RON HOWARD: Industrial Light & Magic is such a remarkable name for a company
and a place that's going to make these visual effects, because it says it all.
I never wanted to leave that place,
because they understood how to make magic and how to have fun at the same time.
(LAUGHTER)
What is possible now in film and TV
is in large part because of risks George Lucas took
and ideas he had that may have existed elsewhere in other times,
but he was the one who actually put them into effect.
(WHOOSHING)
The company was founded on this idea of using technology
to let us do things that had never been done before...
to create striking and memorable imagery.
We were the only visual effects house in the world for six or seven years.
J.J. ABRAMS: There really weren't visual effects until then.
There were optical effects, and there were sort of practical effects.
When I saw Star Wars...
- (LASERFIRE) - (EXPLOSION)
Yee-hoo!
...it took everything to another level on such a massive scale.
GEORGE LUCAS: They said, "Oh, well, it's just for space movies."
I said, "No, it's not. It's for any movie."
(INDISTINCT CHANTING)
HOWARD: The vibe at ILM,
it's this sort of intersection of loosey-goosey intellectualism...
(SHOUTS)
Mind the step, sir.
...and a kind of enough angsty need
that created a certain kind of energy of innovation.
ILM was the place.
I mean, there was just no discussion about it.
They were kind of rebels.
They were outliers.
(SHOUTS)
They were geniuses.
I was so in awe of them, I thought I could never afford them
and they wouldn't work with a little pissant filmmaker like me.
I had a kind of religious experience with ILM.
I suddenly saw that everything was going to change.
(ROARING)
It was going to change everything for all of us...
(ENGINES BUZZING)
...and for audiences everywhere.
And we were never going to go back.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
KNOLL: For years, there were a number of company meetings
where George would address the whole company.
Actually, in this very room.
And inevitably, somebody would ask,
"Hey, are you going to do more Star Wars movies?"
And his answer was always, "Oh, I'm thinking about it,
"but, you know, I don't have anything to announce yet."
A lot of the people who had been here a long time
were very desirous of working on more Star Wars movies.
And frankly, most of the people that had come through the door since
had grown up on those movies.
And the idea of getting to work with George on a Star Wars movie
was kind of what they lived for.
I remember very well the day we were called into C Screening Room.
And we were given the impression
that this was a meeting that we did not want to miss.
And George was there.
- On or off? - It's on.
All of us were in the same space at the same time
and heard him say that he wanted to make more Star Wars movies.
And to hear him say that was incredibly exciting.
And almost a little frightening.
(CHILDREN LAUGHING)
Come on.
GEORGE: The prequels, I hadn't written them yet.
But I couldn't write them unless I knew what I could do.
That's the one thing about Star Wars,
is I always wrote for the technology I had available to me.
Episodes IV, V, and VI were using old technology.
And the analog technology wouldn't allow us to do so many things.
We pushed that as far as we possibly could here at ILM.
But I knew the other stuff I wanted to do was much more complicated.
George Lucas was always forward-thinking.
He was always mentioning how he wasn't satisfied
with one bit of technology or another and how he wanted to see it change.
(CLANGING)
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
And if I were to go on and do the next three,
that I needed digital technology for.
(BEEPING)
GEORGE: I knew the digital technology
was going to be ultimately the most important thing in movies.
And we spent over ten years
and lots of money to develop digital technology,
'cause it didn't exist.
He'd look at things and go,
"There must be a way we can use computers to do editorial better,
"there must be a way we can use computers to do audio better,
"and we must be able to use them to do visual effects
"in a way that's cleaner and better
"and more versatile than we can, you know, do on the stage
"and with traditional techniques."
You start drawing dotted lines
back to everything that came out of innovations that he made.
You know, everybody knows about Pixar,
but there's, like, EditDroid and Pro Tools.
We had somebody who was in charge of creating digital sounds.
We started building these digital editing systems.
I remember the EditDroid that George created.
It's the first computer editing system.
PAUL: It was like a séance.
You had this table with a screen and no film or anything,
and all of a sudden, the image would appear, you know?
It was sort of magical.
Change is always very difficult.
So we started the Computer Division.
ED: Initially, we did not have nearly enough compute power
to make images that were good enough.
But as we got closer...
(GLASS SHATTERING)
...we began to produce something that did have an impact.
(ROARING)
When I saw that, I felt like I had seen the future.
It was a great time being here
as the digital side of the world was growing up.
The digital work was coming in and allowing us to do stuff
that was impossible before, or very difficult to do before.
Everybody at the company knew George was moving towards making these prequels.
He talked about it so much,
and he was exploring digital technology while he was doing that
and trying new things out.
I was ready for CG as soon as we could do it.
When George put the department in here, I thought this has got to be the future.
And the momentum in that direction became very strong.
(BELLOWING)
JAMES: You think about the impact Jurassic Park had on people.
They couldn't fathom how what they were seeing was done.
(GASPS)
It's... It's a dinosaur.
Especially in the wake of Jurassic Park.
Um, all of the other approaches started to be looked upon
with more of a jaundiced eye.
Like, well, yeah, optical is okay,
but wouldn't the shots look better if we did them in digital?
At that point I'd say to clients, "Well, yeah, but it's going to cost more."
"Yeah, it'll be better, right?"
And you'd go, "Well, I don't know.
"I think we can do a pretty good job with these techniques."
But digital effects took on a momentum that you really just couldn't stop.
DENNIS: I was surprised that the digital revolution hit so quickly.
