Light & Magic (2022) s02e01 Episode Script
Are We Ready for This?
1
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.
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.
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.
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.