Gadgetory

we're at Industrial Light & Magic for the last 37 years ILM has made some the most well-known effects in Hollywood history have you seen the Star Wars movies the Indiana Jones trilogy or the Transformers films you know the work of ilm Jeff white was the visual effects supervisor on the Avengers and Transformers Dark of the Moon i sat down with him to talk about what first inspired to me get into special effects and a problem I'll um had about a particularly colorful Hulk you know I think so many of us Star Wars and said okay this is this is where we want to work and you know knowing that ILM kind of was founded to create that and then just following it over the years and then getting a chance to get a job here was was really a dream come true let's talk about the most recent film you do the Avengers Rex you're sitting here in the motion-capture stage where you said you'd shot a lot of stuff for that movie what's the process what happens in these four walls one of the great things about Avengers especially with the Hulk was having Mark Ruffalo come up here and do performance you know and we actually did several rounds of that he came here initially just to come here on the mocap stage and we showed him his motion kind of retargeted onto a hog very fast and loose so they could play with some ideas and at the same time we captured a range of expressions from him that we used to drive the digital version of him and our process on this one rather than just kind of jumping straight to the Hulk was to actually build the mark digital mark ruffalo first and and verify that when we took that the data that would captured you know from all his expressions put it on the digital version of him and then looked at them side-by-side that they would look the same so that you know we were really figuring out the difficult problems by having a perfect reference and then because the Hulk had elements of mark incorporated into his design which I think was a really great decision for this film we were able to take a lot of that same work and kind of apply it to the hall sometimes I feel like you may ccg character's name will kind of like pop out from the environment they won't kind of blend in and he is seamless throughout that entire movie you know what steps did you take to kind of make him blend in like that says it seemed a step above the stuff I've seen recently because the design was based on him he did a performance for every shot he actually came up here and put on the helmet cam and put on the you know ridiculous-looking try suit and went through the entire process and Joss could direct him and you know very quickly work through you know what the shot was make some selects off that then we track all of that data apply it first to our mark ruffalo digital double again make sure that we had that as a good match and then apply it through retargeting process to the Hulk because the Hulk is such different proportions from Mark Ruffalo there's a lot of work in terms of you know taking his performance and then the animators really crafting it into you know what you see on the screen and a lot of hand on you know work in terms of putting that together what I think then helped us really blend it into the plate was when we were on set mark was there for every Hulk shot and so we were able to render the Hulk and stack them up side by side with the mark ruffalo there and you know something that we kind of learned on Davy Jones from parts of the Caribbean is you have the real actor there even if you're not using any part of them just to have the reference of what do you know marks eyes look like in this shot in this lighting in this environment and then making sure that our Hulk matches that because a lot of times we would we put our same or digital character in there we'd render it and you know like hey this looks great and then we'd start comparing it like whoa there's a lot that's off that we need to go fix even down to just the angle of the eyelashes could make a big difference in terms of your perception of the character and that kind of match so you know I think especially for the things where cg tends to be a big struggle like around the eyes where you're trying to put some thought and some emotion into the eyes being able to have that reference performance and was really valuable know what are some other areas that are traditionally a struggle when you're trying to go and put a character together like that well I think you know for the Hulk he's he's a human and yet he's not only giant sized but he's got green skin and you know we sort of joked around all the time that green is a really difficult color humans are very sensitive to green and differences in that color and he's in so many different environments he's down on the Park Avenue viaduct and he's jumping up you know stark tower to the you know outside and you know the the blue sky or the the building shadows would all change his green color to sort of bad looking colors we had minty Hulk and we had pumpkin Hulk and so we worked very closely with Marvel in terms of trying to make sure that his color was consistent throughout and that we also early on in the process Joss decided that the green really wanted to be a pretty deece a chewy at green and I think that helped us a lot in terms of making him look real because it's it's very similar in saturation to kind of a natural flesh tone so you know rather than something that kind of pops off the screen he integrates really nicely with the other Avengers that are there well so Joss Whedon directing the avengers not something that had done a huge big budget film like that before what was that experience like I you know I was really excited to get a chance to work with him on this project and had been such a huge fan of his coming into it and it was it was really fantastic I think you know all the humor and that you see in the writing and that you see on the screen is what it's like working with him you know every day and you know he's pretty amazing at pulling out references to movies and artists that we'd be scrambling to go you know look up to see what he's talking about but it was it was a really phenomenal experience and I think the great thing that he brought to it was making sure that in the end the visual