And this is like three or six months after Jurassic came out.
I had many colleagues,
people who had been great contributors to the company for a long time,
that were, you know, on the cusp of being out of work.
LORNE: That just traveled like a ripple through ILM.
You know, I just wasn't cut out for CG at all.
There was so much difference between me manipulating things with my hands.
I was always kind of a materials guy.
JIM: I wouldn't say that the model shop and the stage folks and so forth
had animosity or anything towards the digital people.
They kind of saw what it was and respected it.
I think, though, they couldn't help but see their world shrinking
as that was happening.
So, you know, it was a wistful time at best, I'd say.
KIM BROMLEY: But then all of a sudden, it was upon us.
And you could feel it coming
because of the hiring wave that was happening in computer graphics.
The Jurassic Park crew, who had pulled off this amazing feat
and changed the history of filmmaking,
were then almost lock, stock and barrel the entire crew,
plus new people, went on to Casper.
(DOOR CREAKING)
- Morning. - (GASPS)
Oh, no, no. Please don't scream. I promise I won't hurt you.
To my knowledge, I don't think there'd been a key character
that was fully animated that ran throughout a film until that time.
And it was bedeviling.
How would you do that? I mean, how would you film it on the set?
How would you coordinate it in the editing process
so you could ultimately put an animated character
where a surrogate was acting the part out?
Let's start with real for her.
I was the lead supervisor to begin with.
And after a while, Dennis came on board, too, to help,
because it was a monster of a show to try and deal with.
DENNIS: There were like two or three hundred shots,
and they were all performance-based, you know?
And you had to be able to read his expressions,
and then the other characters would go around him.
So it was more like making an animated film, a Disney film.
And that's something that ILM hadn't done.
And we had a number of animators in there that really couldn't quite pull it off.
George could certainly see that the technology was pretty close
to being able to do the types of things he was imagining for Episode I.
And we had a number of people that came in
to the computer graphics department and so forth
that were able to help move that along
and kind of help realize George's dream
of wanting to be able to do digital effects.
- JOE: Welcome. - Hi, Joe.
The computer graphics department at ILM...
I started in October of '93,
was about 45 people.
And I think I was animator number nine they hired.
There were six animators on Jurassic.
So it was still early days.
Um, but... it was beyond intimidating.
The legends were there.
Ken Ralston was there, and Dennis was there.
There were people that I knew their names and they were in the hallway, and I...
I had the worst case of impostor syndrome for about six months.
How had I fluked myself into this place?
JIM: Rob Coleman, in particular, is a real interesting guy,
because he came in as a very talented animator,
but his leadership skills just stood out
and he could run a crew with great efficiency,
and with great empathy and get great work out of people.
And it really was important on Casper.
We had to hire a bunch of traditional animators
because there weren't enough CG animators in the world at that point.
And Rob really trained them up to be able to do the work in those shows.
ROB: If it's a digital character,
I'm putting all the effort into making sure
it's a living, breathing, emoting character.
So the first huge breakthrough for me was Dragonheart.
Dragonheart was a very challenging show for ILM to do at the time.
The technological advance on that film which was also groundbreaking for us
was a piece of software called Caricature, which we shortened to Cari.
And what that allowed us to do was to have a high-resolution face
that was really interactive.
We could dial in facial shapes.
Sliders that allowed us to put in, you know, a smile, or a grimace,
or a blink, or a cheek puff or whatever.
So I could see it, and then look, "I'm going to tweak that."
See it again, tweak that, tweak that, tweak that,
make it better, better, better, better.
So that was a huge leap for us.
Even then, I knew his bloodthirsty nature.
But I thought my heart could change him.
You want to lean into the voice actor's performance,
because that will help the audience believe that
that voice is coming out of that animated character.
So for example, on Dragonheart, I had Sean Connery.
And with a character like Sean Connery,
you've also got the legacy of all the films that they've done before.
(SCREAMING)
(GUN FIRING)
So in Dr. No, there's a famous sequence in there...
You coming out?
ROB: He's been told that there's this dragon.
I tell you, Mr. Bond, let's get the hell out of here.
Listen, both of you.
And he says, "There's no such thing as dragons."
There are no such things as dragons.
So we just took that line
and we animated that as our proof of concept for Draco,
because I've got Connery talking about dragons.
But what's fabulous about his face,
and I can't do it,
he will talk out of one side of his mouth and he'll move it to the other side.
So it'll be like, "Oh, yes, Moneypenny."
It goes kind of across.
So we put that into Draco.
And the director was like, "Fantastic!"
We dragons love to sing when we're happy.
Well, you're not like a dragon at all.
Well, how many dragons do you know? Hmm?
I found out later on...
that George was watching from his house in San Anselmo.
They were showing him, of course, what ILM was doing.
And when he saw Dragonheart, he then said to Jim Morris,
"ILM is ready to do The Phantom Menace.
"They've now shown me they can do digital characters.
"We're ready to go."
This is about 5.8 million of CG resources.
JIM: He could see that the technology was there
to do a lot of what he wanted to do.
So my conversations with George were more about
how inexpensively can you do all the things they want to do now.
And, you know, George has always been very mindful of the budget.
Obviously, he's paying for these films himself,
so there was a big financial issue to solve there.
The reason that we made so much money
was because the films were so cheap, so inexpensive. (CHUCKLES)
And that was the secret to the whole thing.
JOE: Well, plus you had Rick McCallum.
- Yeah. - (JOE CHUCKLES)
Well, he was the enforcer.
