Light & Magic (2022) s02e02 Episode Script

1
(GROWLING)
STEFEN FANGMEIR:
You know, after Jurassic Park,
that decade really changed
what filmmakers and producers thought,
"Okay, now this is possible,
this is possible."
And those were the exciting days.
Those were the days
where people would come to ILM
and ask for things
that had never been done before.
We didn't know what the next thing was.
We had to rack our brains
and look around for ideas anywhere.
STEFEN: I think a lot of people
pulled scripts out of their drawers
that had stuff in them
that couldn't previously be done.
But now we're saying, "Okay, let's check
with ILM whether it can be done."
This is so huge.
How are we going to do this?
How do you make water look like water?
How are we going to simulate that?
How can we make this real enough
so that it can actually work?
-(BLASTERS FIRING)
-(LIGHTSABERS HUMMING)
How do we not, you know,
freak out about this?
And how do you move ahead
and keep it fresh and new?
And that's hard.
(MACHINE GUNS FIRING)
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
(SHOUTING AND CHEERING)
I was asked by George to come to New York
for the press screening
The first press screening
of The Phantom Menace.
And then there was all the interviews
that happened after those.
Hi, I'm Doug Kriegel
-from KNBC in Los Angeles.
-Nice to meet you.
-I'm Kirsty with The Movie Show.
-Oh, great.
What's the hardest part of bringing
something like this to the screen?
When you get the script and you read it
and there's an innocent line like,
"7,000 Gungans march out
into the ground battle."
And though, there I was, incredibly proud
of the collective work that ILM had done.
And as the line of questioning
continued through that afternoon,
my heart started to sink,
because I was picking up on a theme,
which was these reviewers weren't
necessarily enormous fans of Jar Jar.
CREEDLE: Thank you, everyone.
COLEMAN: George invited me to fly back
with him on his private jet,
and Lynne Hale printed out
all of these reviews,
gave him a stack of print.
Over the hours,
he just worked his way through the pile.
He looked up at one moment
and he just caught my eye,
and he just waved me down.
He said, "You don't look very happy.
What's up?"
I said, "Well" I pointed at the pages.
"They don't like Jar Jar."
And he said,
"I've been through this before.
"I didn't make the movie for them."
Yeah. No, I think they couldn't imagine
a goofy character like that.
Of course, you've got to remember,
in the original Star Wars,
everybody hated 3PO.
-Sir, might I--
-Shut him up or shut him down.
-(EXPLOSION)
-(GRUNTING)
GEORGE: They thought
he was annoying and stupid,
and it was a terrible character.
JOE: I don't remember
people disliking 3PO.
Oh, well, how about this one?
You came to me
and you gave me your design for the Ewok.
And I said, "No, no, no, no.
Dare to be cute."
-(GASPS)
-(EWOK EXCLAIMS)
Cut it out.
GEORGE: "Make them cuter.
Make them little teddy bears."
And you went, "Uh"
You rolled your eyes
and you sort of slumped out of the office.
You know, I'm trying to appeal
to a very large group,
and the group really consists
primarily of 12-year-olds.
-WOMAN: What's your favorite character?
-Jar Jar Binks.
I liked Jar Jar Binks
because he was funny.
COLEMAN: He goes, "Jar Jar is amazing."
I said, "Yeah, but we did all this
We tried so hard."
And he went, "Hey, hey, hey, hey.
"Did any one of these articles say
he didn't look real
"that Jar Jar wasn't believable?"
I said, "Well, no."
He said, "Well, then you did your job,
didn't you?
"You and the team
made this character alive.
"They just don't like him."
One of the stars
is a pure animated creature
-named Jar Jar, is that right?
-Right.
I had a hard time understanding him,
by the way.
(IMITATES JAR JAR) Meesa Jar Jar Binks.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHING, APPLAUDING)
I will never let Jar Jar
live on this stage.
REPORTER: The ease of web page creation
has led to a number of sites
dedicated to bashing
the childlike bipedal frog
from The Phantom Menace.
AHMED: With all the websites
that popped up,
it kind of drove the narrative
to traditional media.
If you made a website back in those days,
you were considered
some sort of computer genius.
REPORTER: One website is even calling
for George Lucas to recut the film,
citing the ease he should have
at deleting a digital character.
-(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKING)
-(CROWD CLAMORING)
Was that a mixed review? Fantastic.
You know, I went to the premiere
and it was weird. (LAUGHING)
There was this weird kind of thought
of it's just going to be Jar Jar
and I'm not going to be there.
But in the film, it was very obviously me.
Then, boom.
Getting very scared
and grabbing that Jedi, and, pow
And then, when I saw my name
in the credits,
I was like, "Oh, okay.
I'm there, I'm in it. I did it."
Can you talk a little bit
about Jar Jar's backstory?
I know he explains a bit in the movie,
but I couldn't understand him.
AHMED: At a press junket,
I was asked this very ridiculously obscure
question about Jar Jar's sexuality.
I was taken aback
because Jar Jar's a seven-foot amphibian.
So, um, I didn't quite know
how to answer that question.
Um, but that's when
I kind of realized that
people were seeing something
that we weren't prepared for.
After that, it was
just like this flood of backlash.
What is that accent based on?
I mean, it sounds vaguely French.
No accent. No Jamaican.
No Patois. No Creole. No French.
No German. No nothing.
JOE: So Rob Coleman and Ahmed Best
were pretty much devastated
by the response.
What did you tell them?
I told them "You're in the movie business.
"80% of the people
in the movie business get trashed.
"Personally.
"In very, very destructive ways."
McCALLUM: That's when I heard
that we were trying to exploit
this poor amphibian creature
with Rastafarian hair.
We were racist.
Jar Jar's a racist character.
MICHAEL DYSON:
He has a stereotypical Black walk.
He has a pep role.
I'm not suggesting
that George Lucas is a racist.
