Plantec's POV: Is VFX Going Down the Wrong Road?

Some years ago at the World Animation Celebration when I was a jurist, I got to spend some alone time with the legendary Ray Harryhausen. We got into an interesting conversation about how he approached special effects. Ray told me that back in his day they didn’t have a lot of fancy tools to use for visual FX. Their most important tool was not the computer, but their own creative brains. He told me how he came up with some of his great stop motion effects; and they were pure genius. His forced perspective stuff where he’d set up a miniature foreground and place it close to the camera to make it look large in front of a background of hills or jungle etc., were very clever. He used that approach to make Mighty Joe Young (1949) look so big. The key message was that having a storehouse of techniques and clever use of available materials was the way to great visual effects back then. Audiences expect more today, but that message should not be lost.

Today, we have adaptable, photorealistic 3D tools to allow us to create just about anything we can imagine. So we don’t need to be very clever. Argue with me if you like by posting below this article, but I stand by that. Sure you can be clever in your use of Maya, but you might be missing the bigger picture. I’m not saying that 3D doesn’t take talent, but when you know your tools and have an effect to produce, you sit down and create that effect without considering potentially better and cheaper ways of creating the same imagery.

I’ve also noticed that big VFX houses like ILM and animation houses like PIXAR have very narrow job descriptions. If you do lighting, that’s all you do and you do it very very well. It’s the same with modeling, texturing or animating. All projects are done with a team of people, each doing his own part of the project according to the VFX supervisor’s plan, based on his work with the director. Clearly on big budget films this works well and the output is remarkable.

My fear is that too many of the young artists I see today are one-note-Charlies. They know one or two software packages, but only in a limited way. And to make matters worse there is an awful trend in the industry restricting artists to one-note performance. That is, lighters do lighting, modelers do modeling, texture-freaks do textures. Few, indeed, can do it all.

For lower budget projects – and I expect that to be a growing part of our industry – we need generalists. A really good generalist has to be exceptionally smart, well-trained and have a great eye. Unfortunately, we have a lot of people in VFX who just do not have the eye. You see their work on low budget sci-fi channel movies, where things just don’t look right.

I see a sad trend among young people coming into our industry. Many are also only vaguely familiar with the world around them. Earlier generations grew up playing outside in the woods or in the park, observing actual life, running in the street till dark and interacting with real people.

So many of the young VFX animators I meet today grew up semi-isolated, spending little time outdoors and a lot of time in front of their TV or monitors playing video games, creating media or in online social networking. In other words, they spent less time using real life as reference material. Learning and living pop culture takes up so much of young people’s lives that many have little time for broadening their experiences. Most of the young people I’ve met at various studios have extremely narrow realms of knowledge. Some are so focused on their micro-realms of CG, that they don’t read, watch little TV and didn’t even know there were nasty fires in LA, not 20 miles away. I am serious!

They work very long hours, are oblivious of current events and often have difficulty keeping their checkbooks balanced. In many cases they make so much money, they don’t worry about it. But they’re also not investing in their future. Few have thought much about retirement or investing. Not all mind you…but way too many. I even ran into one that had to think really hard to recall our present president!

I was discussing this phenomenon with Scott Ross who currently claims to be a “bum-in-transition,” but used to head up ILM and later Digital Domain. I have a lot of respect for Scott and he shares my concern about the current stock of young animators and the way they’ll be impacting our industry. Here’s what Scott suggested to me: “Peter, I’m old enough to remember that visual effects is more than digital imagery and 3D animation. I have worked with the masters during my career, and I am quite concerned that once the Edlunds, Ralstons, Yeatmans, Dykstras, Murens, Farrars, Legatos, Brevigs, and Brunos of the world retire; we will be faced with VFX sups that ONLY come from the digital disciplines and so much will be lost… and the work will surely suffer.” Scott is a pioneer in this business so he should know.

Although I agree with Scott, I think the problem is more immediate. In the fast-changing landscape of VFX, we need more well-rounded artists entering the field. We may need to help the existing stock of young artists to broaden their worlds.

