Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
On Location Two artists, and sometimes three, worked on the massive robot for more than a year. "Sometimes even four artists," Fogler says. "And they were our best artists. She [the crew extended the battleship analogy with the pronoun] is damaged in six or seven different fights, so we made 21 different versions. Gypsy with her arm torn off. Gypsy with acid burns on her arms, and so forth. A lot of the effort went into texturing." Her base model has 2,000 parts – a big number but less than that of a Transformer robot, even though she's much larger. "I'll tell you why," Fogler says. "We put extra time into creating efficient assets. We did a lot of deep thinking about how to create a giant robot that accomplishes complexity without overburdening the system." But, her base model doesn't tell the whole story. "Guillermo bubbled over at the idea we could see functioning parts at the shoulder and knee," Fogler says. "So the route we took was to make the machine actually work." When the audience sees Gypsy Danger lift her arm above her head, the hydraulics function in the rig. Same with her knee. "When you have a knee the size of a bus that actually cogs around and functions, it's a challenge," Fogler says. "Modelers, riggers, and animators were often in a painful and drawn-out loop. But we didn't have much after-the-fact fudging." To help create a design that worked for everyone, the crew sometimes went outside the typical postproduction paradigm in which drawings go to modelers, then to riggers, then to animators. "With mechanical characters, so many things can go wrong; we needed someone in the middle who could mock up a design quickly," says Hal Hickel, animation supervisor. "Gypsy's shoulders were a particular nightmare. The parts had to fit in a plausible way, and we couldn't have pieces crashing into each other when she moves an arm overhead. Chris Mitchell, an animator on the show, was a natural at that. He is pretty good at rigging, can do some basic modeling, and has a great brain for machinery, so he would prototype things. Put a drivetrain here. A piston there." Mitchell's prototype went to Fogler's crew, which made the final model with proper UVs for surfacing, and from there, to rigging for character TDs to install the sophisticated animation controls. "Guillermo appreciated that we took time to have our mechanics make sense within reason," Fogler says. "Pistons function and push ■ THE CHARACTERS' SCALE becomes obvious when set against a city; in this case, Sydney. Because "postproduction" began at Industrial Light & Magic during filming, ILM Visual Effects Supervisors John Knoll and Lindy DeQuattro alternated between working on set in Toronto and in the studio in San Francisco. "When I was on set, John was doing rounds with the asset teams," DeQuattro says. "If he was on set, I did that. You need real shots to lookdev the final looks, so we requested some kind of turnover while on location – at least a handful of shots from key sequences that represented the main characters. The scale was something we'd never dealt with before. You can't wrap your head around it until you see the characters in a scene." In Toronto, eight sets were available to the filmmakers. "We usually had two or three active at a time, while they built or dismantled the rest," DeQuattro says. "And, we did a little location work, shooting on Elizabeth Street in Toronto, which they dressed to look like Tokyo." The coast in Toronto substituted for Alaska for a sequence in which Gypsy Danger comes ashore and collapses, and then Raleigh [actor Charlie Hunnam] steps out of her head and collapses. "Luckily, there's not a lot of interaction between the characters and the actors," DeQuattro says. "The scale is such that it's not really possible, so it's not like Transformers where they make eye contact. More likely is that we see one of the actors climb out of a Jaeger." For the beach scene filmed in Toronto, the crew had a small section of the head for Raleigh to exit and orange cones to mark out Gypsy's body lines. Giant blocks of ice and ice confetti created the illusion that the scene was set in Alaska. "We were supposed to shoot the sequence for two days," DeQuattro laughs. "But, it was February in Toronto, and it was freezing cold. Halfway through the second day, Guillermo [del Toro] said, 'I'm done.' He got in his car and left." – Barbara Robertson Things. Cogs fit into other cogs. He calls it 'mech porn,' and he embraced it. In the opening of the film, there's a mech porn sequence. Gypsy's head travels down a shaft, and then her arms pull it back on. Cogs cog. Things steam. That comes from the tradition of Kaiju films, which always have a sequence where, for no good reason, a robot's head comes off, the head goes down an elevator, and then joins back on the body." Thus, although Gypsy's base model has 2,000 parts, the modelers also created a high-detail Gypsy with 20,000 parts. "We could flip a switch, turn on the high detail, and the lights would dim," Fogler laughs. "But, when a shot needed the detail, it would be there." In addition, textures added to the visual complexity without increasing the number of parts. "Anything that didn't move was a texture," Fogler says. "We had to do a texture optimization, though, because the renderer we used, [Solid Angle's] Arnold, doesn't love displacement." With 1,550 shots and characters at this scale, efficiency was important. "A lot of what we did was not glamorous," DeQuattro says. "It was CG W July / August 2013 ■ 41