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Cowboys & Aliens S continued on page 47 ILM takes on By Christine Bunish AN FRANCISCO — An alien invasion of the Old West.“From the VFX side it doesn’t get any better than a mash-up of the two genres,” says VFX su- pervisor/2nd unit director Roger Guyett of San Francisco’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the lead VFX studio for Cowboys & Aliens. “I always wanted to work on a western, but there are fewer and fewer of them. Add Daniel Craig, who’s a current-day Steve McQueen, Harrison Ford in a great character role and Jon Favreau, who’s a real actor’s director, and you have a winning combination.” Guyett notes that Favreau didn’t want the movie to become “a parody, campy version of a western. It’s an honest story of people — outlaws, cattlemen, towns- people, Indians — uniting to fight a common enemy.Then you have the aliens and their behavior: what you do with them once you have them is what’s interesting.” Although Cowboys & Aliens is based on a graphic novel, the film’s creators were more inspired by than committed to a direct translation of the book, he says.“We didn’t sit down and match the frames of the novel, but it was important to us that we remain faithful to the material.” THE ALIENS At press time the film had not yet been released, so spoiler information on the look of the aliens themselves was not available. Shane Mahan, one of the co-own- ers of San Fernando,CA’s Legacy Effects (www.legacyefx.com), developed the de- sign for the worker aliens and built puppet parts based on them. ILM (www.ilm.com) devised what Guyett calls the “uber alien,” a kind of “second-tier intelligence within the species.” ILM crafted maquettes based on both types of aliens, which proved helpful to animators and actors alike, he notes. “The physicality of the creatures give a certain understanding of it,” Guyett says. “If you actually build something, even out of polystyrene, and stand next to it, there’s an inherent reaction you get that’s very different from looking at artwork. Legacy’s puppet pieces also gave us great lighting references.” ILM used its proprietary Imocap technology for close-up shots between aliens and human characters. “If you weren’t seeing a full-body shot, it was invaluable to get a physical sense of them,” says ILM animation supervisor Marc Chu.“Imocap requires a very small footprint on set, so we could dress a stunt performer in a suit, have him interact with people and the environment, track that movement and repurpose or alter it if need be.” Having an alien performer also allowed “the camera operators to get some- Jake’s Blaster wrist shackle was a combination of practical and CG effects. thing to frame up on” and the actors “something to respond to and thus deliver a better performance,” he notes. The full-body aliens were keyframe animated.“This was a great show to be an animator on,” says Chu.“Coming from movies with a lot of motion capture, every- one had a real treat with Cowboys & Aliens’ keyframe animation.” Favreau gave the animators a lot of latitude in their keyframe animation for the alien faces, Chu re- ports.“He gave us the freedom to explore the aliens’ performances, to flesh them out as real characters.” The basis for keyframe animation was Autodesk Maya, supplemented by nu- merous proprietary tools and the studio’s custom pipeline, says Chu.“We did a lot of great physical animation with a fairly small crew: 18 animators for nearly 300 shots.They really hit it out of the park.” The aliens’ spacecraft was another practical-digital partnership.The enormous mothership is seen buried in the ground where it is conducting mining operations while small, swift, keyframe-animated Speeders fire bolos to grab people and reel them aboard for specimen study. Production designer Scott Chambliss built a section of the mothership and em- bedded it in the ground on location in New Mexico, Guyett repor ts; another mothership section was housed on the Universal stage in Los Angeles. ILM cre-