"In some ways this early generation of 3D artists has forgotten the lessons of filmmakers past"
That is some true in many cases but not all of them. People like John Dykstra, Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren know quite a bit of cinematography and also come from the time of classic VFX: shooting opticals, framing shots and lighting and composition, etc. That's why films usually done by veterans fare much much better than those done by new guys (especially boutiques). In some films you get that CG camera syndrome, which makes them look like an amateur demo reel or a motion based ride film.
There is one forgotten aspect though. There are tons of small and dramatic films that contain the "invisible" type and subtle VFX. Stuff like on Pollock, A Beautiful Mind, What Lies Beneath, Forest Gump, Adaptation, Gangs of New York, Punch-Drunk Love, Panic Room, etc.
Even in big films there can be quite a bit of subtle VFX like sky replacements, removing rigs and mics, set extensions, etc.
Well to me VFX are getting better all the time. The problem now is that with CG there are a lot more places doing VFX (there are tons of boutique VFX shops) and also there is a bigger quantity of films with VFX. So while we have better VFX there is also a larger number of films (and maybe higher percentage) with so-so VFX. Still there are projects with great VFX. And there are still facilities that still do all sorts of VFX, not only CG but stuff like miniatures). It seems that this larger portion of so so VFX gives the impression that all VFX are bad but that is not so.
Also it seems that you can't separate the VFX from the story. Just because you didn't like a movie or story doesn't mean the VFX suck. Each should be judged by themeselves unless you criticize the whole package. Or take this as an example, you can see a movie with a sucky story and great photography, or say you can see a great film with bland photography. You can certainly pick apart the different disciplines and art involved. Of course all that contributes to the overall experience if you like the film or not, but it would be stupid to say a filmed sucked because the cinematography was bland and presdict the doom of movies.
And it's incredibly naive to say the CG guys are not artists, There is not much difference between being an artists with a pencil and one with a computer. The computer is just an incredible high tech pencil and it takes real artistry to do great stuff for it. I take you have never met or seen documentaries with CG animators. It would be the same as to say photographers are not artists because they use a machine as opposed to a brush and canvas. There are both artists in their disciplines.
Granted some people out of college (many of them button pushers) might want to do CG and VFX. But many of the people in top acilities have been doing CG for more than a decade. Wouldn't you consider John Lasseter of Pixar, who directed both Toy Storries and has done CG since the early-mid 80s an artists. What about T3's Animation Supervisor Dan Taylor who even did stop motion long before joining ILM. There is much talent and artistry in CG VFX, too bad most people don't see it and think every animation app has a render dinosaur or animate alien monster buttons.
Well the nuclear blast we see in T2, when you have that wide angle view of LA from the hills it was done with some CG, Electric Image if I remember right. In T3, the blast in the desert, that is seen in the trailrs with the beat up car, the sand shockwave was done via practical pyro effects using primacord, much like the Paris destruction in Armageddon. There is also plenty of miniature wrok, including the oputside views of the particle acelerator, and a lot of stuff in the future war is miniature combined with CG.
CG is an incredible powerful and flexible tool and in many ways superior for many things in VFX and looks much much better if done right. Who would want to go back to see strobing effects in stop motion, visible matte lines, creatures that look like rubber and barely move, static matte paintings, etc. There is a place for old and new techniques and usually good supervisors will know when to use them. The problem is projects or facilities that aer thorwn together and just use CG as a cheap way of attaining the VFX. CG is not inherently bad.
I saw a preview this past Thursday. I didn't see the penguin mentioned, but HP sure got a big logo in the credits as the exclusive technology providers for Dreamworks Animation.
Both actually. The machines are running Linux and using Linux based apps. Maya for 3D I believe, and they have a propietary tool for 2D cell painting which was used last year in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
Not really since those machines are gonna be used for batch rendering and compositing (they'll be render nodes), not interactive work like what you do on a Flame. Weta Digital uses Shake for composting so she'll have an SGI or a Linux workstation probably.