What I am suggesting
is that George Lucas
has tapped into unconsciously
some racist and stereotypical
conceptions of Blackness.
It really was just draining,
you know, to constantly
have to defend the work.
Because that point cloud
is so representative of my performance
and it almost is a physical signature,
even if you talk about the character,
you're talking about me.
But it wasn't just me as Jar Jar.
We were Jar Jar.
ILM was Jar Jar. George was Jar Jar.
I'm the face of it, but it was all of us.
We all hurt because of it.
And I felt as if I let everybody down.
I felt it was my fault.
I was 26.
What should have felt like
the beginning of something quite wonderful
felt like the end.
I remember it was
really, really early in the morning,
and it was one of those nights
when New York City was asleep, you know?
And if you're from New York,
you know New York never sleeps, right?
But there was no one
on the Brooklyn Bridge.
No one. It was just me.
I don't even remember walking across it.
I just remember myself
on the outside of the bridge
kind of leaning up against
one of the big pillars,
and I see the Statue of Liberty.
And, um, what I think to myself is
"I'll show every single one of them
what y'all did to me.
"I'm going to make every one of you
feel what you did to me."
So I'm leaning on the bridge
and I'm getting closer and closer to
Just going, you know.
Just being free of all the talking
and people and the
And then this really
unexpected, out-of-nowhere
whoosh, gust of wind blows just at me.
You know, out of nowhere, and I
I lose my balance
and I just grab on
to the side of the bridge.
And then I laughed to myself.
I'm like, "What are you doing?" (CHUCKLES)
You know?
"What are you doing?"
And then, reality.
It was like New York
just popped back up. Right?
I saw everything.
I saw the lights, I saw the Towers.
Everything just came back to life.
And I was like, "Holy shit."
I'm
You know what I'm saying?
What am I doing out here?
And then, um, I got scared.
I got really, really scared.
And I was very happy
that I was afraid, you know?
Because that meant I wanted to live.
(SIGHS)
I think the lesson that was learned
from everyone who does CGI characters now
is to talk about the actor
and not just the character
as if the actors don't exist.
The hardest part about it is,
I was the first person to do this,
and I was the first Black man to do this.
The erasure of artists,
especially African-American artists
as pioneers in the industry
is something that has been pervasive
since the industry's inception.
And it's something
that needs to be talked about,
and it's something
that needs to be rectified.
There were a lot of things
that critics poked at with Episode I.
Choices George made or didn't make.
And certainly, Jar Jar was on that list.
Because Star Wars isn't just a movie.
It taps into the collective zeitgeist
of just millions and millions of people
who found it to be
the greatest cinematic experience
they'd ever had as they were growing up.
I understand the dislike from older fans.
KNOLL: The people that were fans
of the originals
forget that they were kids
when they saw them,
are kind of evaluating them
with adult sensibilities
and not really understanding
what the intent was.
You love what you grew up with.
And George had said,
"I guarantee that later in life
"10, 20 years down the road
"kids who are 10 now
are going to come up to you
"and tell you that
Jar Jar is their favorite character."
(AUDIENCE CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)
AHMED: It's just great to be in this room.
The energy is palpable and exciting
and so very positive, you know?
(AUDIENCE CHEERING)
Love it. Love it.
He would say things like,
"Twenty years from now,
it's going to be completely different."
And he's right. It's happened.
I think everybody here, you know,
was proud that they pulled it off.
The scope of the effects,
that level had never
really been done before.
Also, there was so much work to be done,
that it was just a lot of good work
for people to sink their teeth into it.
(INDISTINCT CONVERSATION)
GEORGE: In the beginning of ILM,
when we first moved into Kerner,
we had about a third of the main building.
Tiny, little thing.
Compare that today
where it's six blocks long
and three blocks wide.
-(CHUCKLES)
-KNOLL: It's like a studio now.
ILM was scaling at the same time
as filmmakers were getting
more comfortable using visual effects
and pushing the envelope
and resurrecting ideas
that now seemed within their reach.
These heavy effects-driven projects
can be really challenging.
A number of them were real nailbiters.
JEAN: I am constantly in awe
of how a crew of people at ILM
can solve pretty much any problem,
any filmmaking problem
that's presented to them.
Back in those days,
when you were meant to do something
that hadn't been done before,
the studio or the producer
or the director was always saying,
"Well, let's do a test and see
if you guys can actually pull it off."
DENNIS: There was a project came through
that Spielberg wanted to do
involving a tornado.
He said,
"Can you do a test shot for Twister?"
And this was a chance
to do particle systems,
which really had not been done before.
There's no way to have done it
with any technology that we know of.
It could be really horrific.
But let's do it as a shot.
It was the digital version
of gum and bailing wire.
You couldn't just go
to your software store
and buy a tornado off the shelf.
Compute power was also still limited
at that time,
so we had to be very efficient
with creating these particle systems.
BROMLEY: It was Habib Zargarpour
who developed these particle systems.
All right.
They said, "You're the particle guy.
"You have eight weeks. Go."
DENNIS: Habib was the perfect person
to come in
and make the software system
that you could animate
like you could a character.
But you can move it in any shape,
do it any way,
have speed controls, thickness controls,
wind controls, all sorts of things.
I knew I wanted to be a designer
since I was 13.
I grew up internationally
in Iran,
then Belgium for a couple of years,
south of France in high school.
The original Blade Runner was
one of my favorite films of all time.
Still is. Through that film,
I found out about Syd Mead.
SYD MEAD: Ridley Scott,
the director of Blade Runner,
asked me to design
the vehicle ideas for the film.
ZARGARPOUR: Then I found out that Syd Mead
went to
Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design.
And I was like, "I have to go here."
I thought, you know, I could be
an industrial designer, but for movies,
because then I don't risk
frying someone with my toaster.
Like, it doesn't have to function.
It has to look good, you know?
