Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/135926
Digital Worlds a computer-controlled rig, put lights on the rig, and fed the 3D animation into the lighting rig." The animators at Pixomondo moved the lightweight model of the ship in Maya and exported the data to the Navcam motioncontrol system. "It's a very complicated shot," Grossmann says. "There's a conference with Starfleet's top brass going on, and suddenly, a bright light shines in from outside the window. A ship armed to the teeth rises up and starts mowing down people in the room. Starfleet's air-defense teams try to shoot down the craft. We built CG ships, debris, the building, and all sorts of destruction." For the shots of Kirk in the warp core, Pixomondo's artists extended a small set piece to create a large structure of catwalks built to make the sequence look especially dangerous. "It needed to be death-defying," Grossmann says. "We had to feel the jeopardy and the drama in that moment." In Beijing, Pixomodo artists created a phaser battle on the bridge of the Vengeance; in Shanghai, they built and tossed CG interiors of the Enterprise as it tumbled in a fall through space. Munich artists put holograms and vistas of future San Francisco out bedroom windows and planted tails on two alien girls. In Frankfurt, the artists gave a live-action actor CG eyes on tiny stalks. ■ THE ENTERPRISE could run but it couldn't hide inside a warp tunnel from the dark Vengeance, after all. Streaks of light and, eventually, debris help create the illusion of speed in these all-CG shots. New Frontiers Grossmann managed the work carried on around the globe through Shotgun pipeline tools, using that company's Screening Room application to look at the work. "Normally, we do dailies," Grossmann says. "The coordinators run presentations for the supervisors and all the artists sit there and wait for the review. I only did dailies twice. All the supervisors and I used Screening Room, and we ran 'dailies' all day long as material came up. I'd look at fresh work from artists in Berlin and Shanghai, and in the middle of that a shot might pop up from LA." With Screening Room, Grossmann could see a list of shots 14 ■ CGW M ay / J u ne 2 0 1 3 ready for review. He could send email to the artists with notes and drawings. When he wanted simultaneous conversations, he would organize a Cinesync session and talk to people through Skype. "Dailies can be a time suck," Grossmann says. "By using Screening Room, we would look at work when it was ready. The artists didn't have to show stuff at 10 for a daily when it wouldn't be ready until 11. I could sit at my desk and see a constant flow of new material organized by sequence or by studio. I could ask for the last version I saw, the last version I sent to JJ, the current version. I could put them side by side and play them together. Stack them. Do wipes between and see what's different. I kept thinking that at some point we'll start doing dailies, and then the show was almost done and we hadn't needed to." For Grossmann, the biggest challenge on the show was not the work itself, but the expectations of the fans. "You have to find a fine line that makes the film approachable to non-Star Trek fans and still give the impassioned fan base enough of a connection to see you're faithful to the canon," he says. "This is not a stand-alone movie where you can make stuff up and walk away from it. People make repair manuals for the ships you design. We had designed all the ships when production called us and asked us to turn the ships over to the game developers and the toy companies. We had to go in and make the ship work and function in detail, including how many people could sit in the cockpit, which door panels opened up, how the landing gear worked. Holy crap. We had to build a piston system. "Every time a trailer came out, people analyzed every pixel, criticized ship designs, and we weren't even done with the movie," Grossmann continues. "It was a little intimidating. But JJ is such a fun director. We'd take our cues from him about how much credence to pay to the canon of Star Trek." The first film based on Roddenberry's television series, director Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture received an Oscar nomination for its visual effects, which were, of course, optical and practical. But it was the 1982 film Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan that has gone down in computer graphics history. Ed Catmull and a stellar crew in Lucasfilm's computer graphics group (who went on to found Pixar in 1986) created the 60-second "genesis effect" for that film, the first entirely computer-generated sequence. Now, 32 years hence, hundreds of artists working hand in hand in 10 facilities around the globe have boldly sent the crew of the Enterprise into frontiers the filmmakers and computer graphics scientists who created Wrath of Khan could barely have imagined. As computer graphics have evolved, visual effects have become an integral and artful part of filmmaking, an art that filmmakers have only begun to fully appreciate. ■ CGW Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.