Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
couver, and 11 in Singapore. "I had many of the same people who worked with me on Rango," Hickel said, "so I knew them well. We were like a 24-hour studio. We'd do [Cospective's] CineSyncs in San Francisco, go to bed, and the next morning we'd have a bunch of work to review from Singapore." Hickel began animating Gypsy Danger and Knifehead, the main alien, before the studio had officially started work on the project. "We didn't use the assets in the film, but the designs were close enough that, even later, I could try things out with those two," he says. "I did a series of shots of Gypsy walking through a city of tall buildings, knowing there would be action in Hong Kong. I wanted to know how she would move, how quickly, and how we could give a sense of scale." Because no street in Hong Kong was wide enough to accommodate the giant machines, the team at ILM later carved a wide avenue with a parkway through the middle of the digital Hong Kong that they created. Big in itself wasn't Hickel's most difficult problem, though. "Big needed to see something with a large, vertical ship, and we found pictures of the space shuttle with scaffolding and tons of workers," he says. "We wanted a very active site." Thus, the Base artists added vehicles, cranes, and other equipment to the sets, as well as scaffolding with welders working on the Jaegers. "We had a catalog of 50 Shatterdome props that we could apply to a Jaeger or the dome," Pasquarello says. "The shots were very complex; there were so many moving pieces." For Pasquarello, the challenge was to fit these 350 shots seamlessly into the rest of the film, even though he was miles away from Visual Effects Supervi- ■ FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: An alien attack, digital rain cascades over a CG Jaeger, destruction in a CG city. things need to move slowly or apparently slowly," he says. "The problem was how to keep the action exciting while keeping the characters looking big when they are surrounded by realistic, physically based simulations." Excitement happened through cheating the physically accurate slowness with fast cuts and with camera angles. "We'd mount the camera on Jaeger's fist as it swings toward a creature," Hickel says. "In a wide shot, that might look like slow motion, but the fist is traveling 120 mph as it hurtles toward the face of a Kaiju." Fitting the characters into the physically based simulations came down to what Hickel calls a "million little decisions." "The water had to look realistic, so if we had a creature moving through the water, we had to be mindful of the simulation," Hickel says. "If an animator had a foot moving 900 mph to sor John Knoll and Director Guillermo del Toro. He would do CineSync sessions with both, and additionally, joined in on the dailies whenever he could to stay aware of the other shots. "The grunginess of the Shatterdomes came through Guillermo's direction. The tone of the place," Pasquarello says. "At first, it was too clean, so we had to make it feel more like a working place that would get dirty. Guillermo is amazing. He can break apart the frame in a way that changes the mood from one area to another. Sometimes, it's just the way sections are lit. You know that if you worked in that area, you would deepen the mood. By breaking up the areas, we could feel the space. Although ILM provided the assets, we had the opportunity to help develop the look." Working at arm's length from the studio in San Francisco had some advantages. "We were this little offshoot project," Pasquarello says. "We weren't out of sight, out of mind, but it was kind of what I wanted. Our challenge was to contribute to the film without diverting John's attention; to complement the film without burdening the ILM crew, which was taxed already. And the cool thing about the team in China is that they rose to the occasion. They were really dedicated. They did great." – Barbara Robertson CG W July / August 2013 ■ 43