DreamWorks Animation SKG has made some wise efforts to broaden the life experiences of their artists. They offer a wide variety of classes and experiences designed to make their animators and artists more aware of how the world works. These classes include such things as life drawing, acting workshops, sculpture classes, experiential field trips, screenwriting and more. Not only do they offer these experiences, but their artists take advantage of them in droves. I see this as a very wise management investment. It could well account for the growth in quality and popularity of DreamWorks feature animations. They tend to develop and keep their talent, giving them an edge. Heck, I’d like to work there for the life drawing classes alone.

One of the reasons I’m concerned about the CG farm team, especially those self-taught kids nurturing dreams of a big career, comes from reviewing tons of demo reels. I can tell you that about one in a hundred is really good. That’s improved in the last few years to about one in 50 here in the US and about one in 10 in Europe. That improvement is due almost entirely to improved CG education opportunities. I’ll write about that later.

Much of the 3D stuff I’ve reviewed doesn’t look right. It isn’t textured believably. The motion is wrong. The lighting is off and a whole slew of other little things don’t look right. I ask and I find that many young artists generally do not use reference footage; guessing at how things should look. It’s distressing.

With the economy in turmoil, it would be wise for self-taught young CG artists to start broadening their capability, spending more time with reference footage, thinking of less expensive ways to produce the same effects, and practice finding clever solutions.

In my Animation Master Classes, particularly in the area of making a killer demo reel, I usually suggest my students go out and sit in the park near a children’s play area and observe how children interact. I ask them to come back with at least five usable/entertaining behaviors. They usually come back with many more than that. One student in France told me “I can’t believe I didn’t think of doing that myself. ” The children’s playground is a treasure trove of ideas to use in short animation (just don’t get taken for a pedophile).

Observing reality, broadening your horizons and being cleaver is what this column is really about. Let’s move away from one-note- thinking, and get back to the Ray Harryhausen approach. That is, let’s give ourselves lots of tools, then look at what we’ve got at hand, and find innovative ways to problem solve. This is particularly important in TV production. Let’s see how it’s done.

I’ve spent some time chatting with VFX people who are known to be clever at using simple, inexpensive approaches to achieve high production value VFX. I’m a big Adobe fan because they have some excellent tools that generally work well in tandem for creating cheap VFX. For example you can develop assets in Photoshop, slide them into After Effects and go from 2D to 2.5D very easily. 2.5D effects are created by layering up 2D images with transparency in After Effects (your application of choice), and applying virtual camera moves that display parallax, fooling the eye. You can combine that with a quick matte painting background, created by first rendering a basic photo-real scene in Vue 6, and then digitally painting in necessary details by hand or with photo-reference.

You can quickly create credible establishing shots in Vue. I created a 14 second, photo-real, time-lapse establishing shot of a jungle beach in Asia at sunrise, in 20 minutes in Vue 6, using off the shelf objects and customized preset atmosphere, lighting and breeze. In 45 minutes I created a believable two camera aerobatics sequence over a sunset ocean complete with volumetric clouds, a pirate ship, waves and sound effects.
Let’s say that I was on staff at a TV production company and they needed that sunrise shot and didn’t know I could do this (and most likely they wouldn’t.) They would have to allocate a sizable budget to build a fake Japanese pagoda and set it up on Westward Beach and haul a film crew out there at 4:00 am to set up for the shot. They’d also need to rent an expensive crane as well. We’re talking days of aggravation and a lot of money.

But if I were on site and the producer/director called me in for a consult, I’d just say, “No problem, I’ll have it for you in an hour,” and I’d deliver early. Producers are usually writers; they don’t all know the ins and outs of VFX. They are unlikely to know what’s possible with short notice on a tight budget. They need a really clever VFX person at hand. It can make all the difference in a show’s survival in today’s tough competitive market.

Now imagine that the writing team has some really wild, impractical ideas that would make great story, but are difficult to achieve visually by practical means. They call me in and ask if they can do this, that and the other thing. To most of it I say: “Yeah, no problem…this is what we’ll need to do.” Imagine how such a thing opens up the minds of the writers who are now far less constrained by the practical.