Well as I mentioned I don't consider color correction to be VFX. If a movie is totally edited in a computer does that make it a full CG movie? Of course not, the computer was just a new tool used to something that used to be done with blades and tape in editing rooms. Same with digital color grading, it has been done by colorists for decades before the advent of computers and used in films which had no VFX at all. OR what upsets me when people considered something like Toy Story the biggest VFX film since all was done inside a computer, arghhhhh!
O Brother Where Art Thou did contain quita a few VFX shots, many by Digital Domain especially the flood sequence at the end. But the color grading can be done elsewhere (places like EFilm for example) on films with no single piece of VFX. Digital color grading is just a new tool. Anyway it's a (maybe slight) distinction. Though I guess films like Pleasntville have blurred the line.
Oh yeah, their inital setup had quite a few SGI boxes, I remember a photo of it. The thing is that places like ILM, Imageworks and others have been accumulating SGI boxes for years. SGI gear, especially the big boxes and servers have a very long lifespan, they are not thrown away just when a new model comes along. Not many years ago ILM still had Crimsons lying around though they might be used as doorstops now;-). The economics before the advent of cheaper x86/Linux machines dicated that you didn't throw out SGI machines quickly. Besides ILM and Imageworks have more people so workstation wise they are gona have more machines there (though I'm not sure how many enter into the render pool in there, places like Weta and Rhytm and Hues or maybe PDI include the workstations into the nightly render pool). They also have several projects in their pipelines.
Still Weta is probably among the top 10 VFX houses capacity wise speaking. Who wouldn't want to play in there;-)?
Probably. Supoposdely they work on King Kong for PJ next. Apparently they might work on the film versions of the Chronicles of Narnia and rumor has it a movie based on Neon Evangelion. A lot of people were only meant to be thre until the end of the year since they didn't have any other projects lined up afterwards. A chunk of them are also foreigners, rom the US, Europe and elsewhere so they might want to go back home regardless. They will certainly go on, it just depends on the timing on the nest projects as to how much they will downsize before ramping up again.
As far as ILM that's why they need to bid on a lot of projects. Pipeline has to be busy to accomodate the huge number of people and overhead. That's why they try to work on several projects concurrently, at the moment on Peter Pan, Van Helsing, Harry Potter 3, Ep. 3 and Master and Commander. They just wrapped The Hulk and if T3 and Pirates of the Caribbean haven't wrapped up they should do so in a week or 2 at the most.
It's the big dilema of finding the balance between size and capacity with workload and potential work.
Well there are sveral like that, but surely not every single scenery shot needed somethnig to be removed. Some of the NZ locations were a bit away from civilization (or at least the closest Holiday Inn). Wasn't Bag End and Hobbiton built pretty much isolated, though supposdely you can see a car driving in the distance in one shot. Some shot are real tight with mountains in the back or rock gaces etc. where no hting would interfere. Besides as the articles mention, there were 800 VFX shots in TTT. Im sure a 3 hour movie contains a whole lot more than 800 shots, meaning there must be some without VFX.
Yes but I don't consider the digital color timing part of the VFX. Before the digital era and even before Star Wars, there were/are jobs called colorists which would time (that is color correct) the whole film. They didn't have anything to do with VFX, if anything they have to work with the finished VFX shots to match them to the surrounding shots. Now grading is becoming more digital and it has some connection with VFX as it's sort of related to compositing since you have to match elements.
The LOTR trilogy is using Colossus which was made by 5D which went out of business and Colorfront got a hold of it and I belive Discreet acquierd them and the new product will be called lustre. You can read a bit about it here:
Interestingly I thought sometime the color correction was to extreme and too contrasting. There is a shot at the end of TTT with the 3 main characters after being victorious in Helm's Deep, and the shot of Gandalf (which supposdely has the sun right behind him) is really contrasting to the shots of Aragorn and Legolas in terms of saturation and flestones in particular and looks a bit softer. There are several shots like that in both films which made me groan a bit ut are not a real big deal. It kinda reminded me of the extreme color saturation and washout in some shot of Geonosis in Ep. 2. I still think O Brother Where Art Thou is the most consistent in terms of extensive digital grading, but that's just me.
