Original subtitles

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

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-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me ♪

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

Strike your colors, ya bloomin' cockroaches!

Show 'em your larboard side.

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

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 shooting and poking and firing guns 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!

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 shoot 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.

Fire!

Hey, can I show you something here?

Yeah.

This is your geography.

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.

Action!

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.

Action!

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

And so I thought, "Well, let's just shoot it with the actor,

"and then we'll shoot 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.

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.

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.

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 ♪

My goal was to ultimately come down to the Bay Area

and work for ILM.

So joining ILM ultimately was huge for me.

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.

We wanted to liberate the camera.

When you've got, you know, 70 characters interlaced

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.

The only thing that really made sense

was to go ahead and shoot the actors in their picture costumes

and then match move them as closely as we could.

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.

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.

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.

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

than any of the other films.

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.

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.

And then, Episode II was a little over.

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

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

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.

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.

It's meant to look like hell.

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

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.

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.

No, I think that looks great.

Very good.

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.

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.

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.

So when they saw it,

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

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.

- 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There was some poaching going on.

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

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.

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.

Especially in the early 2000s.

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

Every year, it got better and better.

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.

For achievement in visual effects...

And the Oscar goes to...

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

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.

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.

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.

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 balls on them.

We came up with a slightly different suit.

And for one thing, it had these bands instead of balls.

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

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 shoot the movie, and we'll do what we need to do later.

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.

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.

Interesting translucency right in there.

Is it too much?

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.

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

Is it going soft before the rack to Orlando?

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!

And the Oscar goes to...

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

for The Pirates of the Caribbean.

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.

It kind of renewed my faith

that as filmmakers and visual effects artists,

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

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.

- 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...

They're going that way?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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 War of the Worlds.

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 War 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 shooting in December, and it was gonna be out in June or July.

We were shooting 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 shooting 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 shoot 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.

The great thing in the design of War 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.

There's a scene in War of the Worlds

where Tom Cruise is racing away from the war 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.

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?"

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

shooting 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!

War 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.

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...

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.

Rango was a huge undertaking.

It was the first digital feature that ILM ever did.

And it was really scary.

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.

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."

This was a new thing, right?

Rango was completely an animated feature.

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

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.

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 5 return him safe and sound,

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."

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 shoot 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...

You actually ate the bullet.

I... I ate my prop.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good to see you.

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

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.

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!

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.

37 years ago, I walked in that front door 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.

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.