ONLY HALF an hour after I pass Darth Vader in the corridor on the way out does it occur to me: that was the Darth Vader. Masked bodybuilder with the voice of James Earl Jones or no, Darth Vader is principally a figment of George Lucas's imagination. Most of us, if we found such imaginary figments loitering in our hallways, would be marked up as prime candidates for the booby hatch. “This is Darth. He's a seven-foot asthmatic leather freak. And have you met Harvey the rabbit?” But not George. At George's sprawling Industrial Light & Magic operation in San Rafael, a ferry ride north of San Francisco, the manifestly unreal is made manifest. So if any Darth Vader can be called the Darth Vader, that was it. Or him.
  It or him? This confusion is what George, and ILM, and the entire visual effects industry depend on. The fact that Darth is mounted motionless and for all I know stuffed atop a modest plinth makes him no less alive in my recollection. Which is, it's true, the recollection of a small boy circa 1977. Two decades later, Darth's successors face a far more sophisticated audience; equally willing to suspend their disbelief, but with eyes primed to spot the join where fantasy meets. . . further and more fantastic fantasy. The supernatural, the super-real and the super spectacular continue to soak up most of the time and effort spent on special effects. And that's a lot of time and effort, a thousand employees' worth at ILM alone.
  In the Nineties, the Special Effects Movie has become a genre of its own. You know what to look forward to. Large things will explode. Smaller things will behave in unlikely ways. Other things which have no business being there at all will stubbornly insist on being there a lot. What you may not realise is that nowadays digital effects lurk where they are least expected. Art movies. Costume dramas. The kind of cinema whose audience would rather swallow its own eyeballs than sully its retinas with the likes of Armageddon . ILM helped out Woody Allen on his last two features, Celebrity and Deconstructing Harry . Elizabeth had special effects up its Tudor wazoo. Even the emerald Oirishness of Waking Ned was touched up by hands more accustomed to fashioning bulbous clouds of orange smoke.
  John Berton is clearly a little sorry that he doesn't get to work on films like these. Berton is too good at the big stuff. He was once employed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, on scientific visualisation films: “I had to choose between helping man understand the universe and scaring teenagers. I chose scaring teenagers.”
  Berton joined ILM as a computer graphics animator on Terminator 2 , and has since performed ever more substantial functions on Jurassic Park, The Mask, Men in Black and The Mummy. There is something of the visual effect about Berton himself, in the way his eyes and his grin bulge outwards from an improbable ginger barnet; but this is simply the way his huge enthusiasm for movies reveals itself. With Berton, the switch is set permanently to Enthuse.
  “Visual effects have become intertwined with all of film making now,” Berton enthuses, “with popular films that aren't seen as being blockbusters, things like Elizabeth and Waking Ned. It's very difficult to recreate a scene with a camera moving close into a group of protestants being burned at the stake, so you do it with the highest level of technology that you can bring to bear. A phone booth falling off a 350-foot cliff and hitting the beach - you could shoot it, but it would be a lot more difficult to get exactly what you want, so you use computer graphics.
  “Look at Forrest Gump,” he enthuses some more, “and you see how the techniques can create images that don't jump off the screen at you, but at the same time are incredibly unique. Many people to this day believe that Gary Sinise has no legs, and that's because of visual effects, because they are so convincing. Every film that's out there now is using this visual effects work in some form or another. It's become a part of editorial, a part of composing the frame.
  “The Phantom Menace is a tremendous example, where every shot is composed in the computer. The layers of battle droids and tanks and explosions and shields and grass fields, all these things are under the control of the film-makers. And now something that was developed as a method of creating amazing things on the screen to serve the needs of entertainment films, is actually becoming an inherent part of the way that we make movies.”