I yeah I enjoyed Waterworld myself. It still doesn't erase the fact that the budget was about U$175 million, but the domestic gross was around U$90 million. Worst of all it was ripped and lambasted by most critics. I thought it was as good an action/scifi movie as any around that time. Some of the complaints were silly like Costner's character being too unlikable. Call me crazy but I don't need every hero or protagonist be the idealized goody two shoes. It's too bad we don't have many anti heroes or ambiguous shady one to keep thing more interesting.
Well just because you found it boring doesn't mean other people did. Not all expensive movies tend to lose money either. Pearl Harbor comes to mind which was the largest budget approved by Disney (though Dinosaur ended costing much more) and was among the top 5 movies of the year. Or maybe it's the exception that proves the rule;-) (hey even Waterworld finished in the black counting all international revenue).
Well if anything you can't fault VFX with the story. But yes each prequel had over 2000 VFX shots. You have to read the article though, last film Weta did about 800 VFX shots and for this they are doing upwards of 1200. As their technology matures (Massive, muscle dynamics, subsurface scattering) you can even throw more things at to the VFX.
It certainly is a big setup, they are adding 1,176 new processors to what they already had (which was stated in an article some time ago). Probably ILM and Imageworks have a bit more though. The article says that they have the largets Intel deployment, but places like ILM and Imageworks, besides their Intel/Linux machine still have quite bit of SGI hardware around. An article on the SGI websitye a couple years back stated ILM had an 800 CPU Origin 2000 machine, and around 500 O2s. Since then a lot of the TDs, animators and compositors have gotten Dell Linux workstations and several of them keep the 2 machines side by side (the O2 and the Dell). ILM and Pixar also recently added to their renderfarm via RackSaver:
It's not only the increase ni speed but actually having more processors. In the basic PRMan setup you send one frame to each CPU. So if before they had 1000 processors they could send, theoretically 1000 frames at the same time, though of course some would render faster than others. Now instead is they doubled their capacity they can now send 2000 frames concurrently (again theoretical).
LOR: ROTK has even more VFX shots than the previous film so it does make sense increasing capacity. Things can be rendered overnight so they are ready for dailies next day. They might also use some of these also for compositing as WQeta Digital uses Shake which also has a batch renderer for Linux.
Shot here refers to standard movie terminology, that is what is between 2 edit cuts. I mean shots of just the New Zealnd scenery, like some of Rohan, require no VFX. Sure one VFX shot may go through different iterations but in the end it's still one shot.
And yes 1200 is very high. I usually consider anything above 400 VFX shots to be high. The Perfect Storm had less than 400 and Pearl Harbor and Ai had about 200 and they still feel VFX heavy. Asylum VFX, a small but very good boutique shop can only handle about 200 shots per project on average though they grew and upgraded so they could handle 400 for Master and Commander. When the makers even doubled that it was a bit too much for them.
Yep I must agree. My parents took me to see the originals, and my Mom loved it then and still is a SW fan. To me the movies were more aimed at the middle, teens, but adults and kids could still enjoy them. I still remember the time I saw ESB first time, the theatre was probably 90% teens that show.
Seems Lucas softened up (maybe in part because now the originals are considered classic kids films, even though they weren't that originally) and so made the new ones more tame, without the edge of the originals.
You do realize that a lot of people in CG and VFX don't like John Gaeta, who is the VFX supervisor for the Matrix trilogy because all his trash talk, right? Maybe he is severly misquotten or has zero social skills but I wouldn't give much credence to his opinions.
About the soulless statement, that is really funny coming from a guy who previsously worked on the VFX of Star Trek 5 and Judge Dredd.
Second he is as guilty as what he is ragging about. How much talk has there been about the all CG humans and environments in Reloaded and their technological superiority? What wa it, like 1200 VFX shots too. What was the story point of many of the VFX except trying to be cool and hip for the sake of it? How much crap talk has there been about they have raised the bar so high in VFX that it'll never be touched? Imagine if the folks at ILM had said they had raised the bar so high with Jurassic Park that no one would be able to reach it? Gaeta is the only big VFX guys who has been very unprofessional and even insulting to others in the business. Even some of his speeches makes it look like he was solely responsible for the greatness. One thing is certain, seems Gaeta and Mr. Silver are made right for each other.
