Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
34 DGA QUARTERLY C: I think it's less that he loves it as much as he likes to create a provocation to the tech people to rise to some new challenge. I think he is less interested in actually figuring it out than saying, "This is what I want—here's what I want you guys to do," and pushing them to a new level. F: He's definitely like the old tradition of a classic director [who asks], "How do I tell the story?" Whereas in looking at your body of work, often you're mulling over a technology and then the stories are inspired by them, like with Titanic. C: Literally. Avatar resulted from me being one of the founders of Digital Domain, and seeing where CG was going, and wanting to not only ride the wave but actually help build the wave. And this was in '95, we were a year and a half into Digital Domain, and we had come out of the blocks hot with digital comp, because everybody else was still doing opticals. There was about an 18-month window, or a two-year window, where we were doing digital comps and ev- erybody else was still looking around going, "Hey, I don't need my optical printer any- more," which was an interesting moment. But I thought, "We've got to stay ahead, and how do we do that?" So I wrote Avatar to push Digital Do- main. And I literally said, "All right, what can we do?" I was trying to create the grand provocation to get them to the next level. And everybody said, "No, that's out of reach, we can't do that yet." But we always knew we wanted to do human emotional capture, photoreal. And it started there. And the thing with Stan (Winston) was, that was our dream. And he saw that we were going to make this transition from prosthetic makeup to essentially… F: …Digital prosthetics. Stan was very important to me because, again, he was another one who was passing that knowl- edge he had developed with you and Steven. And so when working with him, especially on Iron Man, [there was] always a child-like enthusiasm. And the thing is, I think the reason why Jurassic Park still holds up is because there really aren't as many [CG] shots in there as you think. I think there's like 60 shots. C: Yeah, that sounds about right. We only C: We shoot tons and tons of reference throughout the rainforest. Like in the first film, when Zoe Saldana's character is drinking from the flower, that was me with a rubber plant leaf in Hawaii, pouring a bottle of Evian down the leaf and she was drinking it. And we got the lighting the way we wanted. F: Well, that's what also has been very help- ful with the key frame animation, because with a movie like Lion King, to transpose the human performance onto a photoreal animal, there's so much interpretation with the animators that we just went completely key frame. But when we do key frame, instead of doing capture, because we don't need all that data, we create a black box theater and have the performer… C: You're filming… F: With a video camera—no tracking... C: You film the gesture... F: It's to give the key frame artist the refer- ence for performance, which I think is a lot of what's valuable about motion capture: you're allowing the actor to make decisions about eyeline and status, when they hesi- tate, when they perform. If you just have a voice track, a lot of that is determined by an animator, and often animators come from a different tradition. C: Sometimes it's the mistakes or the hesi- tations or the pause between the lines that's important. If all you're doing is just taking those audio clips out, you're missing what's happening in the pause. F: And I can have them interacting. So in our volume, we swept out all the tech and we just had video cameras, and we had people in their street clothes. We were on long lenses, so there was no camera in their space. They would overlap each other, they would improvise, and so we could give it again that human [dimension], just like with the cameras… C: The messiness… That was the first thing you responded to when I was having Jake [Sam Worthington] running through the jun- gle, and you saw a rough cut of the scene, and you said you liked the messy camera. Because had 42 on T2, and that was like a year and a half earlier. F: Well, but you would, as did Steven, marry a practical thing that kept the CG honest. I assumed all the liquid [metal on the T-1000 villain]… I didn't realize you were shooting real mercury to get the liquefied metal. C: You wouldn't do that now. F: And even at the time, you just assumed some of that stuff was CG. But what it does is it grounds the CG, and I think that a virtual camera does that as well—having something for reference in the frame. But now you've evolved to the point where you can create full worlds. I think it helps, hon- estly, that Pandora has a look to it, a stylized look when you're doing photoreal without any reference. You'd better go out and shoot a lot of photography. Fusion Camera System: Created by James Cameron and DP Vince Pace, a dual-camera 3D motion control system that allows for finely calibrated stereo lens movements that mimic human vision. MotionBuilder: Real-time 3D character animation software that also allows for camera and light creation. Multi-Axis Motion Control: Automated systems that allow for precise, repeated camera movements along two or more dimensions. Native 3 D: Refers to the process of shooting with 3D cameras during production, rather than converting a film into 3D during post. Techvis: Technical previsualization, or a practical visual analysis of how an effects-heavy sequence could be filmed that accounts for issues like cameras and lenses, constructed sets and planned VFX. Terminology Decoded