My name is Rick McCallum. I'm the producer of Star Wars.
We can talk about this new little project.
Rick McCallum was George Lucas' right hand.
And he had a reputation for being
the almost literal 1,000-pound gorilla.
That takes about a third or half of the doors out.
Half.
Rick is a fascinating character.
- You're talking about till next Thursday? - Yep.
At the moment, that's what the forecast is saying.
(BLEEP) Shit.
I've had Rick do some very, very generous things to me.
And then there's also been budget meetings and stuff.
When I left his office, I thought I might bleed out on the way to my car.
RICK: If we pay somebody $1,000 a week, that's our total cost.
If we do it through you, it costs $2,000.
That's just what it is.
CHRISSIE: He didn't want to follow ILM's structure
of budgeting and billing and that sort of thing.
JIM: I remember vividly a meeting where we bid the work on Phantom Menace,
and the best we could do, we came up, and we thought, like,
it's going to be $102 million to do the effects on this movie.
And Rick slides a card across the table from me,
turns the card over, and on the right back,
as everybody is talking, and writes "62 million all in,"
and then draws a line with my name for me to sign. (CHUCKLES)
That was kind of typical of Rick.
He had an aura around him of being like a mob boss.
(LAUGHS) That was his reputation.
And then you'd just have this finger outline.
WOMAN: Rick...
- Sorry. Yeah, but we own this footage. - (WOMAN LAUGHS)
Whenever he was around,
for me, I would just, I don't know, stand behind something
or avoid eye contact.
This is the place we should have been six months ago.
Do we have it louder outside? Okay.
Wasn't enough noise.
A movie runs like most things that are run well,
on a combination of fear and loyalty.
You're loyal to somebody 'cause you like them,
you're afraid what will happen if you don't do what you're supposed to do.
- JOE: Welcome, Rick. - Thank you, Joe. Nice to see you.
- That's the way you get things done. - JOE: Yeah.
Unfortunate, but true.
There was some serious shit going down at the company at that particular moment.
ILM had grown a little bloated.
We had lawyers and accountants telling you how to do your shots.
RICK: We believed that there was an art
in doing the very minimal necessary effort to do a shot
instead of the maximum effort.
We needed a refresh.
And we actually called it the Rebel Unit.
And John Knoll was really an architect of that.
GEORGE: It's much more flexible. It's like a commando unit.
Rebel Unit is what we call it,
but what it really is is ILM has become the army,
and what we're building is this little commando unit.
The idea for the Rebel Unit, um, really came...
It was actually the film Star Trek: Generations.
I'd been going to SIGGRAPH for years,
learning about computer graphics...
walking the trade show floor,
seeing what kinds of tools were being developed.
And I got excited
by some of the desktop CG tools that I was seeing.
Things that couldn't do Jurassic Park, but what they could do,
they could do more efficiently than what we could do.
The thought was use simple tools for simple jobs.
DENNIS: They were using SGIs, maybe, at the time. Silicon Graphics machine.
We decide, "Well, okay, let's just try doing stuff on Mac."
I really thought, and I still think, it was a great idea.
This is a 200 and...
200 megahertz.
And when I got this only nine months ago,
it was the fastest notebook computer in the world.
And we didn't ask permission, either. That was...
We're just going to do it.
We're just going to get some Macs, we're going to do this work.
And it's powerful enough to do real work.
I got 80 megs of RAM in there.
I have a Zip drive in here now.
KNOLL: And so, I built the Enterprise in a program called formZ,
which is mostly an architectural modeling program.
And then I textured it in Photoshop.
And animated it in a program called Electric Image.
And I started getting pretty enamored at this workflow
that, hey, you know, these inexpensive, simple desktop tools
are a valid way of doing work.
And I used it on two of the Star Trek movies.
And that sort of led into my work on the Star Wars Special Edition.
(ENGINE WHIRRING)
(STAR DESTROYER CANNONS FIRING)
George wanted to do this rerelease of the original Star Wars.
And then, as part of that restoration project,
George wanted to redo some visual effects shots in it.
There was a landspeeder crossing the main plaza in Mos Eisley,
where, originally, there was this sort of heat shimmer effect
that was added to try and hide the wheels.
And apparently, George always really was bothered by that shot
and figured we should redo that.
(ENGINE HUMMING)
(CHUCKLING) And there's this problem of where do you stop?
- (ENGINE REVVING) - (ROARS)
(ENGINE HUMMING)
KNOLL: You know, once you decide
you want to fix this and you want to fix that,
then other shots stand out.
And pretty soon, it turned into a special edition of the film.
(IN HUTTESE)
We did the work quite a bit cheaper than we could have done any other way.
The shots looked beautiful.
I was very happy with how they turned out.
(EXPLOSION)
And then that kind of ramped up into a much bigger group
doing the same work on Episode I.
JOE: John Knoll.
John Knoll's a genius. (LAUGHING)
With a film like Star Wars, every single object has to be designed.
It's something that most people can't grab a hold of.
Most filmmakers don't have to cope with that.
And a lot of the film depends on how well-executed the designs are.
- JOE: Welcome. - Thank you. Hi, Joe. (CHUCKLES)
I had always known that I wanted to come out to work for George Lucas
ever since I saw Star Wars when I was 15 years old.
Because I grew up studying your work, Joe.
And that was my schooling.
Because I didn't really take formal art classes.
So when George made that announcement, it was just mind-blowing,
because like, "Okay, maybe I could have a chance
"to actually work on Star Wars."