Sorry but I think I'' take opinions of others more seriosuly. That is not to say that the rest of the folks at ESC and the other facilities didn't do a great job and are taleneted and have more class.
Sheez I guess you are one of those people that think that computers have a button "render and animate dinosaur" right. What is ILM's fault about the story content on the films they work on. They get contracted and have no say on story. Would the food caterer, gips or electricians in that sense be also responsible for the story?
Computers are just tools, just like pencils and clay. The artists at Aardman, ILM, Pixar and all other places arereally taleneted people that work on different media. Would you discount photographic art as cheating just because the photographer doesn't use a brush and canvas?
I believe Lucas has a bit of diabetes from what I rmember, the one that is more beningn and can be controlled witha good diet and doesn't require insulin. It does tend to make him gain weight easily and it's indeed a health risk. Maybe it was mentioned in the 60 Min. Ep. 1 piece a few years back?
Well that was 1986, and no small change then. You have to remember that was also around the time Lucas got divorced from Marcia. The group (the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division) that formed Pixar was not composed of hundreds of people either, it was a small dedicated group maybe around 30 or 40 people (depends also how you count, like the people involved in EditDroid or SoundDroid which remained part of the Lucas empier for a few more years). Also back then CG animation for entertainment was ostly relegated to TV commercials, it took almost 10 years for Pixar to get Toy Story out and Disney had a lot of reservations, it was far from proven. Back then it was a very good deal for all parties involved, Lucas, Jobs and Ed Catmull.
ILM also got other stuff besides the money. They got an agreement with Pixar that they would be the first facility to get access to any technology developed by Pixar, mainly PRMan. ILM also get deals from other vendors, SGI in particular with their JEDI agreement (which just expired or is about to). They are one of the beta sites for Alias/Wavefront so they get new versions of Maya, and they had at least an agreement with Softimage (don't remember its exact nature).
But you are right if they setup a good distribution deal they could reap huge rewards. It's still a risky proposition.
Well but that happens in all movies. The question then is about fairness. Sure there were shots in Ep. 2 that made my teeth grind, like the wide water shots in Kamino. But on avrage most of it was good. There are teeth grinders in other movies by other studios too. What about the wargs and Frodo underwater in the marshes in LOTR:TTT. I've hear even many people complain about the hobbits on Treebeard walk in the night. Besides it's the same there too in some instances, film the actors blue screen, film miniatures, create CG and composite them together. On average too most shots were great but certainly not "perfect" (whatever that would mean). It happens all the time to everyone.
Well those shorts were done by an Animation division inside ILM. It's not like they spit off completely, though they did operate semi-independently, much like ILM Commercial Productions. It's very probable that some of the people involved will start forming the new division inside ILM. Patty Blau has been at ILM for ages, she is in the perfect position to head it. Tom Bertino, one of ILM's Animation Directors and director of Work in Progress, was slated to direct the first ILM animated feature. If you check the credits of the short, they are composed of regular ILM folk. It's not split off, just a separate pipeline. The production team (dierctors, producers, etc.) will be separate, but the artists wil be from ILM. When ILM had Commercial Production going on, many of the artists switched back and forth between the VFX pipeline and the Commercials pipeline. For example, Hans Uhlig, who directed the Synchronicity short, besides working in commercials also has worked on films like The Perfect Storm and I believe Dreamcatcher. Mary Beth Hagerty (now at Radium) worked on commercials like the First Union ones but also worked on Episode 2.
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"In some ways this early generation of 3D artists has forgotten the lessons of filmmakers past"
That is some true in many cases but not all of them. People like John Dykstra, Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren know quite a bit of cinematography and also come from the time of classic VFX: shooting opticals, framing shots and lighting and composition, etc. That's why films usually done by veterans fare much much better than those done by new guys (especially boutiques). In some films you get that CG camera syndrome, which makes them look like an amateur demo reel or a motion based ride film.