(SCREECHING)
When I saw Jurassic Park,
I got tears from emotion from
seeing those visual effects, you know,
and wanting to have been part of it.
I didn't know about ILM
until I was at ArtCenter
and my computer graphic instructor said,
"You know, ILM's coming to see
if people can intern there."
So then they made the job offer.
When I started, I ended up on The Mask.
They said, you know,
"When the mask comes off Jim Carrey,
"we want to make this green gas."
And I said, "Well, I can use my particle
knowledge and create this green gas."
Particles have a mind of their own.
When you simulate them,
you have millions of them,
and you have to just give them
general guidelines.
You can have forces of attraction,
forces that repel,
they can collide with things,
but you can't say
this particle's going to do this thing.
Because there's too many of them.
(SQUEAKING, POPPING)
(SCREAMING)
And I got to use the particles
on Jumanji
to get the kid and all the animals
to suck them into the board.
After that,
the challenge came from Spielberg.
"Can you make digital tornadoes?
"If so, we'll make the movie.
"If not, we're not going to
make the movie.
"No pressure."
DENNIS: Habib did all the really
groundbreaking stuff on this
to be able to control the velocities,
and the currents and the density
and everything of the tornadoes,
and making all out of CG little particles,
little points that you could, like, swirl,
have swirl,
they could get hit by a current,
they could go up like this,
they could move across the ground.
MOHEN: Habib was sort of
a mad scientist.
It does really
fun working with him as well,
because you could tell
he would get so excited.
And I found this really infectious
because, you know, he'd just go like,
"Come over to my desk
Let me show you something."
And then he'd basically pull up
some physics setup
that he'd figured out how to simulate.
ZARGARPOUR: The concept
we came up with is
it's an F5 tornado, it's the biggest one.
We have to prove we can do it.
And it's surrounded by tons of debris.
And this is based on footage we saw.
It's so enormous,
that what looks like a speck
is actually a car, or a truck, or a bus.
We filmed this plate from inside a car.
When you're driving along
and you make a turn like this
and then, boom, you see this building
and there's the tornado
right behind it and it's huge.
Rips the roof off, tears pieces up,
they go flying all over the place.
ZARGARPOUR: The idea was one of
the debris pieces comes towards you
and gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger
becomes a tractor.
This tractor crashes into the ground
and the tire goes into the window.
We sent the shot to Steven Spielberg
and Kathleen Kennedy.
Dennis was on the phone with them
while they're going to watch it
for the first time.
I was under double pressure,
because my daughter was due the same day.
I was on time. She was late.
They said,
"Okay, we're gonna roll the film."
And just silence.
And, you know, they're watching it.
And then we hear, like, loud screams
and all these sounds,
like, "Oh, my God" (LAUGHS)
That was like, "Okay, yes, they like it."
And apparently,
they didn't even have a script yet.
But they knew that they could make it.
If they could do a tornado,
they could get a good script.
And so this particle rendering
unlocked several things,
including water for Perfect Storm.
JEAN: Water was something that was,
like, "How are we going to
"How are we going to do it?"
That was one of the things
that had never been done successfully.
STEFEN: Well, if they can do tornadoes,
maybe they can do massive storms at seas.
I was actually working at that time
on Galaxy Quest,
but I'd heard that Wolfgang Petersen
was coming up to ILM.
And being a huge fan
of Das Boot, of course,
and him being a fellow German,
I thought, "Oh, God, I want to meet him."
So I showed up in that meeting,
and I said a few things.
And I still remember very vividly
walking out of that room and saying,
"Oh, my God, I'm so glad I'm on a project,
because this is going to be really hard."
(GALAXY QUEST THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
I really enjoyed working on Galaxy Quest
because it was just such a good script,
and the comedy was great.
That was a hell of a thing.
Then Wolfgang called up to ILM
a couple of weeks later
and said, you know, "I want Stefen."
I think people were probably
still at that point
talking about miniatures and water tanks
and this and that.
DENNIS: It was just, like, mind-boggling.
How the heck are we going to be able
to make an ocean be directable
by the director?
He wants to come in and say,
"I want this wave to come in.
"I want it bigger.
I want it to hold there for a moment."
How do you do that?
It had to be CG.
They say water and human skin
is the hardest thing to do in CG.
How do you model water,
something that's constantly viscous,
it's changing?
You know, everything's so natural.
You have the air and resistance.
You have temperature.
Everything affects water.
So we have to kind of find a way
to translate that in a digital world.
This was my first big job.
They said, "You know, there's a smart guy
that wants to work on the show,
"a new person in render support.
"His name is Masi Oka."
Hello, Mr. Lee. Nice to meet you.
-Is that Chinese?
-And you?
-My name is Masi. Masi Oka.
-Oh, Masi, yeah.
And he went on to become
an actor on Heroes.
He says, "I'd like to look at
the ocean simulation code."
And I'm thinking, like,
he's not going to really understand it,
so, sure, go ahead.
And he came back the next day
with a printout this thick,
and he goes, "I think we can make
the Fourier transforms
"ten times faster."
We were creating
revolutionary new technology,
just so we could
digitally drown George Clooney.
MAN: And action!
ZARGARPOUR: The really tough thing
with water is that
the droplets stick together
and they affect each other.
When you're doing a tornado,
the dust is mostly just this turbulence,
and they could just follow the turbulence.
But now water, especially up close,
you have these foamy pieces of water
that they stretch and they stick
and they It's like glue.
So we had these things,
we called them blobbies.
And we rendered out
hundreds of these blobby animations
of these pieces of really tiny
pieces of water coming apart.
And then,
when we're rendering a water splash,
we'd actually put
these tiny movies of these blobbies.
So on a big scale
when you watch the whole splash,
you have this sensation
of this sticky water inside it.
The project in general
was a very tough one.
I think the giant waves
were definitely the hardest.
