Masters of FX

Behind the Scenes with Geniuses of Visual and Special Effects

Ian Failes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138845961
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317540922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

It would be rare these days to find a film that did not in some way depend on the magic of visual effects, from the raging computer-generated dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, to the fantastical worlds of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, and the photoreal tiger and ocean in Ang Lee's Life of Pi. Through interviews with 16 of the leading effects pioneers from around the world (see list below), author Ian Failes explores the making of some of the most memorable film sequences ever produced, showcasing the shift from practical to digital magic with original behind-the-scenes imagery, shot breakdowns, and detailed explanations of some of the secrets behind the making of cinema's most extraordinary creations.

Visual effects artists and films discussed include:

Dennis Muren ( Star Wars: Episodes IV–VI; Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Jurassic Park; A.I. Artificial Intelligence; War of the Worlds )

Bill Westenhofer ( Babe: Pig in the City; Cats & Dogs; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Golden Compass; Life of Pi )

Joe Letteri ( The Lord of the Rings trilogy; King Kong; Avatar; Planet of the Apes; The Hobbit trilogy)

Rob Legato ( Apollo 13; Titanic; The Aviator; Hugo )

Paul Franklin ( Pitch Black; Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy; Inception; Interstellar )

Richard Edlund ( Star Wars: Episodes IV–VI; Raiders of the Lost Ark; Ghostbusters; Multiplicity );

Edson Williams ( X-Men: The Last Stand; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; The Social Network; Captain America films)

Karen Goulekas ( Godzilla; The Day After Tomorrow; 10, 000 BC; Green Lantern );

Chris Corbould ( Golden Eye; Die Another Day; Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy; Inception );

Ian Hunter ( The X-Files; The Dark Knight; The Dark Knight Rises; Inception; Interstellar )

John Rosengrant ( Terminator films; Jurassic Park; Iron Man films; Real Steel )

1 > John Bruno

John Bruno had established himself as an animator, layout artist, and story director when he saw George Lucas’ original Star Wars in 1977. “I thought, ‘Man, what do I have to do to do realistic effects like that? The simplest thing like the lightsabers were just such a visual treat and I didn’t know how they were done.” Still pondering a career in visual effects, Bruno met effects supervisor Richard Edlund while working on Heavy Metal in Montreal. Richard was giving a talk to the Canadian Film Commission about the 1980 release, The Empire Strikes Back. “I attended that seminar and introduced myself to him. I said something silly like ‘I really want to do what you do.’ I was doing a lot of complicated classic animation for a film called Heavy Metal. And there were a lot of things that applied directly to live-action special effects.”

[1] John Bruno with the “Terror Dog” puppet from Ghostbusters.

“Later that year,” adds Bruno, “I heard that Richard was looking for somebody to do animated effects on Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. I brought an effects reel from Heavy Metal to show him at MGM, where Richard was applying the final finishing touches to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark were done with cloth moving in a water tank. “He wanted better control for Poltergeist,” says Bruno, “and suggested that I come up to San Rafael, to ILM, and set up an animation department to do ectoplasm and other animated effects. I was just in heaven at ILM. Our department did Poltergeist, E.T., Star Trek II, and Return of the Jedi.”

When Edlund left ILM to form Boss Film, Bruno went with him and would contribute to films such as Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Batman Returns, Ghostbusters, and Cliffhanger. He then branched out as a freelancer visual effects supervisor, soon forming an on-going relationship with director James Cameron. The two first collaborated on The Abyss, a film that saw one of the first CG creatures ever photographically realized on film—the water pseudopod.

ILM had been crucial in showing Bruno the possibilities of CG. “In the early 1980s, Sprocket Systems, an ILM subsidiary, was creating incredible imagery with CG,” he recalls. “They really helped me understand 3D animation and lighting volumes. On my way to lunch one day, George Lucas asked Mike Pangrazio and I to go next door to Sprocket Systems and talk to Alvy Ray Smith and learn what we could about computer animation. It was just the most amazing thing I ever experienced. We were shown the ‘Genesis effect’ for Star Trek II, which was my introduction to the world of 3D. It had wire-frame animation of a planet and how to move it and light it. I was shown how to take a flat surface and pin it to a globe, rotate it, and light it. If the flat surface was water, you could roll it into the shape of a tube and it would animate in three dimensions. I remembered that. That’s how the water pseudopod from The Abyss eventually came into being.”

