Film
Viz Kids
From the aliens of Mars Attacks to the flying debris of Twister, today’s hottest special effects are created by graduates of Texas A&M’s Visualization Lab.
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The sudden clamoring for special-effects talent is the product of a fundamental change in the way movies are made. Once upon a time, studios shot movies, developed and edited the film, and delivered it to theaters. But film production today is increasingly done with bits and bytes rather than a movie camera. While in the old days film relied on location scouts to figure out where to shoot, digital production allows backgrounds or entire scenes to be generated wholly or partly by a computer. A real person or set can be photographed and the image electronically pasted into a computer-generated background or into older footage, as was done in Forrest Gump. And while traditional animation used to rely on a progression of sketches, which were photographed frame by frame and then run through a projector to create motion, in digital animation those sketches are more simply—and cheaply—scanned into a computer and colorized.
The secret of the Viz Lab’s success is an array of powerful software tools. At the start of a project, a designer might use a computer to build a “rough render,” a basic form without much detail, and then apply a texture map, a software program that puts on the digital “skin”: muscles, hair, scary green alien scales. A texture map lets the designer cheat and construct the figure much faster than by drawing each individual muscle or hair. ILM designers, for example, used texture maps to create the dinosaurs’ skin in Jurassic Park; they had a tougher challenge working up the monkeys and lions for Jumanji, since monkey hair and lion manes have more intricate detail. Using a technique called inverse kinematics, the designer can define a skeleton inside an animated figure and use another program to instruct the computer how the joints will work together; thus an animator can move, say, an arm by pulling on a hand. There’s also a program that allows a figure or scene to be lit by moving a digital point of light and adjusting its angle and brightness to create the desired effect.
The Viz kids are a close-knit bunch who often work all night on projects at the lab, which never closes. The program has an unusual mix of students: Some have degrees in art or computer science, but others majored in everything from physics to the classics. Randy Hammond, a third-year student who expects to get his degree this month, studied chemistry as an undergraduate; Anne Woods, a second-year student, was a journalism major; and Bill Sheffler, a first-year student, studied environmental design at A&M’s architecture school. Over lunch on a typical day, they talk about—what else?—movies and special effects, picking them apart detail by detail. “We can systematically suck the magic out of any film,” Woods says with a laugh. “I put movies in the tape player and watch them frame by frame.” What movies’ computer-generated effects do they admire? All mention Toy Story and Terminator 2, which they agree was brilliant in its rendering of the liquid shape-shifting villain that Arnold Schwarzenegger battles. “You could see the reflections change with its every movement,” Sheffler says. But the students also agree that special effects have their limits. They’re still impressed by the lighting, shading, and compelling plot of a classic like Citizen Kane. “You can have a well-rendered and well-lit model, but you still have to understand the story,” Hammond says.
That dose of reality is refreshing but necessary. In the reel world, technical directors and animators may spend months working on a single character or creature, only to see their work end up as seconds or minutes in a finished project. “I spent an entire semester to produce ten seconds of animation,” says Hammond. McLaughlin, who was a developer and a technical director for different special effects on Jumanji, worked for months on the lion’s rippling muscles and skin around the rib cage. His architecture training actually came in handy in constructing a realistic lion. “I relied on the eye I developed in architecture to try to get all around and inside the creature,” he says. Haggerty was one of about seventy ILM employees who spent months working on visual effects for Twister that amounted to mere minutes of screen time. But what minutes they were. Some of Haggerty’s digital lighting and computer-generated flying debris ended up in the dramatic sequence at the movie’s end, when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton try to outrun a tornado and dodge flying fence posts; they finally strap themselves to a pipeline as debris whirls around them. “You’re trying to simulate a controlled chaos,” Haggerty says. “If you take too much control, it looks staged. It’s balance that you’re trying to achieve.”
Though entertainment is the hot industry of the moment for Viz Lab vets, A&M has purposely resisted gearing the program in that direction. “We’re constantly fighting the perception that we’re an animation school,” says William Jenks, the lab’s director. “Our goal is a broad-based understanding of the three-dimensional, virtual environment and to involve a viewer fully in the richness of motion, detail, and audio.” In the future the program’s faculty expect more graduates to go into publishing, medicine, architecture, and archaeology. That’s just fine with some critics in the architecture school, who grumble that the program’s students are gravitating too much toward Hollywood. “There was some griping and complaining at first,” says House, “but it really is a star program.”
And even if A&M’s special-effects wizards barely see their names roll in the list of credits, stardom has other rewards. McLaughlin was playing soccer at an ILM Fourth of July celebration when the star of Jumanji joined the game. “So I was kicking shins with Robin Williams,” McLaughlin says. “I don’t think I’d be doing that back in Texas.”
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