And the irony was that, at that time,
I was the creative director for Industrial Light & Magic.
I was head of this art department.
It's a little more extreme, because we need more stuff up in here.
And all these little highlighted areas are still real soft.
And I thought, "Okay, well, George is going to staff up this art department.
"I'll be first in line."
And the funny thing was that George actually said,
"No, I don't want anybody from my companies.
"I want to look worldwide."
So I realized I had to just get in line like everybody else.
And so, I submitted my portfolio.
And I didn't hear anything for a long time.
And it was kind of like, "Okay, well, maybe if I'm lucky,
"I'll get to be a PA in the art department."
And then I got a call from Rick McCallum.
He said that George really responds to your portfolio.
And so we went up to George's office.
And I remember that day vividly,
because it was like my first opportunity to really actually just meet George
- and speak with him. - JOE: Yeah.
And I was terrified.
The first thing that he said was that,
"Forget everything you thought that Star Wars was.
"We're starting fresh. We're creating a new style."
LUCAS: We have to reinvent the wheel here.
CHIANG: And then right away,
George started to describe all the things that he wanted in the film.
A gyroscope thing that's sort of moving around on it down here.
Suddenly he pushes forward, and there's three buttons right there.
- Yeah. - Where those three buttons give a thing,
- and then you cut. - Yeah.
It turned into a production meeting. And I was completely unprepared.
Same thing for the starfighter. It can't be a knob or it can't be a...
- Okay. - It can't be fuzzy.
And I didn't have any paper or pencil.
And so, right away, on the coffee table, there's a big stack of napkins,
so I just grabbed and I started to write down everything.
I remember at the end of that day, my mind was just completely spinning.
All right. See ya.
(DOOR CLOSES)
My first day on the job was January 15th in 1995.
And first thing in the morning, I started to draw a robotic stormtrooper.
And I went into work and I finished it, and it was one of my first drawings.
And it was a complete failure.
And I knew that nine times out of ten, my drawings would be garbage.
My art skills aren't that strong.
Art is really hard for me. I have to really struggle.
Maybe that's because I didn't get proper training,
so I always had to stumble my way through it.
I've always felt very insecure in terms of my position
that, you know, I'm faking it, that it's not real.
The first year was absolutely horrifying for me...
because I just... I put so much pressure on myself.
I didn't want to let him down.
At first, it was just myself and Terryl Whitlatch.
And then once he had an outline of the script,
I started to hire more people in there,
like Jay Shuster, Ed Natividad, Iain McCaig.
We were just doing world-building in its purest form,
without knowing what the context was.
We were designing not only spaceships and creatures and worlds,
but we were also doing costumes.
WOMAN: Yeah, that's beautiful.
DOUG: We were doing the whole thing.
And so, trying to do all of that while trying to figure out,
well, how do you create this tapestry of animated characters
that make it all believable?
We had no idea who these characters were.
I have never before or since been involved in a project
that had that much secrecy.
I hadn't read the script. None of us had read the script.
There was no script around.
We knew from day one
that George wanted to create sort of a new synthetic character,
and he went all in on it.
He wanted to create a new comedic character
that was modeled after Buster Keaton.
There we go.
- A first draft. - (CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)
Official first draft.
DOUG: And that was Jar Jar.
This was the first time we were going to create
a completely synthetic CG character that could live in a live-action film.
- (FOOTSTEPS THUDDING) - (SCREECHING)
I mean, obviously, we had done the dinosaurs,
and those were solid, but they didn't have to emote.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
DENNIS: When we first started hearing about Jar Jar,
we thought, "Are we ready for this?"
You know, we had done Casper, we had done Dragonheart,
we had done a number of films that have full CG characters,
but this was someone who's human-sized,
pretty close to it,
has to act with actors and be composited in all the shots
but look like he's right there, and have a personality.
And it seemed like an extremely hard thing to do
for the hundreds of shots that was necessary
for him to be a minor-major character in the show.
Jar Jar is one of those interesting things where when we started to design him,
we weren't quite sure where George was going.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
- Hello. - WOMAN: Hello.
DOUG: And I remember we chased it for a while,
and he kept encouraging us to go cartoonier, more graphic.
And there was this one drawing that Terryl did way back.
He said, "That's the closest thing that I want."
And it's funny because how Jar Jar evolved, so to speak,
was from a little drawing, just a little sketch I had done
for no reason at all but for my own entertainment.
And I had brought that with me.
George saw it and said, "Yeah, this is kind of like...
"This is kind of like Jar Jar in the eyes."
And so I just kind of call these proto-Gungas.
And that's kind of how he started.
The next day he came in and says, "Make that into an alligator now."
(LAUGHS) And at first I was like, "Wow, an alligator, and mixed with this?"
TERRYL: He kind of went through stages where he looked sort of like a frog,
and then like a salamander, vaguely like an elephant,
vaguely like a pig, which happily didn't last too long,
a little bit of dachshund. (LAUGHING)
Jar Jar has been many animals,
and actually is composed of quite a few animals.
He really wanted to lean into sort of this comedic aspect,
where his face was really malleable, where his eyes could pop out,
and we'd give it long ears to kind of flop around.
We were always thinking in the back of our mind,
well, are we pushing the envelope too far?
It almost felt that we were taking too much of a risk.
Because if Jar Jar didn't work, it was going to ruin the whole thing,
because he was a key character in this whole story.
What the heck. All right.