effects always serve the story that he was creating you know I think people really connect with these characters and then you know our job was to just make sure everything look good one of the really fun parts about working with him is that because he's such a fan of comic books to begin with he knew what people want to see the Hulk do and so he gave us those moments another effects supervisor influenced by Star Wars was Grady Cofer we talked to Grady about has work on the film battleship and paul thomas anderson's there will be blood so we got a call that there were there were a few shots on there will be blood that kind of sat in the middle of his movie and that was kind of the big country know whenever they strike oil in the middle of it and there's the big kind of the big geyser of oil and there were lots of ways to kind of tackle that kind of shot now for for Paul who's definitely a purist and and it really honors kind of the craft of filmmaking and likes the purity of the frame and all of that because I could have done this is a little early I could have done like a big CG simulation had done all of that and for that show that didn't really seem like kind of the right solution we kind of it was something actually a special effects form it was great had a pretty good looking kind of representation of oil and we did a big kind of we shot it as kind of a miniature we we actually sprayed oil up in the air down in LA and filmed all of these elements and it became kind of a large kind of comp of those kind of elements and it worked really well and it was all very real it meant a lot of the lot of the cameraman Ghana got covered with this kind of fake oil but you know it worked out in the end you had the supervisor on battleship you guys have a long history of great sci-fi movie special effects when you're taking something on like that you know was it daunting and you know and what is the process and some pretty good innovations you guys brought to the table with battleship it was daunting and you know a lot of that were I mean there was a lot of big ideas and this and that's kind of what you want you know when you can when you find a director who and Pete is definitely an idea guy it's like he it's kind of non-stop he'll show up in the morning and go I've got it you know get my previous guys out here he'll throw out some all these these interesting things and you go down all these different kind of creative journeys and and like ideas and stuff but when he pitched it it wasn't just kind of naval warfare it was naval warfare meets sci-fi alien invasion you know on a grand scale on a summer blockbuster scale and and he wanted he wanted spectacle it's like he you know he wasn't shying away from it you know he was he's like I'm here I'm making a big you know mega summer movie and the way he described it was that these alien and this alien invasion they landed these ships called stingers which are if you look at kind of their their silhouette they're kind of based on like these water bugs right so they kind of hover or kind of a walk along the surface or float along the surface of the ocean but he wanted them to start kind of submerged so in their reveal in this kind of a big part the movie they all kind of breach up through the water then they splash back down that's already pretty hard right we know that that's that's a kind of a large-scale fluid simulation and that was going to be something we're going to wrap our heads around but as the the project we were in we were you know and in pre-production he said okay not only do they breach and they sit on the surface of the water but I want them you know I want all of these tubes and stuff underneath them and they they kind of suck water up out of them and then recycle it over them constantly like there's constant waterfalls you know and you know of course you nod you're like okay that sounds great very interesting and we so we we kind of knew at that point that an island has actually great you know history of water show specifically they've done some really really groundbreaking stuff but maintaining that over the course of this entire show for a lot of it in broad daylight and in very very wide kind of spectacle shots we knew we were going to have to raise our game and and it was you know it was pretty amazing here at ILM because they you know they have a really really strong R&D department and so you get all these guys together in a room and they came up with a call it the battleship water project and pretty much over the course of columns two year they re engineered how we tackle kind of large-scale fluid simulations at ILM and and then how we render it you know render it for all you know we wanted to kind of represent water kind of through the entire kind of life span of kind of water from from from a big kind of splashy massive water to to you know to the little speedy kind of particulate that comes off of that to the little mist that comes off of that and all of it we wanted to be influenced by airfields and simulated kind of movement of vortices in the air was a huge huge project but the end of the day it really enhanced kind of did your experience of these stingers became a part of their personality you know Pete's mandate from the beginning on this film was authentic right everything had to be very authentic and we were scouting the Missouri one day down in Pearl Harbor and there was kind of kind of when throughout the day that people wanted to have a bit of an effects meeting dockside at the end of the day so I met him and so we're kind of sitting there and there's this like you know wall to wall there's the Missouri kind of beautiful and majestic kind of filling the horizon and he said all right that I get that's real you know I feel that that ship your work has to look just as good as that I have to believe your work and it was I mean it was a challenge you know that's your pressure that's not right yeah but you know but it was great and it actually it's set kind of a high lofty goal for us and that's it's kind of what you want you know you want to aim high well Grady thank you so much for spending some time with us it's been a real treat is to get inside of what you do every day and the facility and yeah thanks for checking in soon yeah awesome thanks