  To illustrate Berton's point, you need look no further than the current hit Fight Club. A lot of things have been said about Fight Club - that it's vicious, amoral, downright immoral, neo-Nazi, vile, an affront to society. What hasn't been mentioned is the brilliance, or even the existence, of its visual effects. Civilisation could not have been brought down without them. Fight Club's visual effects supervisor Kevin Haug, when I track him down, is working at the smaller of Warners” two Los Angeles movie lots, on a film called The Cell, which he summarises as “Silence Of The Lambs, MTV-style.” The quietly-spoken, khaki-clad Haug does not strike me as an agent of anarchy or a closet Hitlerite. Not unless his skill at subterfuge outweighs even his gifts with a digital paintbrush.
  “It's not really that Fight Club is an effects movie at all,” he murmurs. “In fact the studio, Fox, never really recognised it was an effects movie. I don't have a title credit. It was only 25 effects shots at first, but it ended up being about 80. Although most of them are what I'd call invisible. Or ‘body and fender’ work. There was a big ugly scratch on Brad Pitt's face in one of the takes [Director] David Fincher liked best. That had to be taken out or reshot. It was one of those calculations - how much would it cost to reshoot that, and how much to fix it. The scratch took “em weeks to fix but it still worked out cheaper.”
  Haug is justifiably proud of sequences in Fight Club which don't feel like VFX, although when you stop to think about it - usually a long time afterwards - they could hardly be anything else. One is a writhing, polymorphous sex scene which features Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter. Or rather, it doesn't. “It's animated, CG [computer generated] people, all naked, all close-up, all believable.” So believable that a Variety review gave the director of photography credit for it, despite its never having been photographed.
  “Our naked bodies were covered with white dots,” Bonham Carter has explained. “For 12 hours, Brad and I assumed positions from the Kama Sutra. The computer did the rest. It made us do anything it wanted to.” Another fancy manoeuvre follows the camera around Edward Norton's kitchen into places where it can't possibly go. “You fly up over the top of the stove,” says Haug, “and go down underneath the grill and fly around the burner, and then you fly up and behind the refrigerator, and then out from underneath it - all of which is possible in CG because the camera has no size.
  “The problem with CG is often you're chasing that photo-real look, and it ends up looking too perfect, it doesn't have the grain, the peccadilloes of the dyes that are on the film. This technique is off at a tangent from where the rest of the CG community is going - if you will, a sort of third-world way of doing it. You go out and shoot pictures, and they are photo-real by their very nature. You give them to the CG people, who use the images to make the digital models, and then map the images back onto them. It's very much the same way that satellites make maps of the earth. It's the same exact technique that's been around since the First World War. We did actually test to see if it wouldn't be cheaper to build oversized sets, but it just became a monstrous thing. A full crew working on set all the time is more expensive than the CG.”
  Which scotches one myth about visual effects; that they exist only for their own sake, swallowing vast budgets that might be better spent on, say, a dozen arthouse films with nothing startling in them at all, apart from the heroine's propensity for taking her top off every few minutes. Effects can cost a lot; but then movies cost a lot. Faced with a choice between a computer program and a giant kitchen, the bean-counters who purportedly run the movie business will tend to favour the former. Directors might not always feel the same way, but that's their lookout. It is, after all, the director's job to impose his own perspective on the movie no matter which tools - or which vendors, as special effects contractors are known - are to be used.
  “It's happened in the past,” says Haug, “with big facilities like ILM, the supervisor will have a stronger vision than the director does about the shot, and it'll end up looking like his vision. And it'll be beautiful. It just won't look like it came from the same movie.” He cites Escape From LA - not an ILM title - as “the classic example of the way not to cast vendors. Every vendor, lacking any real strong input from the director, did what they thought best. Some did better, some did worse, and every time you changed a shot you were in a different world.”
  “Sure,” grins Berton, when I ask him about this, “there's a danger that effects houses will dominate a movie - if you let “em. Technology is an incredibly inviting trap, and it will lead you where it can go, if you let it. If you don't fight against the pathways to which the technology is best attuned, you end up with boring stuff. You can never say, well, this'll be easier for us to do. That's crazy. If you never think beyond it you're going to be controlled by the technology and you're never going to have good pictures.”


