Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
rge Industrial Light & Magic artists use CG tools to create battleship-sized creatures for Guillermo del Toro's film Pacific Rim By Barbara Robertson The visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic is famous for its giant robots, but nothing, not even the Devastator in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or Colossus in Transformers: Dark of the Moon compare with the Jaegers and Kaiju in Warner Bros.' eagerly anticipated Pacific Rim. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, the sci-fi monster movie, set in the near future, pits machines called Jaegers against invading alien monsters called Kaiju, who rise from a crevasse in the Pacific Ocean. Robot-like in appearance, the Jaegers have two legs, two arms, a head, and a power generator. They take orders from two human pilots who ride inside their heads. "Giant" scarcely describes the robots. Gypsy Danger, the hero Jaeger who appears throughout the film, is a 250-foot-tall walking battleship and power plant; a 25-story building that moves through the ocean and through cities. And Gypsy is but one of five main robots, the legendary and, perhaps, obsolete one. The Godzilla-like aliens they fight were even larger. Gypsy Danger's main opponent, Knifehead, stands 250 feet tall, but nose to tail is approximately 400 feet, and Slattern is 900 feet long. By comparison, King Kong is 25 feet tall. The Transformers films' lovable Bumblee robot is no more than 15 feet tall. Thus, "giant" scarcely describes the amount of work the ILM artists needed to do, as might be expected. The numbers tell the story in part: There were visual effects in approximately 60 percent of the film's running time. Of the 1,550 visual effects shots that made it into the film, 600 were all-CG shots with the giant robots and/ or aliens. Of those, 245 had robots and aliens fighting in digital water. And, whether the CG characters were in simulated seas or on land, they often had simulated rain pouring down on their heads and cascading over their bodies as they moved. "Scale was an ongoing challenge," says John Knoll, creative director at ILM and visual effects supervisor on Pacific Rim. Working with Knoll were ILM's Visual Effects Supervisors Lindy DeQuattro and Eddie Pasquarello. ■ INSIDE THE immense CG robots' heads are two human pilots. CG W July / August 2013 ■ 39