INTERVIEW:
Question 1
How did you start with your work ?
Answer
I always had an interest in the hobby of photography, but of course I was always
interested in the technical work as well. I studied computer science and film at
university and began working in animation first as a programmer and software engineer,
then as an animator. Over the years I kept developing my skills and worked my way up
through the ranks of special effects. Now Iím effects supervisor. As an effect
supervisor, Iíve done many things besides digital effects: Iíve worked with the digital
side but also animatronics and made models and miniatures in every scale in Starship
Troupers, a film Iíve just completed, and as well as with pyrotechnics, opticals, the
way we used to composite film before it was all taken over by digital. So Iíve combined a
formal education with on-the-job training to get to where I am today.
Question 2
In your last job you worked with a staff of 250 people. Can you explain how you manage to
work with all these people?
Answer
I think the Starship crew was about 250 people. When you get a crew that size itís more
like a traditional movie crew. I am the supervisor, which is the equivalent of the
director, and I have a producer, which is like a film producer, and we work together to
keep the whole crew organised. In each department such as animation or modelling or
compositing or 3-D we have our heads of the department, our supervisors, so Iíll have a
composting supervisor, a CG supervisor, a models supervisor, and Iíll have my own
director of photography. Those are my key people much like a traditional movie crew with
the director of photography, a gaffer, a key grip - we have a parallel structure. Each of
my key individuals then has their own crew who I know and I work with and I also help
guide. But I very much depend on the handful of people who work very closely with me to
help guide the people below that. Only by layering all the groups of people can you get
control over such a big crew. With a crew that large my most important job is to make sure
that thereís a consistency of vision, that what I talk about with the director - what we
want to do, how we want to make it, in this case, ěspace feelî - that that message is
communicated to the entire crew, and then each of my department heads helps to make sure
that everything is technically correct and keeps relating to the vision that we have set
out.
Question 3
Iíve read that in Los Angeles big companies like Boss Film have closed down even
though they worked on major films. How can this happen?
Answer
Visual effects has never been a business that made a lot of money. In the
best of times, the best companies only make a small two, three, at very best, ten percent
profit. Itís a very low-margin industry. Because of that itís very easy to make mistakes
that will put you out of business. Last year was one of the most spectacular years in the
visual effects industry ever. There were seemingly endless summer blockbusters. You had
the volcano movies, you had Men in Black, you had Titanic, Starship
Troupers. In America last summer every week there was another big summer film, all
with many, many special effects. And each film got larger. So last year it was very hard
to find people. Almost anyone who had skills was getting hired because we needed so many
people. That was not a pace that the industry could really withstand. So next year the
number of films appears to be a little bit smaller. Still bigger than it was five years
ago, but smaller than last summer because last summer is just not achievable again this
summer. Therefore, some companies are evaluating how many people they need to go into next
year. As you said, Boss Film closed down after fifteen years of operation, partly because
Richard Edlin, who ran it, was tired of running a business, but also because it is a very
difficult time in the industry. But they had a successful run and theyíre going out on
some good notes like Air Force One. Then other companies such as ourselves in the
digital domain have also laid off some people because we hired and, just like a film crew,
you hire a lot of people to work on the film and when the filmís over you lay off the
people who were hired on temporary contracts.
Question 4
Do you think there is a chance for small companies and a few people with creativity to
work in this business?
Answer
Oh, very much so. First of all, thereís always room for people with a lot of creativity
and a lot of talent. Those people always work. The smaller companies also do very well.
Very small companies find a way of making money because thereís always people who are
looking for it a little cheaper but yet with the creativity. The problem is that when you
try to do the large films your costs go up much quicker. Small creative companies and
creative people always find work. In fact the smaller companies are the ones that are
finding it possible to make a profit, because the work that they do now can almost be done
with off-the-shelf software and hardware; they donít have the risk that the large company
has or as many employees. So itís much easy to tide over the small dips on the market,
whereas when my company hires 100 extra employees, thatís a large amount in salaries
every week and if we donít have work for a few weeks, itís very costly. A small company
can obviously ride that out a little better. And the market is so large for broadcast
spots, commercials, corporate work and a very good profit in those areas.
Question 5
In the United States they make a lot of action movies so the demand for these special
effects is very different from Europe. What do you think about European, and particularly
Italian, creativity in this area?
Answer
In America thereís always the two sides of the business. One is the big Hollywood
blockbuster, the summer movie spectacular, of which Iíve just completed one, and then
there is the smaller film which may not be made exactly in Hollywood but it is aligned
with Hollywood, such as Babe. So even within our industry the market is split.