- Okay. - Bye, good night.
DOUG: We were creating all these wonderful designs,
but we knew we had to pass it on to the next department
and they had to actually execute it.
That's where it was really great,
because then I could actually see the terror in their eyes.
Because, you know, George had given us the terror to design these things,
and now we actually had to implement them and make them real.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
KNOLL: There was a meeting out at the Ranch
where George had had Doug Chiang and his group...
storyboard all of Episode I.
JEAN: The storyboards were on kind of moving whiteboards.
And they just kept wheeling in more and more.
And they were completely covered with beautiful artwork.
And each one of these represented incredible amounts of work and new worlds.
And, you know, it was an astonishing amount.
And George talked us through the whole story of the film,
you know, one board at a time.
LUCAS: This is real. This is not. This is real.
KNOLL: And it was dizzying to keep up with it.
LUCAS: This is gonna be tricky.
KNOLL: Because every client comes to us
wanting to do something a little bit different
that we hadn't seen before,
but almost on the very first storyboard,
there were things that, "Oh, yeah, no, we don't have a good way of doing that."
JOHN: We've got a lot to think about here.
(LAUGHTER)
He was regularly including things that were way beyond our capabilities.
I know this is going to work.
I know it's going to work because it's impossible.
But we're the only ones in the world that can pull this off.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
One of the big challenges we had was making a CG character
one of the main cast throughout.
Like, he's on every other page of all three films.
Jar Jar was the only character that really wasn't defined as far as a visual,
obviously, he had, because he was created by the art department.
But more of an essence of character.
It was the one role
where the actor was going to exclusively make that character.
JOE: Welcome.
- Thanks for having me. - JOE: Oh, yeah.
In 1996, I was doing STOMP in San Francisco.
(RHYTHMIC TAPPING AND CLACKING)
And Robin Gurland, who cast Phantom Menace...
she was in the audience.
I'm sitting there watching, and he was at the kitchen sink scene
where he was moving his arms, and his arms were absolutely boneless.
And I'm looking going, "That's Jar Jar."
And they were like, "Can you come to Skywalker Ranch and audition?"
And I was just... What do you say to that?
You know, "No"? I mean...
So I drive to Skywalker Ranch for my first audition.
And, you know, when you get there,
the first thing you see is they have, like, a fire brigade...
and all have the firemen have patches, like fire patches,
and they're all X-wing fighters.
So I was like, "Whatever this is, I'm getting to the next level of this."
So Robin just set up the camera and just asked me to do things.
He immediately went into the scene,
the mannerisms, the...
Even the way he kind of babbled a bit.
It was as if he read the script and he was Jar Jar.
And he knew nothing about the character at all.
JOE: So, you got the role.
Yeah. Yeah.
Shockingly.
(CHUCKLES) Yeah, I mean, I really wasn't expecting it.
When he came on board, it was terrific,
because Ahmed just had this sort of physical presence about him
where he could move, you know, in really incredible ways.
And so we realized, okay, well, then this started to make sense.
If we applied his performance to this character,
maybe there could be magic.
AHMED: George and I worked really closely together for about two years.
George is incredibly astute as a film historian.
And so, he would really dive into these Buster Keaton movies
and talk about why he's moving the way he's moving.
And that it just wasn't a comedy bit, but it was a real motivation behind it.
And that helped me a lot.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
In Phantom Menace,
it was really me and Liam Neeson kind of together most of the time.
I always imagined us being like a buddy cop flick.
You know, it was like Qui-Gon and Jar Jar.
ROB: I remember standing with George.
They were shooting the scene when Qui-Gon's running
and he runs right into Jar Jar.
(JAR JAR WHIMPERING)
(QUI-GON GRUNTING)
And George introduced me to Ahmed, and we had a chat there.
And so, we have a full CG version that we did using you as inspiration,
- all your loose movement. - Oh, cool.
So I can show you both of those.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah.
I love Rob Coleman.
Just a brilliant human being.
So generous and so incredibly open and collaborative.
Rob was the guy who was going to make this thing work.
The combination of animation and live-action
was always the thing that got me.
It even goes back to, like,
I remember being a little kid and watching Mary Poppins.
Dick Van Dyke dancing with those penguins,
even as a child, I knew the penguins were animated.
But the magic was,
here's a man interacting with the animation.
(THUNDER CRASHING)
And I was a kid who was reading Cinefantastique and Starlog
and was really interested in behind-the-scenes,
and I was a massive fan of Ray Harryhausen.
I remember running home from school.
I lived in Toronto, and there's a channel out of Buffalo, New York,
that played monster movies in the afternoons.
And they would have, like, a double feature of Ray's films.
(GROWLING)
My generation... We were 13 when Star Wars came out,
and I can't even tell you how many times I saw it that summer.
(LASER TURRETS BLASTING)
And I think it was probably at Empire or at Raiders
where I started to notice that
there's this company called Industrial Light & Magic.
All these things were just leading me towards this path
that I never thought I would actually achieve.
And I can draw a line directly from those experiences
as a kid watching those movies
to what I got to do on the Star Wars films,
is the combining of animation and live-action.
Must remove the watch.
Gungans don't know what time it is.
ROB: Having that character sharing a screen
with Ewan and Liam and Natalie...
MAN: Stand by.
... who are alive and breathing and naturally engaging for the audience...
and having to have that digital character holding his own,
that was a very tall order for us at that time.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
George then said, "Just watch Ahmed."
AHMED: Which way?
Great.