Bruno next helped design effects for Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, then supervised effects for True Lies, and later designed shots and the shooting methodology for Titanic. “I made two dives in Mir 2, to the Titanic wreck myself,” says Bruno, referring to an expedition with the director in 1995. Photography of the wreck and its exploration would be used in the final narrative. When Universal Pictures offered Bruno the feature film Virus to direct, Rob Legato took over visual effects supervision duties on Titanic.

Bruno would later work again with Cameron co-directing (with Stan Winston) Terminator 2 3-D: Battle Across Time, for the Universal Studios Theme Parks and again on Avatar—coming on during effects production to work with Weta Digital and other vendors on several key sequences. “I did a number of training sequences, with Neytiri teaching Avatar Jake Sully to hunt,” says Bruno.

[2] Two mutants, played by Shawn Ashmore and Aaron Stanford, battle it out using fire and ice effects in X-Men: The Last Stand.

The visual effects supervisor’s other credits include AVP: Alien vs. Predator, X-Men: The Last Stand, Rush Hour 3, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Parts 1 and 2, and Hercules. Bruno also re-teamed with Cameron as expedition director for the documentary, Deepsea Challenge 3D, which followed the director’s successful 2012 dive in a custom-made submersible to the deepest point on the planet.

Ghostbusters

Bruno was able to draw on his rich experience in animation and camera effects skills to work with effects supervisor Richard Edlund on Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984). Three sequences were stand-outs for Bruno—the final blowing up of the Gozer temple atop Central Park West; the creation of the green ghost known as Onion Head; and Mr Stay Puft, the Marshmallow Man.

Onion Head and the Marshmallow Man would become the most enduring characters from Ghostbusters. “In discussing the ‘Onion Head’ I had a long conversation with Dan Akroyd, who said it was supposed to be (his friend) John Belushi,” notes Bruno. “He said the best way to think about that character was Bluto from Animal House—he was a slob. Always. A disgusting blob.”

“He was supposed to be floating three to four feet off the ground,” adds Bruno. “The character was created by a performer, Mark Bryan Wilson, wearing a foam rubber suit that was painted lime-green and filmed in front of black cloth. No blue screen or green screen. Mark’s legs were wrapped in black duvateen so you couldn’t see them, and the suit rested above his waist. His mouth and eyes were operated by puppeteers dressed in black, sitting below and behind him. Someone else’s arm operated the tongue. The camera was locked off and we would move ‘Slimer’ around according to the shot. To make him look hyper-kinetic we shot the footage at six frames a second. It was just such crazy footage that in dailies we’d be laughing our asses off.”

The Marshmallow Man was also a man in a latex suit, played by Bill Bryan. “He was six-feet tall, his face, eyes, and brow were cable actuated from under a set built to replicate Central Park West,” explains Bruno. “As Mr Stay Puft walked, cables from his right leg ran through the set—along a slot—to a trolley with three puppeteers aboard that were pulled along as the character trundled up the street. We filmed all of the action at 72 frames per second to add weight and scale. The police cars, fire trucks, and taxi cabs were all made from Revel model car kits and were moved with fishing line.”

[1] Clouds form atop the Central Park West building as supernatural events take hold in New York City.

[2] John Bruno (far left) examines the Onion Head puppet used in Ghostbusters.

The Gozer temple explosions were realized using a miniature building. The top of the building only existed in miniature, built to scale to match a building on Central Park West. Optically composited cloud tank footage, scaled explosions, animated effects, and matte-painted backgrounds completed these illusions. “Those shots looked amazing, especially the wide shot at the end when the clouds go away and vaporize over the city, but they really came down to the wire,” remembers Bruno. “At the machine shop at Boss Film, Richard Edlund designed and had built a high-speed 65mm camera so we could actually film the destruction of the 112.5-foot tall Marshmallow Man. We also had to build a 65mm to 35mm reduction optical printer. Both of these pieces of equipment were in the works while we were filming, with only ten months to the release date.”

