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COVER STORY shots and concepts, draw sketches, block something out on a laptop, and then send QuickTime movies to Buff. Halon used Autodesk Maya and Motion- Builder to build custom rigs and special vir- tual cameras to shoot animations for the four elements where they could show the “vol- ume, speed and intent” of the bending effect. “It was important to know how big it was,” says Gregorie.Would it be “a violent bending attack or a docile training maneuver?” “I did have an advantage of having that ILM’s Pablo Helman was VFX supervisor on The Last Airbender. material in the Avid,” says Buff, “and being able to utilize it when I absolutely had no image to work with or was trying to antici- pate the timing of shots or how a certain se- quence could evolve. Previs was a big advan- tage in this film for Night.” With over 500 visual effects shots taking up almost an hour of screen time, Airbender challenged and enabled both the director and ILM to produce incredibly sophisticated visual effects. “The conversation with the director al- ways starts with, ‘Let’s make something no- body has ever seen before,’” says Pablo Hel- man, an Oscar-nominated (War of theWorlds, Star Wars:Attack of the Clones) VFX supervisor at ILM.“In this specific case the idea of the four elements and that the fire tells a story and has a beginning middle and an end, that’s kind of a brand new thing for us.” “It’s my first time doing CGI,” reports Shyamalan.“I was learning on the job. I felt like the young kid and everybody else was the seasoned veteran. I thought,‘Oh boy, I better learn fast!’ I felt comfortable being able to ar- ticulate a feeling.They could show me an illus- tration and I could spend half an hour telling them what’s working or not working for me; what’s not realistic, what’s not hyper-realistic enough; what’s not activating my imagination, what’s making it somber.” “We did do a pipeline introduction,” re- ports Helman, “so that [Shyamalan] would know when things were presented what ex- actly we expected from him.” “I would express,‘This is too feminine or too masculine,’” explains Shyamalan, “I would talk a lot in those tones. ‘There are ways this can be more threatening. I am sensing this before I want to be sensing this, can you make it more of a surprise? Is there a more efficient way for the water to get from here to there? I’m not buying the physics of this moment, I want it to feel… can you make it like zero gravity?’ I would go on and on — eventually they can hear me in their sleep. And when they go to animate and come up with designs, and it starts to be in the sweet spot of the things that I was responding to.” “Night has a specific way of thinking about sequences that takes into consideration really long shots,” Helman explains. “A complete story in one take. He takes the time to move the camera around the characters, connect the characters to something else that the character is seeing as opposed to a cut.” “Normally you shoot CGI as kind of a slight of hand,” describes Shyamalan.“So you don’t stare at a thing too long, and you go to the next thing.There are a lot of cuts to cre- ate this slight of hand. My style of shooting is long takes and holding, and there’s a perfor- mance in the background in CGI, so it’s very naked all the time.” One of Airbender’s VFX shots runs nearly five minutes long. “It’s a challenge from all points of view,” says Helman. “From the technical part, pipeline wise, starting to scan Discover the Dimension-3D Format Converter