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 I'm effects supervisor. As an effect supervisor,
I've done many things besides digital effects: I've worked with the digital side but also
animatronics and made models and miniatures in every scale in Starship Troupers, a
film I've 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 I've 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 it's 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 I'll have a
composting supervisor, a CG supervisor, a models supervisor, and I'll 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
there's 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, "space feel" - 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
I've 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. It's a very low-margin industry. Because of that it's 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 they're 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 film's 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, there's 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 there's 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 don't have the risk that the large company
has or as many employees. So it's much easy to tide over the small dips on the market,
whereas when my company hires 100 extra employees, that's a large amount in salaries every
week and if we don't have work for a few weeks, it's 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 there's always the two sides of the business. One is the big Hollywood
blockbuster, the summer movie spectacular, of which I've 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 I've 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 don't make those. So it is a good fit
between the size of the companies and the kind of work. I think it's 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 don't need to
do the big blockbuster. A film with a strong vision doesn't 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 don't make a good movie; that's 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 I'm 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 it's
hard to just entertain with special effects alone. Hopefully it's 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
Henderson's 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 weren't
animatronic because, of course, the animatronic work was complete. Then the film was sent
off to " Rhythm & 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 I've 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; it's 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 it's
what Paul Verhoven, the director, always wanted to make. It's essentially a science
fiction version of a 1940s war film. So it's 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 there's 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 you're seeing a
marriage of the old and the new. The way we've 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. That's 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, you'll 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 you'll 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
It's hard to say. Definitely the digital technology and all technologies are being applied
to the Internet , to CD-ROMs, to multimedia. I think that it's 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 we'll 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 there's 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 it's 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 don't 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 you're seeing with digital stunt
people is very important. We do it because of safety, we do it in order to tell stories
that can't 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 there's 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 today's actors want to their image used in some future story, that's
their right. Should we be dredging up the past for those people again? No. For two
reasons: it lacks creativity and why just copy what's already been done, why not come up
with something new? Let's see what comes out of that.
Question 13
Do you think that people will always go to the movies?
Answer
I don't think that CD-ROM and multimedia will destroy the cinema, at least I hope. I'm a
huge fan of the cinema and the theatrical experience, it's 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. It's 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 there's 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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