[Warning: This email has exceeded the acceptable quota of references to Star Wars and its sender may be banned from further communication.]
Reading Chapter 3 of Closed World necessitated me going back to read Chapter 1. My points of reference often go back to filmmaking, so there was a moment of synchronicity when Edwards, the author of Closed World, cites The Terminator (1984, Cameron) as an example. The following description of the technology used to make Avatar evokes the scale of projects like Whirlwind and SAGE, not to mention eery resonances with the military industrial complex.
…a new cloud computing and Digital Asset Management system named Gaia was created by Microsoft especially for Avatar, which allowed the crews to keep track of and coordinate all stages in the digital processing. To render Avatar, Weta used a 10,000 sq ft server farm making use of 4,000 Hewlett-Packard servers with 35,000 processor cores with 104 terabytes of RAM and three petabytes of network area storage running Ubuntu Linux, Grid Engine cluster manager, and 2 of the animation software and managers, Pixar's RenderMan and Pixar's Alfred queue management system. The render farm occupies the 193rd to 197th spots in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.
There are several examples of ad hoc environments of innovation coalescing around film directors' visions of science fiction landscapes. Star Wars led to the founding of
Industrial Light and Magic and Peter Jackson started
Weta Digital (most known for
Lord of the Rings; also Avatar).
Lucas wanted his 1977 film Star Wars to include visual effects that had never been seen on film before. After discovering that the in-house effects department at 20th Century Fox was no longer operational, Lucas approached Douglas Trumbull, famous for the effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull declined as he was already committed to working on Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but suggested his assistant John Dykstra to Lucas. Dykstra brought together a small team of college students, artists, and engineers, and set them up in a warehouse in Van Nuys, California. Lucas named the group Industrial Light and Magic…
Before all that, Alejandro Jodorowsky sought an international group of artists to develop plans for a 20-hour movie of Frank Herbert’s
Dune. It was never made, but it established a recipe for blockbusters to follow: diverse talent aligning around a grand cinematic vision. Compared to those that followed, Jodorowsky is perhaps most interesting because he wasn’t merely looking for the best technicians; he was seeking like-minded “spiritual warriors.” Like Lucas, he pursued the best of the era—Douglas Trumbull—but then
refused to work with him.
These films were more expensive upfront, required infrastructural investments, and caused technological delays that cause studio execs to panic (and in the case of Dune, they pulled the plug entirely).
Dune
$2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production…
Star Wars[ILM] had spent half of its budget on four shots that Lucas deemed unacceptable. Moreover, theories surfaced that the workers at ILM lacked discipline, forcing Lucas to intervene frequently to ensure that they were on schedule. With hundreds of uncompleted shots remaining, ILM was forced to finish a year's work in six months.
Avatar
The film was originally scheduled to be released in May 2009 but was pushed back to December 2009 to allow more time for post-production on the complex CGI. Also: "In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough, since at the time no studio would finance for the development of the visual effects
No wonder Cameron is making
three more Avatar films. Though not exclusively for this reason, the income from three films helps justify the infrastructural costs just to make one. It’s also worth noting that Star Wars was made for around $11 million ($40M-ish today) compared to Avatar’s $200+ million budget.
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I feel some parallels between places like Lincoln Labs, Xeroc PARC, CDG, and [early] ILM. The two big ILM moments were the first one—overcoming the odds to make Star Wars—and then the ambitious move to digital tools. Here are some transcript excerpts from
VFX, Going Behind the Magic, Episode 1: ILM, Creating the Impossible, spanning the “rise of the digital" period from
The Abyss (tinkering),
Terminator 2 (commitment), and
Jurassic Park (embracing):
Lucas: All in all, the real impetus of ILM was to keep a core group of creative people and this highly technological environment they needed functioning…
The Apple came out and Dennis Muren had said “Gee, can I take 6 months off and learn how to use this Apple?” So he was the one that first put his foot in the water and learned what Ed and the guys were doing. And that started a link so I could transfer the technology that the computer division was doing over to ILM, where it was meant to be.
Lasseter: It was a lot of work because back in the day we didn’t have the tools. I literally had to take the footage and project it onto my computer screen and I matched… animated the camera move by hand. I don’t know if I’ve ever worked harder on six shots in my life, but it was worth it…
Muren: So we setup our own CG group within ILM… that's purpose was to do CG work only for films. And it was great. And it took a couple of years or so to really get it going.
Morris: [The shots in the Abyss] ended up being about 90 seconds of animation. It used a mix of computer graphics and traditional optical compositing techniques so it was kind of a transitional step.
Knoll: That was something very new for us. There were not a lot of established procedures for doing any of this work at the time so we just dove into it and we were making it up as we went along.
Muren: It was just so exciting to be able to see that what had been a promise for so long and so difficult to do because nobody had ever done it before—the tools were now in place, the software was in place, the hardware was sort of in place—it was a matter of applying.
Morris: What happened after The Abyss came up was a number of projects that had been sort of circling needing effects that could not have been accomplished before really started to rise up.
Muren: There was a lot of breakthroughs that we had to do to get that show done… to get the CGI to work… that was really tough stuff to do, you know it was on the cutting edge.
Catmull: So everybody in this industry is saying “Wow, everything's changing now so there's this general awareness that this technology is coming into this industry."
The documentary loses steam shortly after Jurassic Park, when ILM begins building a digital “arsenal” capable of tackling over 2000 shots in the first Star Wars prequel. It’s all "Manifest Digital” after that, and when we finally arrive at Michael Bay’s Transformers, it’s hard not to question the whole CGI endeavor in the first place. I feel like this excerpt of audience applause from a Star Wars 7 announcement sums up our collective desire to return to a more human-centered, physically based [thinking] technology.
Such an endeavor need not be a “retro approach.” I don’t think this applause is rooted exclusively in nostalgia for the franchise, but perhaps nostalgia for a time when cinema (and all of technology) was still inescapably rooted in physical reality. Star Wars was shot on reels of film, in real sets, used physical models and explosions, and even had to be viewed in a theater with other human beings. Actors can inhabit their roles better in costume and on set because all of their senses are engaged. From that same event:
it’s sometimes easier to build something for real than to fake it.
Edlund: optical compositing was so difficult, just to get rid of an outline, we went to the most outrageous extremes… now that we have digital compositing, I am in heaven. But I love to use and shoot elements in the old way… I was a big fan of the digital world coming along… it’s augmented [older analog techniques] and given us the opportunity to be even more bold in approaching visual problems.
ILM recently announced its own lab,
ILMxLab. Some things give me pause: franchise overload, VR headsets galore, and
bionic arms for amputees (yes!) inspired by more franchise material (Iron Man and lightsabers—really?). But they are just across town, and the director of the lab is
John Gaeta, the VFX supervisor for the Matrix films.
It's not what you see is what you get. It's all baby steps toward something much larger that won’t be really commonplace for a few years but there are people around the world sort of scratching their heads; a lot of new ways to photograph things and it will be fairly… it will be as revolutionary as when cameras came off sticks [tripods] and went to a crane and came off cranes and went to Steadicams.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tension between
showing future technology like
this [bad] example (from
Bret’s Rant a few years back) versus creating an environment to
experience what it feels like. The value of [science fiction] movies is how they can provide a bridge from seeing to experiencing, projecting into an imagined future. The end goals of a movie and science are obviously quite distinct, but the processes for making the literal and metaphorical behind-the-scenes tools seem to have a lot in common.