his jaw.

He would do all this kind of
crazy... And he has no jaw.

His character has no
jaw. There's a beard.

Open the chest.
I need to see it!

The most daunting task was this
beard of 40-some tentacles.

ING: It had to be
constantly alive.

It has a mind of its own,

so as he was acting, it would twist
and twirl around like an octopus.

Coiling around each other,
colliding with each other,

moving in response
to his body motion,

getting hooked on each
other and pulling apart.

VERBINSKI: Interesting
translucency right in there.

KNOLL: Is it too much?

VERBINSKI: My only question is does it
make him a little too fragile calamari?

So, extensive conversations
with our team about,

no, here he's agitated,
or here he's coy,

or here it's curling, at
that moment he's thinking.

There was no way we could
possibly do it by hand.

We would still be making the
film today if we tried that.

There had to be some kind of an
automatic procedural way to do that

so that the beard could automatically
be doing that in the shot

while the animators layered
on the facial animation

and the body animation.

KNOLL: So, you know, I think we've
made a lot of improvements to it.

VERBINSKI: Is it going soft
before the rack to Orlando?

HICKEL: So there's no plan B.

The simulation engine we were
creating to run his beard had to work.

And it provided a lot of sleepless nights
for me, literally, until it did work.

And then, once it worked,
it was like magic.

It worked perfectly.

That was sort of next level,

all those things combined to feel
like there's nothing CG about it.

You know, it feels like he's
literally that character.

Damn you, Jack Sparrow!

NAOMI WATTS: And
the Oscar goes to...

John Knoll, Hal Hickel,
Charles Gibson, and Allen Hall

for The Pirates
of the Caribbean.

HAL: Pirates 2 came along
at a really interesting time

in terms of movies
and visual effects,

because we were in
sort of early 2000s

and there was kind of a malaise

in terms of audience
reaction to visual effects.

Almost a backlash, maybe.

The rapid...

Super-rapid expansion
of possibilities

in terms of visual effects was

in a way kind of responsible for making
audiences lose their sense of wonder,

which we really
kind of depend on.

They stopped asking,
like, "How is it done?"

They'd see it and say, "They
can do anything nowadays.

"They do it with a computer."

That was the project that showed me how
we get an audience to say wow again.

They were like, "I don't know
what I'm seeing there. I don't...

"Is that makeup? That can't
be makeup. What is that?"

And that gave them that
little spark of wonder back.

Thanks very much.

HICKEL: It kind of
renewed my faith

that as filmmakers and
visual effects artists,

we could get audiences
to just go, "Wow."

- [SHOUTING]
- [SCREAMING]

VERBINSKI: By the time we
were doing the third movie,

there's the burden of how do
you one-up the previous film?

We want to launch in. Take
turns, vying for close-up. Bam.

- MAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And then, kaboom.

We needed to go out of

what I'd call the trilogy
with something extraordinary.

Probably the sky first,

and then a kind of first strike
of lightning hits the sea and...

And then it starts to move.

So the two ships in the
maelstrom felt like,

okay, you could walk away
saying, "Yeah, top that."

It'd be great to see
it framed like that.

But you saw these
guys jumping off...

VERBINSKI: They're
going that way?

VERBINSKI: The challenges were, you know,
that sort of location-based filmmaking

that we had embraced with the first
two, we couldn't embrace any longer.

There's no way we could
actually be at sea for that.

KNOLL: This is the biggest blue
screen setup I've ever seen.

And I think this may be the
largest blue screen ever.

Got a lot of pixels to fill in.

But I'm not a big
fan of CG water.

Water on that scale
and how it behaves,

we're still fundamentally
building it as three or more basic

completely different
particle simulations.

Only the problem I have
with water sims is,

you can get a big mass of water, but
when it breaks, it turns to foam.

And then the foam
turns to spray.

And it always looks
like there's stitches.

It's something that's
inherently not real.

And I think that was the
one request that broke John,

was like, "Hey, can
you make me a water sim

"that will be massive, but
also break and become foam

"and then the foam will
become spray all in one sim?"

It was much harder than
I expected it to be.