WHEN movies started out, it was enough that they moved. From the very beginning, they were a visual effect in themselves. We tend to forget this when we put special effects into its own category. The distinction is merely a technical one. All films are illusions. That's the point of them. Yet we don't consider it “unreal” for an actor to speak prepared lines, or a director to manipulate time and space. Not the way we consider it unreal for a big lizard to tread on New York, at any rate.
  Modern special effects have followed the same path as more traditional film-making, starting off as spectacle, then being harnessed in the service of plot and atmosphere. But special effects are by no means a recent development. Georges Méliès used them, with outstanding results, in his classic films of the 1900s, of which the most famous and most copied is 1902's proto-psychedelic Le Voyage Dans La Lune (translated, with prescient aptness, as A Trip To The Moon.) Méliès excepted, the earliest special effects wizards were exactly that: magicians who transferred their illusions to the cinema screen. Their lineage can be traced back at least as far as the 1790s, when the conjuror Etienne Gaspard Robert, who billed himself simply as Robertson, staged phantasmagorical magic lantern shows across Europe.
  This is significant firstly because it suggests that visual effects are not a new and corrupting influence in film, but a tradition which predates even photography; and secondly because current computer based effects are heavily indebted to that tradition. “I'm particularly fascinated with the history of film as illusion,” says Berton, with, if possible, even greater enthusiasm than before. “I've always been much more interested in what you can put up on the screen that you can't see in reality, whether it's something as simple as ghosts or something as concrete as spaceships in outer space. I look at Méliès as the beginning of what fascinates me about cinema.”
  Berton is also a fervent admirer of Ray Harryhausen, whose stop motion animations in films like Jason And The Argonauts and One Million Years BC took visual effects further than anyone would, or could, until Lucas came along. Pride of place on the wall of ILM's lobby goes to a huge, signed still of a Harryhausen monster (signed, that is, by Harryhausen; the monster has a distinctly illiterate cast to its features.) When Harryhausen gave a talk to a packed house at ILM, Berton was delighted to discover that a mob-handed CG fight scene from The Mummy echoed Harryhausen's own approach. Technology may advance, but it's of little use without human ingenuity; and in visual effects antiquated methods are often brought to bear on new problems. Witness Kevin Haug's Great War approach to the voyage around Edward Norton's white goods. Or for an even more extreme example, take a look at The Matrix.
  The Matrix received an unfairly hostile reception in the UK, from critics who may have taken its mystical pretensions a little too seriously. True, Keanu Reeves trundles through the movie like a stuffed beagle on castors, but only when he acts. Thankfully, he is called on to do very little of that. What he is called on to do a great deal of is hover through the air, up walls, between bits of flying lead and so forth, in a breathtaking mode of temporal mangling known as “bullet time.” The Matrix's action scenes are nothing short of astonishing, and the outfit responsible is Manex, a rising young VFX company located in the former Alameda naval base, on the other side of San Francisco from ILM.
  At ILM, the first of the big-time effects houses and still the yardstick by which the others measure their success, everything is orderly, timetabled with digital precision. Surprises are frowned upon. At Manex, all is flux. My arrival, at the agreed time, seems to be no more or less expected than that of a hang-gliding yak. Unfazed, the desk staff track down Dan Piponi - “he's around here somewhere” - digital supervisor on The Matrix. Piponi's background is in mathematics. He explains how scenes were shot using “volumetric capture', with still cameras, up to 180 of them, arranged around the action via laser targeting and fired by an electronic system designed for that purpose alone. Thus the viewpoint circles the slow-mo action in a smooth but dizzying fashion which a movie camera could not begin to duplicate.
  At its core, this technique bears a remarkable similarity to the one devised in the 1870s by Eadweard Muybridge for the purpose of tracking motion in horses. He would arrange his cameras along a racetrack, with strings set to trigger the shutters when snapped by the animal's legs. This was effectively the birth of motion photography. Muybridge came up with his zoopraxiscope, a revolving disc, as a method of turning his photographs into a projected moving image. Piponi - like Muybridge, British born but resident in America - used a computer to align The Matrix's shots,

Back to Features
Back to Main Index
Mail