Because the technology is more affordable and more people can do it, the smaller films,
even in the United States, are getting effects in them. Personally, I got into the
industry because I liked making pictures, but I know that without a story I have nowhere
to hang my pictures. And I have found that some of the directors Iíve worked with and
liked the best have been neither American or European. Chris Nunan, who directed Babe,
is Australian. I had the opportunity last year to be over in Paris, hopefully was going to
do a movie with Roman Polanski, and Paul Verhoven just directed Robocop. The
European model is much more one of the auteur. For me to be able to work one-on-one
with the director is a very rewarding process because of their singularity of vision. On
the technical side, I think here in Europe the director with a vision can also find a
company, and particularly the smaller ones, that can do little pieces of work here or
there. It is impossible for a small company of five people to do the same kind of work
that we do for the summer blockbusters, but you donít make those. So it is a good fit
between the size of the companies and the kind of work. I think itís a good synergy and
should be possible for more directors to tell more personal stories. The marriage here is
potentially very good. You have small companies who can be very creative and directors who
are trying to make smaller and more intimate movies which fit the size. You donít need to
do the big blockbuster. A film with a strong vision doesnít need big Hollywood-style
special effects to make it successful.. As the cost of the effects get smaller and
smaller, the film that the effects can be applied in can also be smaller. Nobody would
have tried to make Babe five years earlier because it would have cost far too much
for a story on that scale. But in the meantime the costs came down to a point where a nice
story could be told with special effects helping, rather than being the classic summer
extravaganza.
Question 6
Do you think that effects really contribute to the success of a film?
Answer
I think the short answer is no. Effects donít make a good movie; thatís not why I do it.
I enjoy making big images and great pictures, but what we find is that if there is no
story, no one likes the effects. So my job, just like any part of the film-making process,
is tied to the kinds of stories that are being told. I find that the best stories are told
by the strongest directors. So Iím a strong believer in an individual who wants to tell a
story and who can unite a whole crew around that vision. That makes my work look better
and makes for a better film. You can go to see a movie to see lots of things blow up, but
we can blow up anything these days. Most people have seen something huge blow up, so itís
hard to just entertain with special effects alone. Hopefully itís a synergy between the
two.
Question 7
You won in Oscar with Babe. Can you tell us how you directed the animals?
Answer
Chris Nunan, the director, and Kenny Miller of the company that produced the film called
me and said they were interested in making a film in Australia with 250 special effects
shots, which at the time was fantastic, and I thought they must be crazy. But I went to
Australia and spoke with Chris Nunan and he explained the vision of the film. It was very
simple: he wanted to make a film that was not just aimed at little kids, and he wanted to
use camera angles and shots of the animals that were the same as you would use on humans
and, therefore, the film would be comfortable. From that premise all our work followed. We
did six months of preparation in the design and storyboards, the kinds of shots we wanted
to do. We had another six months waiting for the animatronics, which were done by Jim
Hendersonís Creature Shop, to be created. I then went to Australia and we shot with the
animals for six more months As everyone knows, shooting animals is very time-consuming,
there are many takes and you never know exactly what you are going to get, although Carl
Lewis Miller, who is the animal trainer, was quite brilliant in getting the animals to do
all sorts of tricks and going from one point to another as they had to in the story. All
that was cut together in Avid. We took all the film takes and put them all in the Avid,
selected them against the voices. So we had the dialogue of the film - what we call the
radio play - and could listen to the whole film. We would play that back and look at the
images and select the images that worked with the dialogue. Those images werenít
animatronic because, of course, the animatronic work was complete. Then the film was sent
off to Rhythmíní Hues who actually did our visual effects. The clips that would go with
the dialogue were sent to them and they put the mouths on. After shooting was complete, I
went back to the United States and worked for another nine months on the post-production
and supervising the work there, talking to the director daily about what he wanted, how we
would change things to keep the flow of the story. I worked on the project for almost
three years. It was a very long process between planning, building, shooting, and then
post-production.
Question 8
Can you tell us something about your latest movie?
Answer
Starship Troupers was my last film and is the largest film Iíve ever worked on, I
think the largest film most of the people who were on it had ever worked on. My crew and
Sunny Pictures Imageworks did the space special effects and all the flying ships. We had a
crew of about 250 people. Boss Films had a few shots, ILM had a few shots, and then Phil
Tippets Studios did the animation of the bugs, which was also another 200 shots, so
altogether there are over 500 special effects shots in the film. Probably about seven
companies in total worked on it; itís massive. Our work in particular has digital effects
for space; some of the smaller spaceships are digital, then we have many, many model
spaceships, so we had everything from 22-inch models to 18-foot models which represented
spaceships of up to a kilometre in length. All of these were combined with traditional
pyrotechnics, miniature explosions, brought into the computer with blue screen
photography, green screen photography, live action plates, the images that we combined
with the spaceships, all interwoven into an epic space battle. And we had two main
sequences where we have spaceships avoiding and flying through each other, each reaching a
culmination at a given moment of the sequences, but a very intricate flow of cause and
effect. It is like choreographing a car chase with supertankers. So everything is very
large in numbers and flows but it does so in a very choreographed and action-oriented way.