If it's small, you can kind of, like,
simulate a million particles.
When you have this, you're talking about
trillions of gazillions of particles
have to, you know, simulate.
We were under a crazy time crunch
because the level of complexity
of that show
was unlike anything
ILM had ever undertaken.
ZARGARPOUR: We needed to hit the deadline.
And we're dealing with
not just one simulation.
ING: They would have different elements,
different kinds of mists and foams
that you would actually
additionally have to simulate
and then render to composite together.
ZARGARPOUR: We had the wave simulations.
Then we had the ship simulations.
Then the splashes. Then the foam.
Everything depended on everything else.
Sometimes it takes three days
to render one frame.
So we would need 90 days
to do one second of waves.
And you can't get it wrong.
ZARGARPOUR: If Wolfgang would say,
"Can you make that wave go back a bit?"
That was not a simple thing.
ING: And so the level of complexity
of getting the look of stuff right
as well as the computation time
just necessary to render all of the shots
made it so that
we were really in danger of,
for the first time, not delivering.
And that was just something
that's a no-no.
ILM always delivers on time and on budget.
And so, it was all hands on deck.
And even though I wasn't an effects TD,
they said, "We're bringing you on.
You're going to do effects."
I grew up in upstate New York
when Home Box Office came into being
and you could start seeing things
over and over.
Indiana Jones landed on HBO.
I would watch it
over and over and over again. (LAUGHS)
I wound up majoring in cognitive science,
a cross-disciplinary study of linguistics,
philosophy, psychology,
and computer science.
I knew I just wanted to
get a foot in the door
at Industrial Light & Magic.
And so, right after I graduated,
I headed out west.
And I got an interview at ILM.
They said, "Well, you're overqualified
for this production assistant job we have,
"so we're going to make you
"a resource assistant
in computer graphics for Jumanji."
And I was amazed.
I landed in the right place.
The computer graphics department.
This is what I want to do.
(LAUGHS)
There were only probably about
300 or so people at ILM at that time.
And everyone just
really worked together really well,
especially all the TAs.
We were all coming up together.
We were all in our 20s.
And so, we worked really hard,
but we also all played together
really hard.
Perfect Storm was
a really interesting adventure for me.
I jumped in and started learning
how to run particle simulations
and render and light particle sims.
Up till then, I had never done
any kind of effects work.
I really got so stressed out.
But it was also, you know, very exciting
when you're doing something
that is so pioneering.
Can we do it? Should we do it?
ING: In the end, it
I don't know how.
I guess that's part of the magic.
Somehow, the team always pulls through
and we all come together.
And even if it takes
working seven days a week, um
we deliver that thing.
(THUNDERCLAP)
STEFEN: I enjoyed going to the premiere
and just looking at the other people
watching it.
You know, I didn't really
watch the film that much.
I just watched the reaction of everybody
around it at certain moments,
because that's the most satisfying thing.
The other thing that you notice,
these shots go by
Three, four-second, five-second shots.
And just thinking, "God, we worked
on that for three and a half months,
"that one shot, and now it just goes by."
And that's the most
important thing as well,
that nothing pops out as being odd.
(WIND GUSHING)
So there is not a moment
where you're breaking the illusion.
Come on!
ING: It was really effects in service
of telling the story
of these main characters.
And it was natural phenomenon
as opposed to, you know, Galaxy Quest,
crazy critters,
and ridiculous fantastical stuff.
I think it really opened the door
to people realizing that
with enough brainpower,
we would eventually be able to recreate
anything you can see in the world.
(AIRCRAFT ENGINES RUMBLING)
(MACHINE GUNS FIRING)
I'm sticking air in your mouth.
Thank you, guys.
Really appreciate it. Thanks.
Thank you so much.
KNOLL: At the end of Episode I,
I had no idea
whether George is happy, unhappy,
dissatisfied, okay.
But then I got a call
asking about my schedule
and when I would want to come over
to Australia for pre-production.
"Oh, okay, well then, I guess
they do want me on Episode II."
George often likes to look at some
established production methodology
and ask why, and is there a better way,
some new way of working
that nobody else really wanted to try?
Pretty much right at the beginning,
it was,
"One day I'm hoping that
we'll be able to shoot a film digitally.
"One day, we'll be able to do
"nothing but computer graphics
and effects shots."
KNOLL: One of the big adjustments
on Episode II
was switching to digital cameras.
That George was looking at
so much of the image pipeline
being digital now,
that even if we shot something on film,
we'd scan it into the computer.
It's a digital image now.
We were doing digital compositing on it.
We were adding digital characters to it.
Why do we need to have film at all?
Could we not capture
the imagery digitally?
Because then it's going to be
in the computer more quickly.
Skip that stage of going onto film.
And then skip the stage
of going back out onto film.
Let's exhibit this digitally,
let's project it digitally.
Let it be digital imagery
all the way, start to finish.
MAN: George, would you like these lower?
LUCAS: I think the high wide is better.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
GEORGE: We were working under the deadline
of trying to get all the digital equipment
done for Phantom Menace.
Yep, that's good.
We didn't make it.
It took us about six years altogether
to get the digital camera.
There weren't any. They didn't exist.
Okay
what I got to do is get a camera company
to build a 24-frame high-def camera.
We had a meeting with Sony
about what did we need in a digital camera
that we could use
to shoot a motion picture with,
using the same equipment that was used
to record HD TV at 30 frames a second.
Films are shot at 24 frames a second,
because that was the speed they found out
that when you project it
24 pictures a second
you don't see much of a flicker.
You know, it sort of is smooth action.
And I said, "Look, we really
want to shoot digitally
"but we need to make some changes.
"We don't want to change
the internal dynamics of the camera,
"but it has to be shot at 24 frames."
You know, the film industry
is a 24-frame format.
They couldn't understand
how one of the most successful franchises
would use a TV broadcast camera
to shoot a film.
