Discovering Brave New Worlds
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 16, 1997
No one knows the advances in SFX better than the team that worked on Star Wars. Story by Chris Rubin.
WHEN SCIENTISTS ARE cloning sheep and monkeys in real life what's left for motion picture special effects designers?
"We're not far from being able to insert a CG (computer-generated) character into a live action film," says Ken Wesley, senior technical director at Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas's Californian special effects house. "That's what we've done to some degree in the Special Edition of Star Wars. The real trick with human characters is that we have so many references - we can look in the mirror to see how they differ from ourselves.
"It's easier with animals, made-up creatures. The creation of believable humans is what is and will continue to be the hardest goal to strive to reach."
That doesn't mean it can't be done. "As animators get better tools and computers get faster, that's what we may move toward. But you have to ask what is the benefit of using a computer character rather than a human, because you get more nuances with a human."
Effects can, however, allow film-makers to use stunt people more convincingly.
"In Jurassic Park, where the girl is being pulled up through the ceiling to escape one of the dinosaurs, a stunt double was used for the shot, and the actress's face was mapped on to the double's head later, using computer technology," says Wesley.
After the success of Star Wars in 1977, George Lucas established ILM to create the effects for The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi. The Star Wars re-releases ILM has engineered 20 years later offer textbook examples of improvements in special effects over that time. The start-stop motion of some animated creatures - such as the foul-smelling animals Luke Skywalker rides on the ice world in The Empire Strikes Back - are in striking contrast to the newly inserted, computer generated creations.
"The jerky motion of stop-frame animation is no longer the case, as the computer-generated dinosaurs of Jurassic Park show," Wesley says.
Why do these new characters and effects look so much more realistic? "We can actually set up 'key' frames, so if we know that at second two, I want the character to do this, and at second 12 to do that, we can let the computer do everything in between," Wesley says. "We don't have to position every frame. The computer smoothes out all the in-betweens."
Wesley has worked on Mission: Impossible, Twister and Star Trek: First Contact, and is now busy researching the upcoming Star Wars prequels.
He says computer advances will see several improvements in the way the new Star Wars creatures are rendered. "One thing you'll see in the Special Edition is extensive use of fur on CG characters: the rendering of specific hairs or feathers is now possible. We couldn't do that before. Computers are faster, the software more advanced, so we can render them as they are, or as we want them to be."
He says that for the prequels the SFX staff are ready to create worlds as well as characters.
Wesley says Toy Story was a giant leap in cinematic special effects. "One could use that technology for human-type characters. It's just a matter of time and money. As advances in the field continue, it will take less time and less money to create human-type motion. It all boils down to the skill of the animators."
"In a certain sense, Toy Story was one big special effect," says Bonnie Arnold, one of the its producers. "Every shot was created on the computer - the first all computer-generated film ever made."
What made it special, though, was not just the effects, but the life the writers, actors and animators created in the characters. The best film-makers and SFX artists know one common truth: the effects should help the story, not take the place of it.
"Technique alone won't hold you through a feature-length film," cautions Arnold, who is now producing a traditionally animated version of Tarzan for Disney. "It has to be about the characters."
© 1997 The Sunday Age
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