You may recall that excellent, but canceled show Moonlight on the WB Network. There was a scene where a guy gets shot and the powder burns are important. Unfortunately makeup forgot the burns, and the director was pressed to re-shoot; which would have been expensive and time-consuming in a crunch. So they called in their resident VFX guru Dan Curry. Yup, he’s the same guy that did virtually all the VFX on the whole group of “Star Trek” television series and movies.

Dan told me they needed a really fast fix so he ran out into the hall and grabbed some black sand from one of the public ash trays, sprinkled it on a piece of white paper. He moved it around with a soft brush to look like a powder burn, and shot it with his digital camera. Upping the contrast, he converted the white of the paper to transparent. He then had his two trusted crew members, the Avery Brothers (Luke and Adam), track the “Powder burns” to the victim’s wound and the results were about as close to perfection as you could get. The entire process took minutes and cost a song. In fact, tracking this kind of digital makeup, even digital plastic surgery is a common occurrence for the team. It’s that kind of on-your-feet thinking that can save a production company loads of time and money. If you had to do the whole thing in 3ds Max it would not have looked nearly as good, would have taken much longer and cost a bundle.

As I write this column, money is being frozen in its tracks all over the world. Lenders are not making loans and things are getting scary worldwide. None of us know what to expect because a financial crisis of this magnitude has never happened before. One thing we can be sure of is that it’s a producer’s nightmare. Most producers borrow money on their good credit to feed the engine of entertainment. Some producers don’t even cover their full expenses on a show until the show goes into syndication and/or co-marketing ventures. We’re also entering the era of transmedia distribution as we speak. Heroes, for example, is presented in many different media formats from mobile to TV to web and in Comic Books. The smart producers have designed it so that you have a richer experience watching the TV show if you also check out their other media choices, especially their website. All that takes a lot of money to launch and maintain, and there is lag in the pipeline until the money from the sponsors comes in to cover it. Thus, bridging loans have been common.
It is probable that many of those loans will be drying up. Belts will have to be tightened. I’m wondering how TV shows are going to be produced. We would all be wise to start expecting seriously tighter budgets over the next few years.

Having a small, clever onsite VFX team is an essential way to keep production value high while keeping costs under control. Even better it can really help keep the location budget down. Finding the right team is not easy and it’s getting harder. The best ones have been around and probably have a lot of non-digital practical experience coming up through the ranks as the industry evolved. Some have worked in practical effects and have a broader than usual perspective on digital effects.

Let’s take a close look at a less obvious VFX show like Chuck. I picked Chuck because most of the visual FX you see, you don’t notice. I also picked it because the onsite VFX supervisor is one of the cleverest and most innovative VFX guys I know, the aforementioned Dan Curry.

Dan cut his teeth on effects before the days of digital. He did everything from designing space ships, CG creatures and weapons for Star Trek, to matte painting nebula backgrounds and clever hybrid sci-fi effects, to his stunning ‘ if transparent ‘ work on Moonlight and Chuck. In one of my favorite vintage sequences, Dan worked with Santa Barbara Studios to create the opener for Star Trek Voyager, where Voyager is on a epic journey and goes through some swirling space dust. The sequence represents a mixture of motion control miniature photography, CGI, and a hand-airbrushed title card. At the time it was a stunning sequence for TV.
One of the things that gives Dan a leg up in creative visual effects is his vast experience in working with budgets at all levels, and his personal drive to do the best possible effects in the simplest, most direct way, to forward the story. Dan once told me over a glass of 16 year old single malt out by his pool: “Why do it in 3D if you can do it better, cheaper and faster in 2.5-D?” Although Dan is well versed in 3D, the process is expensive compared to creating the bulk of TV VFX in Photoshop and After Effects. He’s super-clever at using ordinary everyday ‘things’ to create plausible effects. For example, he showed me a space ship miniature he’d built. It looked to me like it was made from a kit, but he pointed out all the everyday house hold objects he’d incorporated into it, from disposable razor handles to micro irrigation parts. I didn’t recognize any of it.

