Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 63 down and doesn't have to move that much, animatronics enabled us to build something tangible," he says. "An animatronic dinosaur gives the actors something to play against so they're not just looking at a green tennis ball. In Ju- rassic World, when Chris Pratt's character Owen reaches out and touches the side of (velociraptor) Blue's face, he's making contact with something real and I think subconsciously you can feel that." Trevorrow extended his analog-meets-digital aesthetic to Juras- sic World's climactic smackdown that pits computer-generated di- nosaurs Indominus Rex against T. Rex in a custom-built town that's 100 percent practical. "When you have destruction by digitally- built dinosaurs—and there's a lot of destruction in these movies— you want as much of it as possible to be practical," he advises. "For that minute-long shot with the giant dinosaurs fighting, production design made break-away glass, collapsing columns and walls that fall apart for real when you hit them with a wrecking ball. Every time a dinosaur touches something, the way to make it feel real is for the thing that breaks to be real. For this kind of movie, VFX de- sign and production design are really married to each other." As Trevorrow preps Jurassic World 3, slated for release in 2021, he stresses the importance of treating digital collaborators with re- spect. "The brilliant animators and compositors who work at these VFX houses are your allies," he says. "They can elevate your work to astounding levels if you listen to them. As the director, when you acknowledge how much you appreciate what they do and how hard they work, these people will go to the moon and back for you." ® anything else," Trevorrow recalls, "because I understood how to use visual effects to move the story forward and nothing more." A propulsive storyline requires re- latable characters. In order to popu- late Jurassic World with sufficiently e m o t i v e d i n o s a u r s, T r e v o r r o w e n - g a g e d i n t e n s i v e l y w i t h I n d u s t r i a l L i g h t & M a g i c , w h i c h h a n d l e d a l l digital work for the film. "Some people think you just shoot a bunch of plates, send them to ILM and they come back with magic on them," Trevorrow says. "But in fact, it's a slow, meticulous pro- cess. The communication I had with my visual effects supervisor Tim Alexander was equal to my relationships with a pro- ducer or writer or cinematographer. It's important to communicate your inten- tions very clearly in story terms so the art- ists can then visualize it for themselves." Collaborating with ILM reinforced for Trevorrow the importance of making firm choices early on. "If you do only one thing for your supervisor and all the artists, animators and compositors working on your show, it would be that when you make a decision, you stick to that deci- sion. Even when you're really cooking and reviewing 15 different shots every day at a different stage of the workflow process, from initial blocking to animation to skin and textures to lighting—being decisive is key." R E V O R R O W C H E R R Y- P I C K E D among myr- iad options from the digital realm to lend heart and soul to his digital creatures. "I consider the dinosaurs to be characters just as much as I do the humans, which is something I've been both accused of, and lauded for, depending on which review you read," Trevorrow notes wryly. "But for me, the process for directing the visual effects is not dissimilar from working with actors. You have to understand the space you're in. Then you talk about how to traverse that space. How should the characters move around? Then we block it out and talk about the feeling of the scene, because in these movies, it's not just about how the human actors feel in relation to the dinosaurs, it's also about how the dinosaurs feel: What kind of emotion this should evoke?" Trevorrow tasked ILM with drawing on a variety of dinosaur- simulation techniques to suit the needs of the scene. The small but speedy velociraptors came to life through motion capture perfor- mances from human actors who were then digitally reshaped and resurfaced to assume reptilian form. For more static shots, Trevor- row favored animatronics. "If the dinosaur's sedated or strapped Patty Jenkins, on location for Wonder Woman with actress Gal Gadot, says she shot elements on the Amalfi coast of Italy that her VFX team matched. "Wonder Woman was the first time I'd worked with digi-doubles and I quickly learned what they can and cannot do." —Patty Jenkins T PHOTO: CLAY ENOS/WARNER BROS.