We had done pretty good fluid surface
simulations on previous projects

and I thought, "Okay,
well, if we can do

"a decent-looking patch
of water in the foreground

"and we can keep repeating
that into the distance,

"it's going to fade off
into a big whirlpool shape

"and rain and thunder
and splashes."

And as soon as I saw the
first render of that idea,

I thought it looked terrible.

Plan B was I needed to
do the whirlpool itself

as the biggest simulation
I could afford to do,

and then do all of that fine detail,
procedural detail in the foreground.

Ay-yi-yi-yi-yi.

KNOLL: Gore hated it.

It was like a toilet bowl.

It was like the ships
felt like a miniature.

It felt completely off.

Your brain's just going,
"This isn't real."

Uh... [CHUCKLES]

Then we needed a plan C.

The ship that takes the
inside lane is moving faster.

Those were some dark days for me
because the clock was ticking.

It was a very compressed
post, and a lot of shots.

They are trying to
make it look plausible.

JOHNSTON: John said you
pushed him pretty hard.

Yeah. And he loves it.

He responds to that challenge.

So I realized that the only
part that I really cared about

was the surface of the water.

So what if we took
the whole maelstrom

and we flattened it so
it was like a pancake?

And then, when we were
done with the sim,

we would transform it back
into that funnel shape.

And that finally got us to a place
where we were getting enough detail

and resolution out of it and it
looked big enough for Gore's taste.

Fire!

KNOLL: That's
what's in the movie.

That was plan C.

It was done with that looming deadline
and a lot of sleepless nights.

Just last thing we're working on

are little tiny water
splashes on a bunch of those.

Wow, that's fantastic, John.

It's a friendship driven
out of a love for adventure.

We've never been there before.
Let's go there together.

[RUMBLING]

An effect isn't just spectacle.

If it's spectacle, you don't sit
like this drawn into the screen,

sucked into the experience.

You sit back and you...

And there's a huge aesthetic distance
between the audience and the film,

because the effect is
pushing the audience away

because it's just maybe too
big, too much to consume,

to much for your eye to
be able to sort it out

into something that
makes emotional sense.

And so, every single special
effect for me, anyway,

in my films needs to make
some sort of emotional sense.

I think I got a call from Steven one day
saying he wants to do w*r of the Worlds.

- [LASER BLASTING]
- [expl*si*n]

MUREN: And I had seen the
original movie when it came out,

and I was like six or eight and
just thought it was amazing.

So, okay.

And I remember one of the challenges
of w*r of the Worlds was that

Steven had thrown
down the gauntlet

and said, "We'll make this
film in eight months."

You know, a huge film like this,

which should really be
about a year and a half,

he's like, "Let's do
it in eight months."

I remember when I
heard that, I was like,

"Okay, wow, the clock is
ticking, we've got to run."

We started sh**ting in December, and
it was gonna be out in June or July.

We were sh**ting in the
cold on the Hudson River

at five degrees in the middle of
the night for a ferry that sinks.

And then we'd be sh**ting
in the daytime in New York

and the sun would be going down
behind the buildings at 4:00 p.m.,

so we could only sh**t
between 8:00 and 4:00.

So everything was against us.

But all those things
also made people alert

and made them be, I
think, more creative.

BOLTE: The great thing in the
design of w*r of the Worlds was

that the camera was always
kept where Tom Cruise was

so that you as an
audience member

had the sense that you
were the protagonist,

that these things were happening
to you and in front of you.

And the camera wouldn't go to
a place where you couldn't be.

And this was because of the two of
these master filmmakers working together

to work out every single shot.

In the front seat.

- Whose car is this?
- Just get in.

MUREN: There's a scene
in w*r of the Worlds

where Tom Cruise is racing
away from the w*r machines

that are starting to blow
up the area around him,

and there's this big
bridge in the background.

And it was shot in a
real residential area.

And Steven wanted the bridge to
be hit from behind by explosions

and kind of curl up like a scorpion
tail, which is a neat idea.

And I kind of tried
it, and I thought,

"You know, it looks kind
of manmade and fake-y,

"but what if we try it in sections,
which is the way bridges are really made.

