SCI FI PI

Davey Jones, first and second draft. These are the models scanned to create the final digital character in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.


The first thing you see as you drive through the Presidio’s gates is brick fence posts and a sign indicating the military heritage. Rolling green hills and parkland bring to mind (oddly enough) Sydney’s Quarantine Station, but instead of sparsely dotted relics, one sees large five-storied buildings, recantangularly horizontal, roofed like a house and covered in a regular grid of square windows, almost like giant lattice.

Red brick and white wood combine with the glass to counteract the imposingly regular and somewhat inscrutable dimensions of the buildings. Glassed in walkways connect the buildings, with manicured gardens, lawns and clean wide pathways (and the odd statue) giving a sense of well-heeled University Campus.



Just one of many walls showing the films that ILM has worked on.


Of course that changes when you enter the main entrance. The single story structure is all glass and white wood, and is protected by a fountain with a life-sized Yoda looking out at the world. Inside, to the right, a wide receptionist’s desk is flanked by a bare wall with the logos of Lucasarts, Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic. Skywalker Sound, at the time of the visit, had yet to move in.

The reception area is wide and well lit by natural light, glass looks out into a central landscaped and rolling lawn that forms part of the playground for the day care centre.

Children play among swish and safe-looking swings and monkeybars. Inside, tables that lines the walls bear memorabilia; small, fully finished maquettes and models (with an emphasis on Star Wars) and books. Comfy but not overly fashionable sofas bring to mind a ski or desert resort hotel lobby. A hint of The Overlook in the decor!



Inside the cutting edge Motion Capture Room.


On the far wall opposite the reception area stand the life sized and fully kitted out figures of Boba Fett and Darth Vader, spaced between a long row of bookshelves sparsely populated with books and Star Wars display items.

Free wall space is taken up by gigantic framed film posters. Most of these are foreign (particularly Italian and French, with a smattering of Polish and Swedish, and the occasional American), original prints and form a collection that is truly staggering to any film buff who’s ever thought to look up an antique film poster on the internet.

That’s one of the enduring memories of the endless corridors at ILM – not just poster after poster after poster, but draw-dropping iconic poster after draw-dropping iconic poster.

This is not the collection of some geeky fanboy with too much money, this is a tasteful, conoisseur’s collection with the knack for a true gem.



On the Motion Capture Stage, preparing for some digital trickery.


Throw in original Lucasfilm posters from around the world to help the mix and you’ve got a movie poster museum, in and of itself, at ILM, let alone a place of business.

Examples include an Italian Gone with the Wind, a Polish Flying High (Airplane!) poster, a French Gypsy Poster, an original Johnny Weismuller Tarzan Poster, an original Swedish Captain Blood (starring Errol Flynn). These poster are the kind of thing that a serious collector would get really serious about. And that’s not to mention the original Italian Attack of the Saucer Men poster, or Dracula, or The Searchers and so on and so on.

That’s just the posters that line the walls!



The games room is filled with awesome Lucasfilm stuff.


First stop after the foyer is the cinema. Just the one, surprisingly enough.

Not too huge, but the seats are comfy, clean and plush. The furnishing heads towards heavy draped fabric and dark wood. Elegant, without being too overly antiquey. Have a seat and watch the show (a feature on the latest in digital effects used on Iron Man and Indy IV) and whilst the picture is good, it is the sound that really hits you.

As a professional film reviewer, one gets exposed to hundreds of film-watching environments. Quite easily and without any hyperbole, this is the best sound system in the world. It is the aural equivalent of a $100 steak. You can practically bite, chew and swallow the waves of it as it cascades over you in rich, complex, enveloping textures.

It’s little wonder that Peter Jackson sat in this very cinema, editing the final sound mix to King Kong and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.



What does George Lucas drink? Tall mocha, sweet, with whipped cream.


That’s enough right there for your money's worth, but of course, there's more.