Ahmed was super energetic, really positive,
big smile on his face all the time.
I think he just couldn't believe he was in a Star Wars movie.
JAR JAR: "Ah, dissen cozy."
And he just had this glow, this energy and this happiness.
(BELCHES)
Excuse me.
George wanted Jar Jar driven absolutely physically by Ahmed.
- (BELL RINGING) - MAN: One more time.
ROB: So the initial plan is that Ahmed's wearing a full costume
and he's wearing a little Jar Jar hat.
But along the neck, you can see some little green LEDs,
because he was only going to be computer graphics
from the neck up.
He was only going to have a CG neck, head, and ears.
The rest of it was going to be Ahmed.
DENNIS: George was saying, "Well, the whole body is the guy.
"We've got a great actor.
"I just want him to have this interesting head."
Maybe the hands can be augmented with fake hands he's wearing or something.
Great. Sounds great. Why can't we do that?
I was sort of opposed to that idea for a couple of reasons.
If you were going to do just a head replace,
you had to match the camera, you had to match the figure,
you had to do an exact lighting match.
So it looked to me like it was just going to be more work
to do the partial than it was to do the complete.
RICK: The thing that we freaked out about when John suggested doing it full CG is,
you know, we could see, "Oh, my god, this is going to cost
"two, three, four million dollars more."
GEORGE: Jar Jar is constantly being debated.
ILM, who said we could save a ton of money by using a guy in a suit
and just putting the head on it, has now come back and said,
"We don't know how much money we're gonna..."
So they still have to get their act together.
They haven't figured out exactly what the most economical way to do this is.
So I challenged ILM and I challenged John to say,
"Okay, can you prove that, that it'll be the same cost?"
And John quickly did a test.
KNOLL: The purpose of this test is to see
what the head attachment is really going to be like.
And it's been brought up as a concern
that we may need to have some additional tracking marks further up
because we have to match the shoulders as well
to actually do that blend.
And they sent it back to ILM.
It was ingested, and we then went about trying to match move...
A character moving through three dimensions with this neck,
and it was incredibly difficult.
Really, really hard.
Even when we got the neck in,
even if it was a pixel off, our eye sees it as a misalign.
It didn't believe in it.
KNOLL: And we had an animator animate a full CG version of it
with no compromises,
designed with all those proportioned limb-length things in there.
ROB: And the side-by-side is what we showed to George
and made our case about
why this is going to be really hard to pull off
just to do the neck and head.
And we shot Ahmed doing a little action here
so we could test to how well the head replacement thing would work.
Here are two different approaches.
Bottom, of course, is the head replacement.
The top is the fully animated figure.
As it turns out,
the fully animated one was actually about half the man hours
of the head replacement.
So we spent $100,000 on that suit that we didn't need to spend.
The test somehow came out to be more expensive
if you replaced the head and neck than if you did an all-CG one.
I was always very skeptical of that.
The difference of the approach we would take without a suit
is about $1,300,000.
I think, at some point, there's sort of a threshold
where, jeez, it's going to be easier to handle that.
DENNIS: The rumor I heard later was that that was not true.
They actually gave the match move of the head
to an animator who was not very fast...
and they gave the full animation version to an animator that was super-fast.
So...
(CHUCKLES) Was the test cooked? Not in my mind.
And it just was like, has the company come to this,
or have the artists come to this? (LAUGHS)
If there was something going on
where Rob had better talent on the all-CG test
than the just the head version, he didn't tell me that.
JOE: What a great rumor.
- Is it true? - It's true.
- George told me about it. - JOE: Ah!
And I said, "That makes sense."
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
So George agreed in that he liked the animation,
but he was really concerned
because he said, "I don't want to lose the essence of Ahmed.
"That's why I cast him.
"And your animators, I'm sure, are great, Rob,
"but I doubt that they can do this."
And I remember Jeff Light at ILM...
Give that a try.
... was the person who introduced me to the idea of motion capture.
MAN: I hope that's not going to be too small for you.
It's supposed to be a little tight.
You wear a very tight, very revealing catsuit.
Okay, everyone, let's start with a brief warmup.
We're going to start with a stretch.
And in this bodysuit, you have all of these targets.
Those targets are tracked by cameras.
And action.
AHMED: The targets are captured into the drives,
and what the animators use as a skeletal system
are these points that they call a point cloud.
George, take a look at this.
And they use that to literally draw your character over.
You now have captured that motion, which you can use in any way you want.
You can manipulate it. You can scale it.
If we can just use your performance, there's no need to keyframe animate it.
You do these great things where you're moving, your hands are like that.
If we can capture that, then we don't have to animate it.
We can take those and stick those into different scenes.
It was so experimental at the time.
None of us knew what would work and what wouldn't work.
But because we were all together
and because George had so much faith in it...
we really made something special.
Back in film school, you could release that as a final project.
(LAUGHTER)
Get the right music.
There were times where I thought that, personally, my own personal take,
I thought maybe we were making the character too slapstick or too goofy.
- (ELECTRICAL BUZZING) - (GIBBERING)
My tongue!
(BABBLING)
But at every turn, George said, "No, no, no, no.
"This is his role within the movie.
"This is his position within the story."
He told me once, he said...
I said, "I don't want to be goofy with this thing."
He goes, "Dare to be dopey."
He says, "Dare to be dopey, Rob. Make this dopey."
And I'm like, "Okay. Okay."
- Hmm? - Don't touch anything.
ROB: And so we did.