“I can actually recall today the Gozer temple shot numbers—GT73 and GT76,” adds Bruno. “We had to be finished on a Sunday. I’d walked into Boss Film, all the lights were on, and over the loudspeakers Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze was playing really loud. I walked into the optical department and the doors were open—they’re never open because the room has a vacuum-sealed entrance for dust. I could hear the 65mm optical printer running. There was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels lying on its side and next to the printer was a big pile of metal shavings. The mechanism for the printer was worn to a stub so it was grinding metal to metal. On a couch upstairs was our optical printer artist. He said, ‘Bruno, GT73 and GT76 are finished!’ And then he fell back to sleep. That was just two weeks before the film was released.”

The Abyss

One of the common questions asked of visual effects supervisors is “how are we going to do this effect?” That challenge was presented by James Cameron to Bruno for the water tentacle creature in the director’s deep-sea oil-rig adventure The Abyss (1989). “This pseudopod, as we called it,” says Bruno, “was a ‘sea water’ probe controlled by an alien force. It had to move and react with sensitivity to its surroundings and finally communicate by morphing into the image of the person confronting it—it had to take the form of the actors’ faces.”

“I was trying to work out how it could be done,” continues Bruno. “For Poltergeist we had a scene where Carol Anne was drawn to a TV. The screen distorts into a hand that streaks past her into the back wall of the bedroom. To do this we stop-motioned 26 acrylic hands that morphed into back-lit cell animation. I didn’t really think something like that would work. We built acrylic sculpts of the pseudopod and stop-motion replacement animation was a possibility, but a distant one.”

The storyboarded sequence was sent out for bidding to various visual effects studios. “Then,” says Bruno, “Industrial Light & Magic showed us a test. Something they’d animated looked like it could work, but nobody was 100 per cent certain. If anybody could do it, we thought it would be ILM. They had the background and the skills. In blind trust we awarded the job to them!’”

At ILM, the team—including visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, Mark Dippe, Lincoln Hu, Steve Williams, and John Knoll—would devise the methodology for bringing the water tentacle to life. To help guide the artists with a suitable look for the pseudopod, Bruno sent a rough template. “We took the background plates and we animated where the water tentacle was moving in the completed sequence,” he says.

It was also the beginning of digital compositing that promised enhanced integration of computer-generated imagery. “Dennis Muren would rely on nascent computer animation and rendering software to realize the movement and appearance of the pseudopod,” notes Bruno. “ILM created a surface water program that was an early version of RenderMan. It looked like water.

It looked like the surface of the ocean and it would animate and undulate. If you took something like that and wrapped it around a wire-frame tube, that was—in theory—the water tentacle.”

Bruno says that ILM also had to expand its proprietary morphing process to allow the photorealistic morphing of the character’s faces to the end of the water tentacle. This, and further improvements to the studio’s CG pipeline, would inform later work on James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), a film that Bruno also designed visual effects for. “Actually, the original look of the water tentacle—before it was made to look more water-like and transparent—was liquid mercury,” recalls Bruno. “On Terminator 2, Jim [Cameron] actually wanted a reflective chrome character for the T-1000 policeman, especially for that shot of him pouring himself into the left seat of a flying helicopter and telling the pilot to get out.”

Ultimately, The Abyss would become a milestone film in the history of visual effects films—partly for its CG water tentacle, but also due to the multi-vendor approach Bruno adopted in completing the film’s complicated water, miniature, stop motion, digital, and optical effects. “Before The Abyss,” he says,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Forewords
• Introduction
• 1 John Bruno
• 2 Chris Corbould
• 3 Richard Edlund
• 4 Scott Farrar
• 5 Paul Franklin
• 6 Karen Goulekas
• 7 Ian Hunter
• 8 John Knoll
• 9 Robert Legato
• 10 Joe Letteri
• 11 Dennis Muren
• 12 John Rosengrant
• 13 Phil Tippett
• 14 Douglas Trumbull
• 15 Bill Westenhofer
• 16 Edson Williams
• Glossary
• Index
• Picture Credits
• Acknowledgments