It was just unthinkable to them.
But getting the cameras done
getting a lens manufacturer
to build them
(SHARP EXHALE) Wow!
That just was years and years and years.
You saw more detail
in the imagery that you were getting
from the digital camera
than we were seeing on film.
There were all kinds of disciplines
that needed to be
LUCAS: And is that the program?
retooled a bit
to work for the kind of scrutiny
that we were now seeing.
I remember the first day of shooting
with a digital camera.
We had to bring the makeup department over
to look at the monitor
and show them that
doing makeup for a shot like that,
on a digital camera,
was more like
you were doing a shot like that.
All right, this is a color study
for the grand staircase outside--
Similarly, the art department
went through a learning curve.
Even though the overall feeling was,
yes, everything's going to be CG,
yes, there were almost 600 CG people
but the model shop still had
80, 100 people in it.
We were still working away.
We're going to go ahead
and grab as many parts as we can
and assemble as much as we have together.
The first miniature
that was going to be shot digitally,
was Padmé's apartment,
and I was the lead on that model.
We were really bracing ourselves
for the fact that you might see things
that would normally be
hidden by film grain.
There was a lot of tension
in the model shop
before we took that first model out.
Very, very stressed about it.
This goes down here.
LORNE: Doing a big film
is like going into battle.
You have your sword in your hand
and you're rushing to the forefront.
But if you fall to one knee,
Fon Davis will come along
and lift you up on the other arm,
and you're back on the battlefield.
But if you fall to both knees
and drop your sword,
Fon Davis is going to run by,
pick up the sword,
and rush to the forefront.
Grab all these interiors.
My dad was Air Force
during the Vietnam War.
He met my mom in Saigon.
And I was born (LAUGHS) in 1970.
And then in 1975,
we moved to the United States
at the end of the Vietnam War.
It was a mixed bag.
We weren't accepted in the United States
being Vietnamese,
which is a different type of Asian
than anyone had ever seen before.
And so it was always a little rough.
I was really into making models
and fabricating things
and building things,
and that was where I could thrive
and where I felt comfortable.
(WHOOSHING)
FON: I thought Star Wars was neat,
so I went and looked up
Star Wars books in the library.
Ha-ha!
This page here changed
my entire path of my whole future.
This is the first time I had ever seen
professional model makers.
And this is, like, Steve Gawley
and Paul Huston
and Lorne Peterson, all those guys.
And I thought, "Wow, that's a job?
(LAUGHS) "I want to do that for a job."
Started checking out books and magazines
with behind-the-scenes at ILM.
I used to see Larry Tan, Ease Owyeung,
and Greg Jein in these magazines.
And I thought, "Oh, they let us do that."
Meaning, they let Asians do this job.
That made it somehow more viable
as a career path for me.
This will actually break into
several sections so cameras can get in.
This has to match the actual set
that they shot in Australia.
This is our palette,
the colors we got from the set.
There's a lot of metallics.
FON: All these rooms are going to be lit.
You're going to be able to see
the interiors inside,
and of course, all the exteriors.
Um
Perfect.
FON: When we took Padmé's apartment
out to the stage
and we started shooting it
the weirdest thing happened.
The miniature looked better in camera
than it did in person again.
And we had no idea why this was the case.
We talked to the guys from Sony that
were there to help with the cameras,
and they were talking about the CCD
and how it collects light
and how it collects imagery.
Anything between two pixels,
it's going to approximate what that is
and shove it over
to one of the other pixels.
So what you see is not what you get.
It's going to look really sharp
because everything is being pixelated
in a way that is very sharp
and defined and clear,
but you're still going to lose information
in between each of the pixels.
It was an amazing thing.
Now we had these really, really beautiful,
crisp, sharp-looking miniatures.
But that's not what
they looked like in person.
It was a huge relief.
DAVID: There's all those great shots
following the ship
as you fly over the terrain
and clone warriors are going by.
I wanted to see what the whole scope
of the work was before we commence.
It's either we're going to do this all as
a giant CD podrace terrain approach
or it makes sense
to build a 20-foot spire
and a section of that landscape around it
and do it as a model shoot.
KNOLL: I was really happy
with the miniature work that we did.
It was probably my comfort zone.
I was a model maker when I first started.
And I was a camera operator
shooting miniatures.
So this was something
I have a great passion for.
It was a tool
that I felt like I knew how to wield well
and get good results.
And as we got into Episode II and III,
I got told pretty directly
"You need to get better
at doing computer graphics,
"because computer graphics is the future.
"Right now, you are leaning
on these older techniques.
"It's a crutch."
Yeah, we do need a new background.
"And I'm kicking this crutch out
from under you for your own good,
"because it's going to make you better
at what the future is going to be."
The good thing about the clone battle
is it's only about 90 shots.
I mean, it could have been much worse.
90 shots, but 7,000 characters per shot.
I remember all of us (CHUCKLING)
pretty much except for George Lucas
thought that we should do
the clone troopers as actors in costumes.
Because we knew it would look good
and be fairly inexpensive, actually,
because we would just crank them out.
Everyone fought for it,
and George was very dead set
on doing that with performance capture.
(GROANING)
FON: And it was really funny
because John Knoll
was one of the few people
who could have George Lucas' ear,
and actually pushed him so hard
to do the clone troopers in practical
that one day George just stopped
and he looked at him and he said,
"We're going to do the clones with mocap,
and that's the end of it.
"I don't want to hear another word."
And that was the end of it.
-KNOLL: I'm with you there.
-Okay. All right.
DOUG: His goal was
really always to push the technology
to inform his storytelling.
No one has ever done this.
Let's try it.
Let's see if we can make it work.
COLEMAN: Now, I didn't know
if we were getting too crowded here.
It's when he turns to the dark side,
and we figured
Yeah, well
(BLASTERS FIRING)
And the scope and spectacle,
of course, always grew.