I asked Chris Fedak, executive producer of Chuck, how things changed when Dan and the Avery Brothers came on board. “I love having Dan Curry and his team on site for many reasons. Here at Chuck we get seven writers sitting around coming up with wild ideas. We want to do like a little movie each week. That is, we want to expand beyond an ordinary single cam show. Our writers come up with some outrageous visuals that we ordinarily couldn’t actually do on screen. But with Dan on site, we just go to him and say: “Is this possible to do, Dan?” I’m absolutely amazed at how often he actually says ‘yes’. He and his team are immensely creative.”
I spent some time with Curry and found him to be an amazing guy. Over coffee I said to him: “You often do what looks like expensive, high end work and I’ve been told you do it all on a micro-budget. How do you manage to pull this stuff off?

“Poverty, as well as sloth, are the mothers and invention,” he replied. “The last few shows I’ve worked for ‘ Moonlight for WB and Now Chuck for WB – the budget has been very limited and we want to provide as much production value as possible; and we don’t have direct access to the highest technology tools. We have a very small farm-out budget for 3D because we don’t do that work in-house. When the show occasionally needs 3D animated effects, I send out to a house that I know that can do the job on a budget without sacrificing the quality of what’s screen.”

“I’ve worked with the Avery brothers, Adam and Luke, on two series now. We work exceptionally smooth together with complete, mutual respect. Adam and Luke don’t need to be supervised which makes my job a lot easier. In a lot of the effects shots we often use some matte painting to get what we want.

“On Moonlight, we had to do an establishing shot of the Queen Mary, but the production company was very pressed for time. The huge ship was lit in a very unique way so we couldn’t just go back down and do a quick establishing shot. So I took a frame from the original sequence, where people were pulling on the dock in a Limousine. I painted out the limousine and the crowds to get an overall clean plate of the Queen Mary. Then, in Photoshop, in separate layers I freehand painted what would have been behind the foreground objects had they not been there. This allowed us to have several clean independent layers. Using After Effects we were able to simulate 3D camera moves over and through the various 2D layers. This approach was inspired by the multi-plane glass shot techniques of the pre-computer days. The final shot looked like a crane shot with a satisfactory illusion of reality.”

I asked Dan if he could explain where his mind goes first when faced with a VFX problem: “I don’t immediately think software as some people do. I think of an image; and then determine the approach we need to create the image that best serves the story, that pushes it along and adds new information for the audience. I don’t feel that VFX shots should stand out gratuitously unless that’s what the style of the piece calls for. Much of the VFX in Chuck ideally go unnoticed because they serve the story in an unobtrusive and seamless way. Adam, Luke and I endeavor to provide production and make the impossible possible.”

Dan offered a comment I feel is a bit of rare wisdom in this business: “An important thing to me is that our little team is a good place to be. Adam and Luke are very creative and work independently. I’ve learned that people do their best work when they have a degree of creative freedom, so I tend to give respectful guidance. I only insist on changes when I generally believe the shot could be better, or to serve the story more effectively. We work as a team and I don’t have to put my mark on it. This keeps the stress level down and it means we’re all happy coming to work with each other. I’ve been in situations where there were Machiavellian politics behind the scene, and that causes way too much stress for everybody.”

I think young brothers Adam and Luke Avery are fortunate to be learning broad skills and approaches from this generous master. Dan has the kind of wisdom that needs to be passed on in VFX. I asked if he had any other suggestions on team building: “Teams need to trust each other. There’s also the issue of shared artistic judgment. Someone has to take the artistic lead, but once everybody is on the same wavelength ‘ agree on what works and what doesn’t artistically and for the show – then things move along nicely. On Star Trek we had people on our team who worked smoothly and happily together for 18 years.” I can verify that this is true having chatted with several of Dan’s Star Trek visual effects team including effects guy Ronald Moore, who has only good things to say about Dan. I love stories like this.

So to wrap up: Yeah, I think we are going down the wrong road…a little bit. All you young whippersnappers coming into digital VFX, heed my words: Broaden your range. You’ll be way more employable in hard times. Learn as much as you can from real life. Get away from the game console and go for a hike. Sit in the park after a rain and watch how oil forms rainbows on water. Learn to create VFX in many different ways and not solely relying on the computer. Develop your eyes with visual reference and reference footage, and even go out and observe how people and nature actually behave. Practice finding clever, easy solutions. Chances are, you’ll be amazed what you come up with.