(BLOWS RASPBERRY)
JOE: George once said to Rob Coleman, "Dare to be dopey."
Yeah.
- JOE: Did he say the same thing to you? - No. He never said that to me.
I was probably dopey anyway. (LAUGHING)
Um, so I didn't need that note. (CHUCKLES)
(JAR JAR SCREAMING, YELLING)
This was an enormous undertaking.
We had gone from I'm guessing around 200 shots on Men in Black
to 2,000 shots on Phantom Menace.
And the scale and scope of it was overwhelming.
I mean, I was really anxious about the project.
It was kind of all on his shoulders, and he was under a lot of pressure.
ROB: We had a weekly production meeting.
And there was only ever one agenda item on the thing.
It said, "Can we get the movie done?"
And the answer, month after month, was,
"No, we cannot get the movie done." Even though we were in production.
Just a continual tsunami of work.
Just fix that hand.
And then behind the people.
ROB: I was suffering from insomnia,
and I was worrying about
the millions of people who had waited for this film.
I remember what it was like
to come out of Return of the Jedi at 19 years old.
And back then, George had said, "There's more films."
I think he had said there was six or nine films.
And I remember thinking at the time,
I wonder how long I have to have to wait to see those next movies.
Not knowing that I was going to be one of the people
to help bring it to the screen, of course.
So I was worrying about all these millions of people.
It got so bad that I drove up to Skywalker Ranch
and went into his office, and he was like, "What's up?"
And I said, "The pressure of the millions of people waiting for this movie.
"I don't know if I can do this."
And he laughed at me and he said, "What are you talking about?
"You need to worry about one person, and that's me.
"And I'm happy with the work."
And I was like, "You're happy with the work?"
And he's like, "Yes, I'm very happy with the work."
And I went home and I slept like a baby.
I just kept saying, you know, keep trying.
And eventually, they got it.
We're supposed to be the experts who can break down these ideas
and figure out how to turn them into an image on screen.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
MAN: Yeah, not bad.
- Right. - Yeah.
There were plenty of scenes that were beyond the capability of the tech
that was available to us at the time.
You know, a big one for me was the podrace.
(ENGINES REVVING)
GEORGE: Yeah, there you go.
Let's bring the map in here.
Podracing made easy.
(LAUGHTER)
My first real exposure to the podrace was Doug Chiang's paintings of it.
He'd done some beautiful concept paintings.
I knew that was going to be an important set piece in the movie.
So what is this between the pods here?
- It's sort of lightning-like... - GEORGE: Yeah. It's energy.
It's a super-energetic magnetic field that holds them together.
George had described it as like the Ben-Hur chariot race.
- (CROWD CHEERING) - (MAN SCREAMING)
I thought, "Boy, this is going to be a really cool sequence."
BEN: The podrace at first started out as its own movie.
I was usually brought in a few months before principal photography.
Okay, here we go.
Storyboards in a traditional sense, which are static drawings,
you start with those, because you have to start somewhere.
But you really need something in motion.
We never started anything without Ben starting the same day that we did.
And Ben would put together a chase of old footage,
and we would follow it frame by frame.
BURTT: Let's explore all the different chases we've ever seen.
Let's start by looking and analyzing every car chase, every helicopter chase,
whatever it might be. Every chariot race.
So let's have a lot of life in this, okay?
And let's run the wind machine.
(MACHINE WHIRRING)
And action!
So I got my son, put some goggles on.
My son was sort of playing Anakin.
And I used a weed blower so his hair is flapping.
The art department out on the third floor at the Ranch,
the videomatic team, built two podracers,
an Anakin full-sized one, and a Sebulba.
They were just built out of foam board.
And we took them down to the basement where we had a green screen cyclorama,
and I just used this... I had like a Steadicam JR.
I mean, you could float, and he pretended to fly.
And then we comped that together with backgrounds.
No children were harmed in the making of this animatic.
Ready? Jump. (GRUNTS)
And that worked out well. It gave me something to cut with.
(LAUGHTER)
- I mean, that new Sebulba's great. - Yeah, he was fun.
It's funny. We're going to have to think about his acting.
And then ILM could take it from there.
It's hard to judge now, because they are grey.
HABIB: Both John and I are very nerdy, geeky guys.
And he said, "You know, these pods go at very high speeds and they have to crash."
We have to simulate something breaking apart.
- Like, exploding. - Yeah, exactly.
"But I'd really like to simulate them,
"as opposed to hand keyframe all the motion, because of realism."
I'll show you the geometry in Maya.
KNOLL: I come from a family of scientists and engineers,
so I'm trying to inject some scientific accuracy into things
even when they're, you know, sort of silly fantasy.
And the design of the pods was, you have these two jet engines, basically,
that are held together with this force field.
And then there's these ropes attached, one to each engine,
and then you're riding in the back.
And I kind of wanted them to have this sort of floaty bounce to them...
that felt like they were suspended on springs.
I had done a 2D proof of concept before that,
and I showed that to Habib and said,
"All right, let's see if we can do a 3D version of this."
There's another one where we did that trick
where we turned it into a spring and then pushed it apart.
So the idea that Habib and I came up with was
we're going to make an invisible framework
that suspends the engines and the cockpit from springs,
and we're going to animate that framework,
and then the engines are going to bounce around and shake
and have that sort of simulated complexity to the motion.
And then all the pod pieces would react with physics.
If it couldn't, that means you must be doing something wrong with your animation,
because physics is never wrong, right?