A lot of the charm in Star Wars for me
is the visuals.
You know, creating that spectacle.
Very good.
Very good.
GEORGE: You're about to die.
Extreme terror. Droids everywhere.
You're going to go to
depressed hopelessness.
To acceptance of death.
-To acceptance of death.
-Yeah.
Oh, nice
KNOLL: George was very interested in
getting maximum production value
on the budget that he had available.
And that meant don't build a giant set
if we're going to see it for five seconds.
Let's just build the part
that we really need to build,
and you guys can just do the rest in post.
Don't worry.
It's being taken care of.
KNOLL: There's a lot of little
set fragments and a lot of blue screen.
Certainly, my sympathies were
to the actors.
That'll do nicely.
(SIGHS) Agree with you, the council does.
Your apprentice, young Skywalker will be.
Humina-humina-humina.
Sorry.
When it came time between Phantom Menace
and Attack of the Clones
I set about creating a digital Yoda
to present to George
that we should be given an opportunity
to animate Yoda.
When we were in preproduction
on Episode I,
George had said that he wanted to do Yoda
on Episode I as a puppet.
My first thought was, "Great."
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
KNOLL: Frank Oz is going to come in
and perform the puppet.
That's a no-brainer.
Yes. Absolutely. We should do that.
The reality of that was, um,
not as pleasing.
The sculpt did not have the same charm
that the original did.
CHIANG: His whole jaw structure
is very different.
GEORGE: Well, he looks flatter.
Like, squished.
-He was sick during the shooting of this.
-(LAUGHTER)
It didn't look like Yoda.
His eyes are seriously
It was really, really bad.
GEORGE: And action.
Always two, there are.
No more. No less.
MAN: Which one was destroyed?
I have one more damn line, Chris.
(LAUGHTER)
Will you give me a break?
Frank was hilarious.
He liked to stay in character
when we were shooting.
But no one could see him.
So the way he interacted
with people on the set
was just to be the puppet
and talk to them.
Okay, here we go.
GEORGE: And action.
Um I forgot my line. (CHUCKLES)
-WOMAN: Master.
-Master.
-That's a good take. Can I cut, George?
-GEORGE: Okay, cut.
Oh, my arm is hurting.
KNOLL: Instead of being foam rubber
as it was on Empire and Jedi
Hey, Maria? I'll take him now.
KNOLL: the puppet was made out of
this silicone, so it weighed a lot more.
-OZ: Ready.
-MAN: Okay
Imagine holding this heavy puppet
up above your head
for two or three minutes
MAN: Cameras call mark.
KNOLL: setting up and shooting a take.
-George would say cut
-GEORGE: Cut.
Yoda just died. What happened?
MAN: Okay. Shooting there, please.
Your-- I'm sorry, guys.
KNOLL: On Episode II,
what Yoda needed to do
was really going to be challenging
for a puppet.
You know, he needed to walk around
in a lot of scenes.
And then he has this big fight scene
at the end.
The plan,
pre-production on Attack of the Clones,
was that all acting scenes
were going to continue to be the puppet,
and only the action and the fight
would be digital.
And I thought, "No, we've learned so much
from Watto and Jar Jar,
"I think we can handle Yoda now."
We were talking about the eyelids.
I pulled some shots out of Empire
and we studied those.
You must unlearn what you have learned.
Also, the way
that the lips push together
Together and in a little bit.
KNOLL: We copied that performance exactly.
Including things like, you know,
the little bit of wobble in the ears.
Frank would hold the puppet,
but he's holding it for a long time,
and his hand would start to shake.
The ears would start to wiggle
on the ends.
Even between land.
COLEMAN: He told me,
"Now, don't put any wiggle in."
It had to have the wiggle,
because that's where we're used to.
Rob has a test to show you.
COLEMAN: We went up to Skywalker.
CG Yoda.
I was so nervous to show this stuff.
These are animated renders.
They don't have
any of the texture or pulp,
but it shows some performance.
Its energy surrounds us
binds us.
Luminous beings are we,
not this crude matter.
And well you should not.
For my ally is the Force,
and a powerful ally it is.
-Fantastic.
-COLEMAN: Thank you. (CHUCKLES)
And at that point, he made the call,
no puppet in Attack of the Clones.
You study what Frank is doing
inside that head,
you can almost feel
the hand kind of moving like that.
But I didn't want to go down in history
as the guy who helped create Jar Jar
and the guy who wrecked Yoda.
Junior animators are going to have
a tendency--
Yoda was alive
and this amazing Jedi Master
and had all kinds of subtlety
in his performance.
And I was so inspired by what Frank did.
It was one of the reasons
I ended up doing what I do.
But if you go back
with an analytical animator mind
and you watch it frame by frame,
we as the audience
had projected so much onto that character.
Its energy surrounds--
In Empire, his mouth is basically
just opening and closing.
It's not forming any real phoneme shapes.
When we did that with the CG model,
it kind of looked like
we weren't trying very hard.
COLEMAN: What I wanted to do was animate
what I remembered Yoda looking like,
not what he actually looked like.
Frank had cautioned me.
"Hey, Rob, you got
too much potential here.
"You can put too much into the face."
And I went, "I know.
"My intention is to honor
what you did with the puppet
"and just give it
a little bit more in the eyes
"and a little bit in the mouth,
"just to give us
a little bit more range of motion there
"so that we can get into his head."
grave danger, you are.
We didn't do full-on mouth shapes,
but we did just enough to have him
form some of the vowels.
COLEMAN: Some of the actions
that we're doing with the head
in terms of turning
were a little too young.
And I would put
a little bit of bobble in them.
LINDA BEL: We're watching our actions
in the mirror,
and we're putting that in frame by frame.
Certain shots, and I can tell
who's done which shots
I can see the characteristics in there.
It's really subtle, the differences
between what's overacted
and what's not enough
to get the point across.
