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n n n n CGI years of film school with Gore Verbinski.” Each time Verbinski gave the artists a se- quence from the storyboards to work on, he’d explain how he would have shot it if he had been on set. “From that point on, we treated the entire movie like a live-action shoot,” Ben- oit says. “Every term was based on live-action cinematography; all the camera work was based in reality.” Te layout artists would, for example, bring Layout artists and look-development technical directors gave the saloon characters their grungy look. Lighting artists created the mood with help from cinematographer Roger Deakins. “He wanted to direct the ensemble even if there would be technical problems with tangled lines,” Hickel says. “He wanted props and costumes. He wanted to walk the set and know how many steps Rango takes in the sa- loon to get to the bar.” Verbinski directed and recorded the actors during a 20-day period on stage sets with props appropriate to the scene—tables, chairs, and a bar in the saloon, for example, a desk in the mayor’s office. A curtained area nearby gave the actors an opportunity to record their lines in a quieter area, but they did so still as an ensemble, and, Hickel points out, they had the sense memory of the earlier performance. “Gore likes to create chaos and then catch mo- ments with a butterfly net,” Hickel says. Even so, Verbinski had spent the previous year creating a story reel—2D thumbnail drawings that he cut together into the entire film. While he directed the actors on stage, a script supervisor checked their timing against the reel. After the recording session, editors added selected bits of dialog to the reel. Ready for the Roundup Te story reel gave layout artists a starting point for selecting lenses, positioning the cam- era, blocking characters, and assembling assets. Layout supervisor Colin Benoit concentrated primarily on camera work; Nick Walker, who joined ILM from PDI/DreamWorks where he had been head of layout for Shrek the Tird, handled the assets. “Layout is where all the assets funnel in and come together,” Hickel says. “We hadn’t focused on dressing a natu- ral terrain, on pulling together every pebble, bar stool, shot glass. Our layout artists know matchmoving.” Benoit had moved beyond matchmov- ing into cameramoving, especially on the last Star Trek film, where he found himself facing black cards with instructions, rather than live-action plates. For Rango, he worked directly with Verbinski. “It was amazing,” Benoit says. “Normally, our layout artists don’t work on conversation scenes. We don’t see how a director shoots something that doesn’t have effects in it. Tis was like two Tone on the Range In addition to characters, the artists had to create the world those characters lived in, and this, for Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), was perhaps the greatest departure from their visual effects work. All told, the modelers, painters, look-dev artists, digimatte artists, and set dressers created 289 creature as- sets, 653 prop assets, and 134 environment and set assets. The town of Dirt has 40 buildings made from old wood and other objects the animals scavenged in the desert. The saloon is a gas can. ILM art director John Bell created concept art for several of the buildings, miscellaneous water towers, the opening high- way sequence, and the desert. “Crash [McCreery, production designer] had a distinct idea about how the desert would dif- ferentiate during the story,” Bell says. “In the beginning, when 18 March 2011 Rango is displaced, he wanted a bleak, barren, nondescript landscape with foothills at least 30 miles away. Later, the land- scape becomes more interesting, engaging, three dimensional. But the overall feeling was that it was hot, arid, and everything is brittle.” Bell drew rocks with hard edges, gave branches jag- ged angles. The town, too, needed to give the feeling that this was a hot, arid place. “It’s purposely de-saturated,” Bell says. “If you study the buildings, you’ll see a lot of blue, rust, yellow, ochre, a wide variety of color. But, we didn’t want it to be as bold and colorful as other CG films that push saturation.” To create the desert, the digimatte artists expected they would paint and project 2.5D backgrounds in 3D space, as they typically do for visual effects. However, they quickly the town of Dirt, Rango, and Beans into Zeno, and then shoot the scene with virtual cameras equipped with virtual lenses that matched real- world lenses. “For the most part, we used the same lens kit that Gore shot Pirates with,” Benoit says. “We’d shoot scenes as if we had a film crew with grips and gaffers in the town of Dirt.” Sometimes, Verbinski would come to ILM and frame shots within locations while the lay- out artists were working on the rough layouts, by looking at first-stage geometry created for the sets and backgrounds. He could see the 3D set on a Wacom Cintiq tablet, change the camera angle, the lenses, and the focus. “Sup- pose we had a shot in the general store,” Benoit says. “We’d populate the store with characters that we could move around. Gore would be on the motion-capture stage. He could frame the shots and take snapshots. Or, if the space seemed too small, he might ask us to push a wall out or move a post.” When working at his desk, Benoit typi- cally keyframed the camera, sometimes with Verbinski looking over his shoulder. Occasion- ally, he used an Xsens device that gave him ori- entation control. Te rough layouts with the keyframed cam- era moves and blocked characters moved into animation, and then the final animation came back to the layout department for a final cam-