Side by Side Page #5

on film, that's just the technology.

The art form is the manipulation

of images to tell a story.

It was extremely difficult for me to learn because I hadn't used a computer.

I thought a mouse was something

that ran across the floor.

I mean, I was that ignorant.

But I learned, and I kicked

the machine quite a bit, but

once I'd got going on it, I was okay, and I liked it.

There's no film in the

editing bay.

It's all a kind of-

it's drives, and it's quiet.

You know, I don't hear-I used

to hear...

You know, the reels on the benches.

It was a very noisy, kind of

bustling atmosphere, and now

it's very quiet.

It's almost like, you know,

I can burn incense...

and light candles.

Digital brings you speed, and

it almost challenges you in the

sense of, "Can I think that fast?

Do I need time to breathe?"

Sometimes these young editors, who were very

interesting and doing extremely

interesting work-but they don't

always have the time to sit,

just sit back and think about

what they're doing.

And I think that if they work on

film, they have probably trained

their minds to do that a little

bit more.

And so it's a different way of

thinking, really.

Film taught you a discipline

that is gone a little bit from

the computer because once you

put the scissors in, you've then

got to join it back together

with sticky tape, and it bumps

through the machine, so you were

much more decisive about it.

Has editing gotten better

because there's infinite choice?

I'm not so sure.

In fact, I'm pretty sure there's

a lot of movies that have gotten

worse because you manipulate it to death.

We may have lost something.

The cut in Lawrence of Arabia where he blows the match out...

It is recognized that you

have a funny sense of fun.

Well, that was a dissolve in

the script.

And if you'd been on a digital

as we are today, we would have

only ever seen it as a dissolve.

In those days, the film was

butted together like that, just

with a direct cut, and so, when

we saw it, we thought,

"Wow, that's fantastic."

It just worked.

It just was magic, you know,

when you feel that feeling.

Digital is this unbelievably

malleable plastic of imagery and

sound, and that's seductive,

because that's what we do, you know?

We are sculptors of images and sound.

It's not that you can't do it

with film.

It's just that it's harder to do

that and make it look good.

As digital technology continued to grow, computer- generated images,

or CGI, were appearing more

and more in movies.

Visual effects, or vfx, have been part of filmmaking since the earliest years.

Camera tricks, lighting techniques, elaborate models,

and lab processes have all been

used to alter reality and

enhance the moviegoing experience.

On many films, there are

a number of things that are

depicted that you can't just go

out and shoot, so the images you

need to see need to be

manufactured in some way.

Being a visual effects

supervisor calls on you to

understand a huge variety of

different aspects of the world

around us at any one time.

You've also got to understand

the physics of the way light

reacts to different surfaces.

You've got to understand animation.

You've got to understand the way

people move, creatures move.

You have to be an artist and

a technician at the same time,

you know, and that's an

interesting combination.

Originally, when effects were done, or for the first 100 years

that effects were done,

they were done, you know, with

models and with film cameras,

and they were very sort of

limited, what they can do.

But a lot of time and energy- and people put a lot of work

into being able to make the

Star Wars films.

When I started doing this about 22 years ago, the

environment I learned in was a physical one.

It was a stage, miniatures,

cameras, lights, everything.

The great thing about making

real stuff is, you get to use

all of your senses and your

physical perceptions.

And to stand there with three

other people and critique

a model or talk about how cool

something looks under real

lighting is pretty satisfying.

And all of this photography would end up in an optical printer in the end.

That's a large device that

actually compresses layers of

film together and creates new

exposures of film so that you

can combine layers of images into the final one that you see in the movie.

The visual effects department

was literally sandwiching one

piece of film next to another

piece of film, and that really

introduces a huge amount of degradation.

In 1978, we had just finished

Star Wars, we'd done some

digital shots in there which

were very, very crude.

You know, the diagram of the

Death Star and that kind of stuff.

But I knew a lot of guys that

were working in the digital

field, so I started a computer

division, and we developed the

pixar computer for I.L.M.

I'm right now in one of our

three computer rooms that we

have here at I.L.M., and what we

have here are thousands and

millions of cycles of computing power going by every single second.

So I kind of pushed the stuff-

at least as much as I could-

here at I.L.M. with this

graphics group that we had.

The exciting thing about it was, it didn't feel like there

were a lot of rules.

It really did seem like, kind of, the wild west.

It started to become possible

to scan in film and bring the

film into the computer and make

changes to that.

The massive advantage to

digitizing your film was that

you wouldn't get any degradation.

Once it's digital, those are

ones and zeros, and they just

stay as ones and zeros all the

way down the pipe.

Digital became important from

an effects point of view.

The first path through the system was in the effects arena, okay?

It was using digital technology

to realize visions.

Okay, if you can take a piece

of film and you can turn it into

numbers, you can manipulate

those numbers and then put it

back onto the film, boy, there-

there's no limit to what you could do.

The entire world is wide open.

the first real image that we

did that was completely digital

was in Young Sherlock Holmes.

We had a character made out

of stained glass, but the glass

actually had to look like it was real, not like a graphic of any sort.

And it took us six months to do

seven shots, which was pretty

complicated but amazing that we

got it done in that amount of time.

George was always very progressive about digital,

and it was just something about

that-the effects community

just got comfortable with it

really early on.

Get rid of the flare!

I was just trying to be

a sheepdog.

Ha!

Enough wolves in the world already.

Now we were still shooting on film.

We weren't shooting with digital

cameras yet, but all of the post

processes were starting to fall

into line.

How did you go into the computer?

So I would have my hand, and

then they would take a picture

of it, and then in a computer,

they would do an animation of,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes