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CG•Live Action n n n n "I wanted to make an inspirational movie for teenage boys," Lucas told Stewart, noting that the film is one of the first all- black action pictures ever made. "This is not a movie about victims. This is a movie about heroes. It's about kids 19 and 20 years old flying the fastest prop planes ever made, going up against jets." Creating those prop planes and jets, and much of the world around them, were Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Pixomondo, and Universal Production Partners (UPP), with an assist from Rising Sun Pictures, Rodeo FX, and Ollin Studio. ILM's Craig Ham- mack was overall supervisor for the film. In addition, a production group at ILM man- aged schedules, turnovers, and data wran- gling; and a team of supervisors reviewed the work coming in daily from the other vendors. "Our facility was too full with other work—Pirates, Rango, Transformers, Cowboys & Aliens—to take on the entire project," says Hammack. "The schedule for the film wasn't entirely predictable, and it was a lot of work for a film with a modest budget. Going to outside vendors made sense to everyone, and George [Lucas] and Rick [McCallum, producer] were open to trying new things. They were on board with the idea from the beginning." Hammack had worked with Pixomondo on Airbender, and McCallum recommended UPP, a studio based in the Czech Republic. "We knew we wanted those two vendors, and then it was a question of how much work they could take on," Ham- mack says. "I had a comfort level with Pixomondo, and I had worked with Björn Mayer, who was also the supervisor on Airbender, so I wanted to give them the most difficult effects work beyond what we were doing. And UPP is quite good with matte painting, so I gave them the German air base and the initial Tuskegee air base, along with some additional heavy CG work." Ollin extended sets to create a German prison camp and the surrounding hill towns. Rodeo FX handled an awards ceremony, filmed with actors on greenscreen, turning the empty space into a convincingly real air base. Rising Sun created a sequence in which the airmen fly home. "We were comfortable giving Rising Sun any of the work, but they were one of the last vendors to come on, so they had a small sequence of the pilots flying over the American base doing victory barrel rolls," Hammack says. "It was surprisingly dif- ficult work because some of the shots were in cockpits and we couldn't film the actors doing 360-degree rolls. So the challenge Animation supervisor Paul Kavanagh at ILM asked animators at all the studios to create flight cycles for each type of aircraft being buffeted by wind and air pockets before creating squadrons or dogfights. Layers of CG clouds helped create the illusion of speed. was in making the photography fit with the CG. It became a re-lighting exercise with the pilots." All told, ILM and the vendors produced 1524 shots overall, of which approximately 900 were dogfights or shots looking out from cockpits. The rest were environments—matte paint- ings and set extensions. For previs on the aerial shots, the team worked with Radical 3D, a studio that creates visual effects for the History Channel's show Dogfights, and Halon, a frequent collaborator with ILM. "Halon has been helping us evolve zViz, our previs tool that George [Lucas] has been driving," Hammack says. "They even- tually moved a team to Skywalker Ranch to work directly with George on the film." Jason McKinley from Radical 3D stayed on as a consultant to review shots during postproduction. Piloting the Work ILM provided a majority of the asset models, did look-dev, created layouts for the German and American air bases, and Opening Sequence: iLM "This sequence shows how the German 'wolfpacks' would attack the American bomber squadrons and how effective they were because the tactics used by the US airmen were ineffective," says Paul Kavanagh, anima- tion supervisor at ILM. "The Germans would send a decoy squadron. The American pilots would follow the decoy, glory-hunting for kills, and leave the bombers unprotected. Then the German BF 109s would come in and decimate the bombers. We had the B-17 bombers, the German BF 109s, and the American P-51 Mustangs. The bombers are in a tight 'V' formation in groups of three and four, stacked in a way that makes it hard to penetrate the center. They had belly guns, top guns, a side gunner, and a front gunner. But, they are sitting ducks. We always had to think of different ways to show how maneuverable the fighters were." Digimatte painters at ILM created environments with ground planes and skies with clouds and wispy layers to create the illusion of speed. One of the biggest challenges for ILM was the destruction, because the high speeds at which the planes travel and, therefore, at which the explosions occur, made it difficult to use practical elements or a simulator designed for static explosions. February/March 2012 31