Computer Graphics World

May 2009 34 n n n n Visual Effects tors who performed the digital doubles for that shot, brought creatures, spaceships, and other objects to life, and, in an unusual move, also created previs and animatics for many of the shots. As often happens in Star Trek movies, Captain Kirk finds himself on a planet with a strange and threatening alien life- form, and for this film, the animators per- formed two such creatures. One is a cross between a polar bear and a gorilla that they dubbed "Polarilla," and the other, "Big Red," looks like a giant lobster with huge jaws and 120 eyes on the back of its neck. Big Red tumbles down an icy slope while chasing after Captain Kirk. "We looked at the way the stuntman fell down the slope and had the creature fall with the same dif- ficulty," Kavanagh says. Most of the animators' work, however, takes place in outer space, and many of those shots are all-CG. Usually, ILM re- ceives plates—the filmed footage—from which the layout department derives cam- era moves and sends matching 3D scenes to the animation department. Animators then create the shots based on animatics—pre- visualizations provided by the studio. For all-CG shots, the layout department creates the camera moves based on the previs. But that changed for this film. "J.J. [Abrams] changed so many sequences af- ter the edit that the previs was pretty much thrown out," Kavanagh says. "e previs guys were gone. e editors just inserted black cards with J.J.'s description of what he wanted the shot to be when he wanted to tell the story in a slightly different way." us, to create shots that matched Abrams' new ideas, ILM needed to create both the previs and the final shots. Fortunately, the team had decided early on to make the production more efficient by eliminating the usual back and forth between animation and layout. Instead, they had created one department and filled it with people who could do both animation and layout. us, when they discovered that black cards had replaced many of the shots they had already ani- mated using the previs, the team was bet- ter able to adjust to an empty space with no plate, no camera, and no previs than they might have been before. For many of the sequences, the new combined animation/layout team, which grew to 18 people, had to redo about half the shots, and they created 70 shots in the end sequence entirely from scratch. "We'd assign people a few shots in a row so they could take on a little mini-sequence," Kavanagh says. "ey would pump out an animatic with a new camera and a new location that the editors could cut into the footage." When the animators received feedback from Abrams, they could quickly finish the shots. "Because we had done the previs work in our pipeline, we could add the nuances and hand the shots to a TD to start render- ing," Kavanagh explains. "It took a lot of effort to do the shot from scratch, but the payoff was that the shots were almost ready to go." Beam Me Up e biggest payoff, however, was in giv- ing Abrams the flexibility to exercise his imagination after postproduction was un- der way. ILM followed its tradition of inventing new CG technology to create the effects. And, in changing the studio's normal pro- cesses by creating a streamlined animation/ layout department, the visual effects crew made it possible for the director to use CG in the best way to tell a tradition-breaking story that's set to break box-office records. As Scotty says in the film, "I like this ship! It's exciting!" n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. (Top) ILM worked closely with director J.J. Abrams to update the transporter effect and retain its previous appeal. (Bottom) Production designer Scott Chamblis moved the Enterprise bridge into the future. There, ILM floated data on the windows rather having it display on viewscreens, as in the past.

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