"Between pylons would be the beam, and
it could kind of bend and stay there.

"Then the next one would ratchet
up. And is that good for you?"

He said, "Yeah, that'll work."

The bridge is now a CG bridge.

The houses are
models that are made

that we're sort of combining
into the real background there

and covering up the real
house that's been undisturbed.

Falling from the bridge is this
tanker truck that is a model,

probably about four
or five feet long.

We shot it outdoors in Marin
in front of the blue screen,

just dropping it down,
and then it explodes,

which is a couple
of other elements.

So the thing is made up of

a bunch of separate pieces
of elements put together,

and it looks like this one continuous shot
with all these different things going on.

[EXPLOSIONS]

MAN: Next shot! Good!

It looked really
great on the monitor.

Dennis is terrific
in the sense that

he can see right through
the clarity of designs

and get to the heart of it.

So you can try to sell
him with all this bling,

but it's like, "Is this
design real, does it work?"

MUREN: There's a shot in there
that the camera is moving

all around the minivan

that Tom is driving
with his family.

It was all shot indoors in
front of the blue screen.

And it was made up of four
or five different sections

that the parts of the car
could be pulled away, the van,

and then you would
switch to part two,

and then you would go as far
as you could and then stop.

And there would be a transition
of some sort, an invisible wipe.

Like a...

You know, a pillar
would go by in the car,

and that could be where it switches
from one moment to another.

For the backgrounds,
which is the freeway,

all the cars stuck on the freeway,
and he's driving through it,

that was shot actually on a real location
where they blocked the freeway off.

And Pablo Helman, who
was my associate on that,

he would have, like, six or
eight cameras on the top of it

sh**ting in every direction, making
this big tile of 360 degrees.

And when you put
all those together,

you had a very seamless
transition moving all around

for this two-and-a-half minute
dialogue scene of the actors

as though you're, like,
magically moving through the car.

- Who is attacking us?
- Rachel.

Rachel, you've got
to keep it down.

Rachel. Rachel. Shut up, Rachel!

- You are freaking her out!
- Look, I'm driving!

Do something!

w*r of the Worlds, I think,
was one of ILM's, actually,

a kind of a high
watermark for the company,

and a film that didn't get
a whole lot of attention.

But when I look at that film,

I was astonished at how
much they were able to do

with a very little budget.

That was my favorite film.

- [DEEP RUMBLE]
- [PEOPLE SCREAMING]

MUREN: It's everything
I liked to do.

Spectacle.

It's long takes.

It's impossible.

And the sequence in Newark

when the pod comes out of the
ground and all that stuff...

it was terrific.

Tom is running and the people
are running along with him

getting hit by these blasts and
they were becoming, like, ash.

And I had the clothes
go up like angels...

just so there's this subtext
going on with it, you know?

And it's all these
amazing shots.

And after that, I said, "I can't do
any better than this," so I sort of...

[CHUCKLING] That's kind of about
the last show I officially did.

We had made some
conservative decisions

in the past.

You know, as an example,
we turned down Avatar

after many, many
months of bidding it

and working on the tests
that got it greenlit.

You not fear.

You strong heart.

Our leadership at the
time when faced with,

"Okay, this could be
unachievable, it's so huge,"

they were not willing
to take that risk.

But we had a great relationship
with Gore Verbinski.

And, you know, he had
this incredible idea.

Rango.

BOLTE: Rango was a
huge undertaking.

It was the first digital
feature that ILM ever did.

And it was really scary.

VERBINSKI: I don't know how
to make an animated movie.

I mean, I know how to put 2,000
shots together and tell a story.

And we certainly have
made visual effects shots

that are fully computer-generated.
We've made lots of those.

[SQUAWKS]

[GROANS]

I wanted to work with ILM

just because I wanted to take everything
that we'd learned from Davy Jones

and, you know, Maya and
Kevin and Hal and the team,

like, everybody that we had
become tight with in that process.

It could have been a
disaster, financially.

This was an example of between John Knoll
and Hal Hickel and Jacqui Lopez and me

and a number of other people
really pushing the company to say,

"You know what, this
is going to be amazing

"and we want to
be a part of it."