And I still remember the moment...
I hit play and we watched these two engines
just floating like this, affecting each other...
very subtly.
And John and I look at each other and we're like, "This is it."
(BOTH CHUCKLE)
I'm like, "Yeah, this is great, this is exactly what we want."
(ENGINES BUZZING)
But then we had to do the crash shots.
That was the...
That was the really big challenge.
George didn't want things to just blow up into nothing.
(EXPLOSION)
He'd pointed us to Formula 1 races.
(ENGINES REVVING)
The aesthetic that George wanted to pursue for the crashing podracers
was one of just kinetic energy.
That he referred to these Formula 1 car crashes
where one of these racing cars hits a wall
or collides with another vehicle at 180 miles an hour.
That there's a massive amount of kinetic energy in them
that takes a really long time to dissipate.
The aesthetic of that was something that George really loved.
You know, when they hit, they tumble
and they just keep going and pieces shred off of them.
Now you're trying to crash something at 800 miles an hour,
and you want it to start rolling at the right time.
And we're having a lot of trouble coming up with it doing that...
so we put these enormous...
I call them blocks of foam, but they were...
We put these enormous invisible heavy blocks of foam
that these things would slam into at 800 miles an hour and go tumbling.
And we could adjust their timing and position
and how much they weighed.
But we never actually rendered them.
First, you take the biggest pieces
and you say, "Okay, I want this pod to hit the ground
"and then break into two pieces and they tumble."
So you run a simulation on that till you're happy.
And then you kind of lock that in and go,
"Okay, let's put the next level of detail onto that."
So what are all the small pieces that are breaking off of that
and start tumbling around?
And when you're happy with that, you go like,
"Okay, let's put in the smoke, let's put in the fire,
"let's put in the sparks, and the dust, and all of those things."
And ultimately, most of these shots will end up having,
like, 20 to 30 different simulation elements in them
to give them the complexity that a real event like that has.
- (ENGINE REVVING) - (THUDDING)
(ENGINE BUZZING)
(SCREAMING)
(SPEAKING HUTTESE)
You know, the interesting thing about George is
he is not very demonstrative.
And sometimes the way you find out
that he's happy with your work is very indirectly.
Um, when we were working on the podrace, as an example,
I elected to build the stadium as a miniature.
And it was pretty big.
- Keep that dolly. - Yeah.
DOUG: There's this misconception when people look at the prequels
that they think it's all digital.
Episode I had more miniatures than any of the Star Wars films...
In fact, all the Star Wars films combined.
MAN: Nothing like a good walk in the morning.
If it doesn't move, push harder.
That's my philosophy of life.
DOUG: And they were huge.
Looking at the rocks, they look great outside.
- Yeah, they do. - Really good.
KNOLL: One day, George was here for a VFX review,
and at the end of the review, I asked George,
"Hey, I've got the podrace stadium models set up over on the stage next door.
"Do you want to see it?" He said, "Yeah, all right."
- Good morning. - Good morning.
Fine day for a Boonta race.
KNOLL: So I took him over there and I showed him.
"Okay, so this is... There's Jabba's box here."
We thought that one, okay, should be about a third
with a bunch of people walking out.
Touring him around through the whole thing.
Are you going to put maybe some canisters, rocks and things?
- Baggage and, you know, props. - Yeah.
KNOLL: And he just went, "Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
"Okay, great."
Great.
KNOLL: And he left.
Okay.
KNOLL: And about an hour later, I got a call from Martin Smith,
who was one of George's editors on the picture
and said, "Is that model still set up? I want to come see it.
"George was raving about it." (CHUCKLES)
And, you know, I got no indication of that from George.
George came to me one day and said,
"All the work here surpassed my wildest expectations."
And I said, "Did you tell the crew that?" And he goes, "No."
I said, "Let's go tell the crew that."
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
- DENNIS: This may be it. This is it. - This may be it.
- This is it. - This is it. (CHUCKLING)
- GEORGE: I don't have any choice. - DENNIS: Okay.
Just a formality.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
Finished on time, on schedule.
Everything was done. And we watched the film.
You know, we were amazed.
And the credits roll, you know, for like ten minutes.
The lights came on,
and George just turned to us and said, you know, "Thank you."
He was just so genuinely proud of ILM,
um, that they had been able to do
what he thought was impossible to even ask for.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER, LAUGHTER)
From Close Encounters to Phantom Menace.
Great working with you.
The most fun I've ever had on a film, really, since I started.
Well, I enjoyed it. You guys pulled it off.
WOMAN: It is.
KNOLL: It's hard for me to be objective,
somebody who was like right in the middle of this chaos.
Hey, Steve, go ahead and move it.
I was very pleased that we had survived the process.
MAN: Keep the pod shaking, Jeff. Just shudder it around.
KNOLL: As massive a project and as intimidating at it was
when we embarked on it, I felt a real sense of accomplishment.
We were all just so excited about what we were able to accomplish
that we were just excited to share that.
(CROWD CHEERING, SHOUTING)
I spent two years helping the Jedi Master himself, George Lucas,
create the movie that he wanted,
and I was incredibly proud of the collective work that ILM had done.
Such a rush. I didn't even get a chance to highlight.
- WOMAN: You don't have to highlight. - (LAUGHS)
New York Times review. This is it?
We put so much time and so much energy and so much care into this thing.
And you know, of course, people were telling me that,
you know, prepare for your life to change, and this is going to be transformational.
But none of us knew what really was going to happen.