The overall vision that we were trying to achieve is what I would call "epic
claustrophobia", where you have wide-open vistas and huge, grand expanse of space,
but you are always closed into the middle of the battle. So even though you can see
forever, you feel immersed in what is going on. Itís, as I said, a huge film, and itís
what Paul Verhoven, the director, always wanted to make. Itís essentially a science
fiction version of a 1940s war film. So itís very visceral, very real, and gives you a
lot of anxiety from it being so boxed in the middle of all the events.
Question 9
What do you think is the future of digital production?
Answer
I think the future is here for digital production. The industry has matured from when I
began, when it was more of an experiment. Now thereís no question; digital is here to
stay. What the maturity has also taught the people in the digital industry is that there
is a lot to learn and to respect from the traditional crafts. So now youíre seeing a
marriage of the old and the new. The way weíve been able to combine digital technology
with model photography or with traditional photography is creating a new scope of work.
Digital technology is also allowing the smaller company to do more and more things. As the
software thatís available becomes cheaper and more stable, more and more small companies
with a couple of talented people can do it. The biggest thing that you see as the
technology matures is that it does come back to talent. Everyone can go out and buy as
SGI, everyone can go out and buy Softimage or Alias or Wavefront; even now people can run
3-D Studio on a PC. But it still comes down to the people, the artistic and creative
talent that can take those tools and make something of them. Thatís where the future
lies, with the people with the talent creating new and interesting visions that other
people are interested in seeing.
Question 10
Do you think that artists that use new technology will be the artists of the future or do
you think that art is different from technology?
Answer
I think what you saw in the beginning of computer graphics was the technological artist.
Many of them are fine artists, many people in the field are better technicians. As the
tools become friendlier, youíll see many more pure artists move in. I think it will
become a combination of the two, the technical artists will always be pushing the limit
much as an expert in painting has the correct methodology for mixing paints and coming up
with the new technique of applying it. You always have the artist on the edge, the artist
pushing the technology. Then you have the other artists who are just painters and they do
quite fine and beautiful art on their own. The two are interrelated but separate. And
youíll see the best of both. Luckily, I hope the infatuation with the pure technology
will fade away so that it will become evaluated much more on the reaction people get to
the work rather than how it is done.
Question 11
Once, heroes came from cinema, from fashion. Now there are a lot of heroes that come from
the Internet, from the digital world - for instance Jessica Rabbit - or other heroines
from the Internet. What do you think of this?
Answer
Itís hard to say. Definitely the digital technology and all technologies are being
applied to the Internet , to CD-ROMs, to multimedia. I think that itís a very new
technology that has not found its method of story-telling. The classic ways of telling
stories were first literature and then cinema, which has very strong rules for telling a
story both in the European and in the Hollywood system. There are very traditional rules
of how one arranges shots and how one edits to tell a story. In the Internet and
multimedia that has not been done yet. So weíll find artists who find a way of presenting
work or allowing people to explore that creates those rules. As that develops and as
people get used to seeing it, you will see new stars of that format. And thereís
definitely the business world - because much of this still revolves around commerce -
which is definitely interested in the Internet and is supporting it and multimedia. Where
it is going I canít quite predict, but it will not go away.
Question 12
What do you think about the idea of making a movie with actors of the past? Do you think
it will be possible? Do you think there is an ethical problem?
Answer
Do I think it will be possible? Yes, I think itís unfortunate but possible. It is my
belief that it should not be done, not from a purely ethical standpoint but in the sense
that classic actors and the people who donít have control over that should not have their
image changed after the fact. If a modern actor wants to say, I want this to happen in the
future, I think itís their right to do it. And I think the technology will allow us to do
it. It is already coming close. I think some of what youíre seeing with digital stunt
people is very important. We do it because of safety, we do it in order to tell stories
that canít be told in any other way. So there is a use for the digital human in films.
But being an actor is so much more than that, at least to me. And thereís a difference
between acting and animating. If I have a digital actor, it is still an animation. What an
actor does is so unique that it should be cherished and used appropriately and not
replaced by something else. If todayís actors want to their image used in some future
story, thatís their right. Should we be dredging up the past for those people again? No.
For two reasons: it lacks creativity and why just copy whatís already been done, why not
come up with something new? Letís see what comes out of that.
Question 13
Do you think that people will always go to the movies?
Answer
I donít think that CD-ROM and multimedia will destroy the cinema, at least I hope. Iím a
huge fan of the cinema and the theatrical experience, itís a beautiful experience. And
part of the experience of making a movie is you are trying to control and create a group
response. Multimedia television is not designed for that. Itís slightly different. I
think CD-ROM has amazing possibilities not only in education to show everyone things that
may no longer exist, maybe never did exist, and also in entertainment, but not as a threat
to the cinema. Records are different than the cinema. Home video is different than the
cinema. Even though thereís a mix between them. I think it will effect how people are
entertained, maybe effect how people tell stories in some ways, but, thankfully, I think
the cinema is here for quite a while.
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