In grave danger, you are.
It got to a place where it felt like
it lived in part of the puppet aesthetic
and part of the live-action aesthetic.
The shroud of the dark side has fallen.
Begun, this Clone Wars has.
-Look how sad--
-Yeah. Poor little Yoda.
Oh, come on, guys.
(LAUGHING)
-Now, that's pathetic.
-I know.
I keep getting these notes saying,
"Has to be a little sadder."
So I said, "Go sad. Really make"
All right, sad is not the right word.
All right, so I got the right reaction.
-He's reflective, he's concerned.
-Right.
-He's upset.
-Okay.
KEVIN: On a shot like this, they're
probably going through 27, 28 takes
trying to get a certain moment just right.
I just wonder about his ears.
COLEMAN: The droop at the end?
LUCAS: Maybe let them stay up
a little bit more.
-Keep them up?
-YODA: This Clone War has
-KEVIN: It's nerve-wracking.
-Yeah.
-No, I think it'll work.
-Okay.
Kind of like you're getting
taken to the principal. (CHUCKLES)
Delete a couple keys.
Hopefully he likes it.
COLEMAN: In the early days
of computer animation,
if we had the crutch of talking,
we could keep the characters
"animated" alive.
Their aliveness would fall off many times
when they stopped talking.
We weren't thinking
about the internal voice.
I understand.
COLEMAN: Directors and editors
cut to reactions all the time
so that audience members
can read the scene
from another character's perspective.
Someone's listening to someone.
Do they trust them?
Do they not trust them?
So for me, the high bar was
to earn a nonverbal reaction shot.
I wanted to earn that from George.
That nonverbal close-up
didn't come until later.
It's Yoda turning back
to look at Palpatine.
And we see in his face
that he doesn't trust Palpatine.
And the audience gets to see that
through Yoda's facial performance.
And that was
We made it over the high bar.
And in fact, a frame of that
ended up on the poster.
GEORGE: Hello, Frank.
There's Rob. Do you see him?
-OZ: Hi, Rob. How are you doing?
-Yeah.
-How is the animation going, guys?
-COLEMAN: I think it's going well.
I must say,
these guys have done a great job.
-I think you'll be proud.
-Yeah, they don't whine like I do.
-They do. They follow your every footstep.
-(LAUGHS)
Frank wrote me a letter
at the end of the production
and he was incredibly kind.
Exceptional skills, he has.
He said, "You found the sweet spot."
"Now I don't have to be underneath
the stage perspiring for hours."
"All I have to do is the voice,
and you guys do all the work.
"I like this.
"Congratulations, and thanks
for staying true to Yoda's character."
I'm surprised. Didn't think he'd like it.
COLEMAN: So everybody saw the letter
that Frank Oz sent myself
and all of you this week?
Yes.
COLEMAN: It's a triumph on our behalf.
So hopefully the fans will like him
as much as Frank and George do.
Hats off to you guys.
I'm very proud of
what the team was able to do there.
Thanks.
I think it's going to be more like
-More like that height.
-Okay.
Is he going to turn around
and get off, or hop off?
How does Yoda get in and out of a chair
that's too tall for him?
Levitate.
JOE: Here's this two-foot tall Jedi Master
-who sort of hobbles along with a stick.
-Yeah.
Then he's fighting Count Dooku
with a laser sword.
That's a huge jump.
Enormous. Enormous.
The sentence that stopped
most of our hearts at ILM
in the script was,
"In a fight that defies description,
Yoda and Count Dooku battle."
That was it.
So I'm immediately over there
to talk to George.
I said, "So, George,
there's this sentence."
And he just starts chuckling.
He goes, "Yeah.
You've got to figure that out."
I'm like, "Excuse me?"
"Yeah, yeah. Off you go."
So I said,
"Well, what's the style of fighting?"
And he said,
"Think of him as the Tasmanian Devil."
And I thought of spinning.
I'm like, "No, don't tell me that.
I don't want that image in my head."
We started to work on Yoda fighting.
Look at this. You get this?
GEORGE: I would think of him more like
a frog. He would spring around.
-He has big thighs.
-I see.
Illegitimate child of Kermit the Frog
and Miss Piggy.
Oh, man. Very disturbed picture
in my head right now.
(LAUGHTER)
Rob has this look when
he's worried about things.
I saw Rob walking across the set,
and I was like, "Hey, man, what are you
going to do for this Yoda fight?"
And he goes, "I have no idea."
"No one has ever seen Yoda move.
"This will be the biggest moment
of Attack of the Clones.
"Let me just help you craft this fight."
(CLACKING AND TAPPING)
COLEMAN: Ahmed had studied martial arts.
He's also a huge anime fan.
So I said, "Come to the crib.
We'll watch some videos."
COLEMAN: He was showing me
some samurai animes,
and we were talking about
different fighting styles.
Like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and stuff.
(GRUNTING AND GROANING)
It's just all starting
to go into the head.
Then I saw Swordsman II,
the Jet Li film
and these ninjas, and they start flying.
The panic just went boop.
Now I could see Yoda.
MAN: Okay, do a lens change
on the Technocrane.
-Now you're up against it.
-A vampire.
I didn't think
you'd do that to me, George.
(LAUGHING)
'Cause he's so small and Dooku's so tall,
I had to get them moving around.
When would Yoda be on the ground?
When would he go up onto Dooku's ship?
When would he flip over here?
GEORGE: Should he be using two hands here?
COLEMAN: His arms are so small.
We could cheat it
and still get it with one hand,
lift it up, and have the other hand
But, yeah, it would be
in a more samurai-ish pose.
That process was six months.
Yoda pushes it away low and then jumps.
Once those pieces came together,
we animated that fight
in about three weeks.
This is your first time
actually seeing that.
Yeah. That looks good.
-Looks great.
-Okay.
There was one missing part.
The entrance.