ING: This was a
new thing, right?

Rango was completely
an animated feature.

And so, super-excited
to work on this project.

VERBINSKI: I think when you're
making an animated movie,

it's not sort of fly-it-as-you-build-it
approach, you know?

So the story reel
became very important.

And to afford that,
we were at my house.

Bring the flux...

Flux capacitors... Are
they phasing right now?

- Are they phasing?
- Yeah, they're phasing.

VERBINSKI: Seven artists
over a period of 18 months.

We had a microphone,
we had a Mac,

and we were just basically drawing
every frame of that narrative

and building the animatic so that
it was really execution-specific.

There was a huge change in ILM

from "shot-based" to kind of,
"Hey, we're telling a story."

With typical visual effects,

you're working on this
one shot out of context.

"I'm making this thing. I
don't know where it fits."

But on Rango, it's like, "No,
stop thinking like that."

Like, fundamentally change
that way of thinking.

We are... "What's the scene?"

Gore wanted to foster a little
more family feeling on Rango.

He wanted to get to know the artists
and invite them in as individuals

into this filmmaking
process and family.

In other words, make them all feel like,
"Hey, we're making a movie together."

So we had spent all this
time discussing the scene

and where is the
character coming from,

where are they going to,
where have they been,

you know, so that every character
who walks into a bar has a backstory.

Uh, and so, that became, I think,
really joyous for the animators.

They became a family.

Basically, at that point,
they are my actors.

And until the people of Andromeda


I will not sell my ranch!

- What?
- What are you doing?

What? What are you doing?

And there was just so much joy.

You could see kind of like this great
release of, "We never get to do this."

You know, like...

"We're telling the whole story."

HICKEL: Most of our
other departments

had been for years really focused
on doing things with realism.

And fortunately, this
project of Gore's

kind of coupled
animated characters

but with a world that,
while it was stylized,

it had a very
tactile, real feel.

So if something was made of wood,
it was very realistic-looking wood.

If it was rusty iron, it was
realistic-looking rusty iron.

It wasn't some stylized,
painted version of that.

I came on to do the
look development

and shepherd through basically
the whole town of Dirt,

where all of these little
critters live out in the desert.

So, really, what came
to us on the team was

all of the reference filtering
through Tim Alexander and folks.

And I remember them all telling
us, "There Will Be Blood.

"There Will Be Blood. Use
that as your reference."

Super-hot baking sun.

High noon coming down
on the characters.

It's just like everything
had to look parched.

The landscape, the buildings, the
characters, everybody's parched.

So we had to build all
that detail into this town

and make it super-unique to
Gore and his team's vision.

But we kept adding
more and more detail,

so it started becoming unwieldy,

and layout artists,
animators, technical directors

couldn't work with it anymore.

So, a super-emergency in
the middle of the show.

We had to really step back

and think about ways we
could make it more modular

so that you could turn
things on and off,

have levels of detail of
each model of the building,

bake out certain aspects of
the geometry and the texture

so that it would render.

The vocal recording process
was really unusual on Rango.

Gore, coming from live-action,
did not want to have his actors

just one by one recording
separately at a little lectern.

He wanted to have them ensemble
and recording together.

And even...

We even had props and cameras on
set to kind of sh**t the scenes.

And you would get
those happy accidents

and people stepping on each
other's lines and so forth.

- That was really good!
- It was... No, I'm choking.

- Oh. Oh, you do...
- [CHUCKLING]

You actually ate the b*llet.

I... I ate my prop.

HAL: So that Gore
can really get...

he can work within the way
he's used to working with them.

And that process was
dubbed emotion capture,

which a lot of people
have asked about.

Emotion capture was
really just a jokey name

for this whole goofy
thing of having the actors

on this empty stage in their
cowboy costumes acting like idiots.

May I present

Madam Lupone's Terpsichorean
Troupe of Traveling Thespians!

- What is that?
- I think they's thespians.

Thespians?

HICKEL: It wasn't about
reinventing feature animation.

It was about working the way
he was comfortable working

and getting that
kind of live feel.

Not that we broke every rule,

but we were certainly more of a hybrid
visual effects model animated movie.