We’re off to talk to Pablo Hellman, the special effects supervisor who may not be a household name, but is still an industry giant. ILM's right hand man to director Steven Spielberg, Hellman translates and predicts the director’s vision, helping coalesce the imagination of the filmmaker with the technical wizardry of ILM.

It’s not a simple task. Far from it. A single shot or sequence lasting a few minutes or even mere seconds can take hundreds of technicians, coders and artists eight months to create, broken into teams that work on minute fragments of a gigantic, complex whole, all coming together, sometimes literally at the last minute, to form that memorable or seemingly impossible shot.



More people go now than when it was labelled 'Temple of Doom'.


Scenes from Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull were carefully constructed in the mind of Spielberg and then worked out using a range of techniques – for example, the ‘Doomtown’ sequence that features the nuclear destruction of a classic 50’s era model town involved miniatures (an entire miniature town was built, to be destroyed just the once, by a gigantic air cannon) and CGI (computer generated imagery).

The full scale town was never built – in fact, only one house and one fence was built – the entire town that Harrison Ford runs through is in fact, not real.

Conversely, a director like Jon Favreau, on Iron Man, has a lot more of a 'give and take' approach to his special effects, which means the ILM team has to not only predict a director's wishes, creating something even better than he had imagined at first, but also offering speedy alternatives to current shots and effects. Take for example, the RT (repulsor technology) that formed the basis for Iron Man's 'thrust stabilisers' (and weapons) - these were created from the painstaking layering of several alternate effects, as filmmaker and digital effects team worked towards a final result for something that wasn't quite laser, not quite rocket blast and not quite energy beam - it was bit of all three!



Reasonably successful firm.


Apart from the painstaking model building and set design (both physical and digital), it is the sheer man hours required to render and create the imagery into lifelike film images that soaks up your special effects budget. Digitally removing things like safety wires, and (heaven forbid in a life or death clifftop run!) hand rails take time. Lots of time. Creating worlds from scratch, or, as is more common, from digital pictures taken from an appropriate source, take even more time to reach a point of lifelike realism.

The hidden temple at the end of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull was created from images taken at Macchu Pichu - by a lone photographer who stayed there for a week!


ILM - from the outside.

What can be quite time consuming is the painstaking to-ing and fro-ing to make digital imagery come alive and gain the organic quality of real life – things like the ants in Indy IV were all computer generated, but made with special computer programs to insert randomness into their behaviour. Ben Burtt's weird and wonderful sounds did the rest. Adding digital camera shakes, smudges and 'mistakes' are all part o the digital artistry to create 'reality' on film.


Yoda stands guard outside the front entrance.


To get the movement of leaves and trees just right is not a question of hitting enter, it is a question of doing it until it looks real - and what looks real to an audiences eye and what is acceptable to a person who works at ILM... well, you get the drift. Ultimately, when you see something that isn't 100% right on screen, it's not because the technicians and artists didn't notice, it's because they ran out of time. Given enough time, they can do anything.

If I told you that ILM is already working on digital human characters, you probably wouldn’t be that shocked. But we’re not talking about, say, the unearthly beauty of the humans in the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie.

We’re talking about 'you don’t know they’re not real' digital people. And not, ‘oh we know they’re not real, but it’s impressive’ real, but “nooooo, that’s impossible!!!, yes Luke, I am your father” real.



A close up of Darth Vader's gloves reveals heavy usage. That is cool. All that force strangling takes its toll.

To have some idea of what the future holds for special effects in cinema, all you have to do is have a look at Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, starring Jim Carrey. In that film, there is an adorable little baby, often seen in close up.

Those close ups – not real. Not a real baby. At all. Nope. Sorry.

With this technology already in the works, one wonders just what miracles the future holds, especially with not only the conversion of cinema film projection to high definition digital, but in many cases, to 3D high definition digital.

Perhaps a lifelike and human performance from Heather Graham? Well… anything is possible.



Mandalorian Armour saves no one in the end.


END OF PART 2 Of 3


FOR PART 3 CLICK HERE!

FOR PART 1 CLICK HERE!