So originally, as scripted
and the way they shot it,
the audience see the 800,
900-year-old Yoda come in that we knew,
and they immediately went into the fight.
It's just too much of a jump
for the audience.
GEORGE: Here it looks like
the whole thing is being held
-Yeah.
-It should look like it drops,
and then it sort of propels it
in a direction.
-Then it's gravity that's taking it down.
-Okay.
They then came up
with a series of events that happen.
So Dooku is throwing debris at Yoda
and he's pulling the roof down on him,
and at each time,
Yoda is able to just deal with it.
-I would suspend this moment.
-Okay.
So that you have a chance to do something
-a bit more Yeah.
-Something extra with his hand.
GEORGE: And he can sort of do
a little crinkle on his eyes.
-COLEMAN: Okay.
-And then he can open his eyes.
-Okay.
-So maybe 12 frames or so.
COLEMAN: Yep.
Then this next one is him
pushing back the lightning.
We need to make it a little bit
more deliberate than the videomatic
so that we can see
the power of what's going on.
Slow the whole thing down maybe 20%.
And I loved
that he added the lightning in,
because we had just seen
Anakin get dispatched.
And here was Yoda
taking the lightning and crushing it
and dealing with it immediately.
So it just told the audience
that Yoda was at a whole other level
beyond where Anakin or Obi-Wan,
who had been wiped out by Dooku.
(BUZZING)
Much to learn, you still have.
We've just gone a notch up here.
George said, "You know what we need?"
He can sort of pull it open.
Yeah, like Clint would do.
The cowboy pushing back his duster,
revealing the lightsaber.
My biggest thing
I was like,
"Rob, if you don't put anything else,
"he has to hit a stance."
"Has to be like, boom
Like that Bruce Lee stance."
COLEMAN: Tim Harrington came up
with the idea,
and he uses the Force
to pull the lightsaber into his hand
and lights it up.
The second we saw that animated,
everybody knew.
It was like, "This is something special."
(INDISTINCT CHATTER, SHOUTING)
MAN: Chewie! Chewie!
COLEMAN: I saw it in San Francisco
with a crowd on the first day.
They had no idea I was there.
I was terrified.
Very important moment.
I convinced myself
we created something really great,
but in fact, it was going to be laughed at
by the audience.
Enjoy the movie.
(EXCLAIMS)
Whoo!
DENNIS: There was such concerns.
I remember that Rob was
going to leave the theater or something
when the swordfight came up
before they killed him. (LAUGHS)
Star Wars!
(CHEERING)
(CHEERING AND APPLAUDING)
(YODA GRUNTING)
COLEMAN: The scene's coming closer
and closer,
and I'm, like, sliding down in my seat,
because I'm waiting for the reaction.
(LIGHTSABER BUZZING)
(GROANING)
(AUDIENCE CHEERING)
(LIGHTSABER HUMMING)
When he pulled out his lightsaber,
they went nuts.
(LIGHTSABERS BUZZING, CRACKLING)
COLEMAN: You could barely hear anything,
because the audience
was losing their minds.
It was fantastic.
That would be, like,
the highlight of my life.
Fought well you have, my old Padawan.
GEORGE: But are you using the Force
on the end there?
Yeah, with him? Are you making him
flop around like a dead fish?
-No.
-'Cause I see you going like
-No, no, no.
-GEORGE: Action!
It's all magic.
I knew I could use those films
to make people believe
that digital cinema works.
BURTT: George, for want of a better term,
was becoming the poster boy
of digital cinema
whereas many other, you know, directors
were still skeptical,
not wanting to leave the comforts
and the wonderful nature of film.
I was obsessed.
I said, "That's what I'm going to do."
Who cares about eye lines?
I'm going to turn the film industry
into a digital industry.
(CHUCKLING)
KNOLL: After the release of Episode II,
I got asked to participate
in this digital summit
that George held out at the Ranch.
There were some big names there.
I think Robert Rodriguez was there,
Oliver Stone, Michael Mann.
There were a whole bunch of people there.
They were the people
who stood up and said,
"Okay, this is interesting, I'll do this.
"If you build the cameras
and you build the stuff, we'll use it."
But out of, what, 20,000 people,
there was a couple of hundred
that said we'll do it.
This is like the gathering
of the first group of people
that actually as directors use the medium.
KNOLL: I think what George was trying
to accomplish was
spreading the word
that the tools are viable
to let you shoot a film digitally
and exhibit it digitally.
That this is nothing to be afraid of.
The tools are perfectly approachable.
And you can do a big movie this way.
Twenty years
and tens of millions of dollars
went into building digital technology.
I don't think anybody realized
how much work went into that idea
-MAN: Cut.
-That was beautiful.
-of converting the industry over.
-GEORGE: That was magnificent.
We're all individual artists.
We all work completely differently.
We all see things differently,
which is what makes it all interesting.
But this is cinema.
It has really to do
with the eye of the artist,
what technology we use.
And it's like asking what brush you use
when you're doing a painting.
Everybody else was just very down on it.
Because it changed everything.
It means you had to relearn
what you had learned.
But I kept saying, you know,
it's so much easier.
You can do anything.
If it's quicker and faster
and better and it's more malleable
and you can do more stuff with it
and it's cheaper, you know, why not?
'Cause we all are faced
with this resource issue,
how much money they give us
to make these things.
It's so much easier to do
the things you want to do.
KNOLL: My entire tenure at the company
has been to follow on
a lot of the things that I saw
that the original pioneers at ILM doing,
which was to gradually remove restrictions
on how things were shot
so that filmmakers can create
visual effects
like it's any other part of filmmaking.
And a director can essentially ignore that
something is going to be visual effects.
Don't treat it special.
It is like any other part of the movie,
and I'll handle any technical issues
that pop up.
I want the filmmaker to just
free the technical from their mind
and just think about story.
(YELLING)