Post Magazine

C O V E R S T O R Y S AN FRANCISCO — Star Trek. After some 43 years of intergalactic ac- tion, there are a lot of things you could have named this movie for Para- mount's "reboot" of the franchise, but direc- tor/producer J.J. Abrams stuck with the two basic Gene Roddenberr y-inspired syllables that say it all. Abrams, famed for creating blockbuster television such as Lost and Fringe, favors character-and-stor y over spectacle and gritty verisimilitude over sleekness. We'll trust Abrams with Star Trek's character de- velopment and focus on his choice for much of the film's look — ILM, the lead effects house, created about 789 VFX shots out of around 1,000 total, or about one hour of Star Trek screen time. (Other houses that contributed work include Digital Domain, Svengali and Lola VFX.) At the peak of production last year, ILM threw vir tually its entire staff — 400 ar tists and technicians — at Star Trek shots. For Rus- sell Earl, the movie's premiere this month presents something of a space-time warp. The visual effects he oversaw were essen- tially all done last fall, in time for a Christmas release (which Paramount then bumped to May due to box-office-share considerations). Now Earl, who was Star Trek's co-VFX super- visor for ILM with Roger Guyett, is stationed in Prague, where he's on the WW II actioner Red Tails (it has air combat). Star Trek represents something of a pro- motion for Earl to visual effects supervisor. He worked in tandem with ILM veteran VFX super visor Guyett who, in turn, wound up taking on second-unit direction duties for Abrams. "We kind of split the work," Earl says. "Roger did a lot of the initial planning, working with J.J., for how we were going to shoot cer tain sequences." While Guyett got involved in second-unit shooting, Earl star ted to commute down to LA to bal- ance super vision of effects there with the work on-going at ILM. "I was overseeing the asset develop- ment," Earl says, "the building of the ships and ever ything that goes into the pre-pro- duction of the film." This may at first sound unexceptional since ILM has often employed scale models of ships — but for this Star Trek, everything, grit-and-all, was built in CG. Alex Jaeger was visual effects art director. "J.J. and Roger and I would go over things and I would send retouched drawings or di- agrams back to the folks at ILM," says Earl. "It's sor t of taking ever ything that's come before and tr ying to build upon that. J.J. wanted you to be in a moment with the characters on a ship and then be able to cut to an exterior shot of the ship and have it feel just as realistic." Another aspect was the daunting scale of the ships. The Enterprise is 3,000 feet long but bad guy Eric Bana's ship is designed to appear a humongous five miles long. Director Abrams, Earl stresses, wanted it all "to look real," which means he was willing to take on what Earl calls "the CG curse." Even today there are directors who shy away from CG because some still feel it looks fake. "We were confident that we could do the CG well and not have that sort of fake-y 'curse' to it." With the film's vast scale and numerous changes in scale, the number of different- sized spaceship miniatures ILM would have had to build would've been prohibitive. Hence Star Trek is ILM's first film with all- CG spacecraft. H E F T Paul Kavanagh was ILM's animation super- visor who, with his team, would often star t with a black card that simply read "Enter- prise enters frame and fires." The move- ments in space of very large computer-gen- erated ships needed to be carefully plotted so they maintained their sense of size and heft. "We were very careful about how fast a ship this large would move," Earl says, "be- cause as soon as you star t doing a really grand camera move, if you move the ship too fast it just blows the scale." E X P L O S I O N Because they were building CG ships, ILM developed some new techniques for all-digi- tal explosions. The trick here is to give the audience a satisfying battle sequence without violating their hard-fought-for sense of reality. So, when the Enterprise is hit in battle, the fiery explosions seem to flare outwards — fueled by gasses you imagine are within the ship — and then suck back in, leaving black particulate and other debris flying outward. The explosions are all-digital but aim to be as true as possible to the physics of space. "In space, explosions would happen quickly, with high velocity, and they would burn off really fast leaving behind this dusty debris," says Michael DiComo, ILM's digital production super visor. Perfecting the new- style explosions took many tests and itera- tions, and multiple passes between the ren- dering and the compositing to ultimately evoke the excitement of battle. DiComo's role was to "oversee all the dis- ciplines and make sure that everyone's play- ing nice and ever ything goes through our pipeline cleanly and that we have the technol- ogy in place for all disciplines to get the job done," he says. Add to that DiComo's involve- ment in R&D to develop tools for effects "that we've never done before" and a grasp of staffing needs and you get a sense of his finger-in-every-pie responsibilities. Star Trek returns In the beginning it was dirty. Gritty. And hyper-real. Just ask ILM. ILM used 350 artists and 50 other staffers on the film. 14 Post • May 2009 www.postmagazine.com By KEN McGORRY mcgorry@optonline.net

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