ING: I love everything
I worked on in Rango.

It wasn't a sort of
cookie-cutter animated feature.

Uh, it was this weird blend
of a photorealistic style

blended with a very
stylized look and feel.

HICKEL: It didn't look like
Pixar, Disney feature animation,

didn't look like Illumination,

didn't look like DreamWorks.

It was its own animal
in every regard.

The animators at ILM
always had that ability,

but didn't always
have the opportunity.

And I think, really, that's the
magic of Industrial Light & Magic.

We're all storytellers.

ROSE DUIGNAN: This used
to be the original ILM.

Magic was made here.

When George moved
everybody to the Presidio,

all the model shop
people stayed.

We continued to work
for ILM and many others.

We did Pirates of the Caribbean,
Transformers, we did a ton of stuff.

But the revenues dropped

from 20 million to 10
million to 5 million.

That's when I just said, "Guys,
it's over. It's really over."

Lots of memories on this stage.

This is where we
shot so much stuff.

It was so fun.

And now we're organizing
for the final goodbye party.

[INDISTINCT CHATTER]

Good to see you.

I said something to George
one time, and it was right...

[INDISTINCT CONVERSATION]

[CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]

In 1978, the art department
for Empire Strikes Back

was over in San Anselmo.

And one day, this
wooden crate arrived.

We opened it up, and it was the
white plastic Boba Fett suit

that Ralph and I had been
working on designing.

I went to Jane Bay

and I said, "I need a
place to paint this thing."

And she handed me a set of keys.

She said, "George has just leased a
building in San Rafael at 3160 Kerner.

"It's empty. You can
have any room you want."

The other day...
Friday, actually,

we shot our last interview for the
Light & Magic Season 2 documentary

in this very stage right there.

And I think that it's
time to say goodbye.

Uh, the work that was done
here by all of you people

and many who came before you...

will live forever

on movie screens and TV
screens till the end of time.

And this is indeed
hallowed ground.

So I would just like to say...

ILM Kerner, it's been
a pleasure to know you.

Thank you.

[CHEERING AND APPLAUDING]

You know, it's in
our DNA. It truly is.

I think that's
the special sauce.

We strive to do things better.

We want to change and evolve,

whether it's in how
we do the work...

or how we manage the work...

or how we engage
with our talent.

In any kind of way, we
want to push the envelope.

George was always pushing ILM.

I think at one point, he said, "ILM
was created to do the impossible."

And we are continually
asked to the impossible.

We took a lot of pride in that.

So there was definitely
a cultural thing

that was very ingrained and
still is ingrained in us forever.

It's funny, because I know most
people will think George Lucas,

Star Wars, right?

And yes, that's true. Definitely.
He's the creator of Star Wars.

He's the creator of Indiana Jones.
Those are the obvious things.

But I think in the industry,

he's going to go down
more as an innovator.

You know, you see THX sound.

He revolutionized audio
in motion pictures.

You look at nonlinear
editing... Avid.

We turn it sideways.

George Lucas was behind that.

And then you have...

Pixar was born from
Industrial Light & Magic.

To infinity and beyond!

LEWIN: Now there's a lot of talk,
obviously, about AI and real-time.

I'm curious to see the extent to which
those technologies really move the needle.

It's hard to imagine that AI won't
play a massive role in digital effects.

It's going to make a lot
of work get approached

in completely different ways than
we've ever approached them before.

But I never feel like there's some
technology or some breakthrough

that's going to
dramatically change...

what we have that's so special
at ILM, which is the people.


and was instantly made to feel welcome.

Part of an amazing and formidable group
of the most talented people around.

If I carefully observed how they worked,
paid attention to what they were doing,

asked the right questions,

I thought I might get to a place where
I could say that I belonged here.

And to everybody who
helped build this place

and make the incredible
art produced here,

a deep and sincere thank
you for all you did

and for welcoming me to
be a small part of that.

[CHEERING]

I attended just the greatest school
ever working for some of these folks.

And my way of paying back

is to try and do the same
thing for the next generation,

with the hope that they can
go to much higher heights

than I ever did.