There is one forgotten aspect though. There are tons of small and dramatic films that contain the "invisible" type and subtle VFX. Stuff like on Pollock, A Beautiful Mind, What Lies Beneath, Forest Gump, Adaptation, Gangs of New York, Punch-Drunk Love, Panic Room, etc.
Even in big films there can be quite a bit of subtle VFX like sky replacements, removing rigs and mics, set extensions, etc.
Well to me VFX are getting better all the time. The problem now is that with CG there are a lot more places doing VFX (there are tons of boutique VFX shops) and also there is a bigger quantity of films with VFX. So while we have better VFX there is also a larger number of films (and maybe higher percentage) with so-so VFX. Still there are projects with great VFX. And there are still facilities that still do all sorts of VFX, not only CG but stuff like miniatures). It seems that this larger portion of so so VFX gives the impression that all VFX are bad but that is not so.
Also it seems that you can't separate the VFX from the story. Just because you didn't like a movie or story doesn't mean the VFX suck. Each should be judged by themeselves unless you criticize the whole package. Or take this as an example, you can see a movie with a sucky story and great photography, or say you can see a great film with bland photography. You can certainly pick apart the different disciplines and art involved. Of course all that contributes to the overall experience if you like the film or not, but it would be stupid to say a filmed sucked because the cinematography was bland and presdict the doom of movies.
And it's incredibly naive to say the CG guys are not artists, There is not much difference between being an artists with a pencil and one with a computer. The computer is just an incredible high tech pencil and it takes real artistry to do great stuff for it. I take you have never met or seen documentaries with CG animators. It would be the same as to say photographers are not artists because they use a machine as opposed to a brush and canvas. There are both artists in their disciplines.
Granted some people out of college (many of them button pushers) might want to do CG and VFX. But many of the people in top acilities have been doing CG for more than a decade. Wouldn't you consider John Lasseter of Pixar, who directed both Toy Storries and has done CG since the early-mid 80s an artists. What about T3's Animation Supervisor Dan Taylor who even did stop motion long before joining ILM. There is much talent and artistry in CG VFX, too bad most people don't see it and think every animation app has a render dinosaur or animate alien monster buttons.
Well the nuclear blast we see in T2, when you have that wide angle view of LA from the hills it was done with some CG, Electric Image if I remember right. In T3, the blast in the desert, that is seen in the trailrs with the beat up car, the sand shockwave was done via practical pyro effects using primacord, much like the Paris destruction in Armageddon. There is also plenty of miniature wrok, including the oputside views of the particle acelerator, and a lot of stuff in the future war is miniature combined with CG.
CG is an incredible powerful and flexible tool and in many ways superior for many things in VFX and looks much much better if done right. Who would want to go back to see strobing effects in stop motion, visible matte lines, creatures that look like rubber and barely move, static matte paintings, etc. There is a place for old and new techniques and usually good supervisors will know when to use them. The problem is projects or facilities that aer thorwn together and just use CG as a cheap way of attaining the VFX. CG is not inherently bad.
I saw a preview this past Thursday. I didn't see the penguin mentioned, but HP sure got a big logo in the credits as the exclusive technology providers for Dreamworks Animation.
Both actually. The machines are running Linux and using Linux based apps. Maya for 3D I believe, and they have a propietary tool for 2D cell painting which was used last year in Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
LinuxJournal had coverage on this:
GFX: DreamWorks Feature Linux and Animation
Linux Dreamworks Redux
Not really since those machines are gonna be used for batch rendering and compositing (they'll be render nodes), not interactive work like what you do on a Flame. Weta Digital uses Shake for composting so she'll have an SGI or a Linux workstation probably.
Well as I mentioned I don't consider color correction to be VFX. If a movie is totally edited in a computer does that make it a full CG movie? Of course not, the computer was just a new tool used to something that used to be done with blades and tape in editing rooms. Same with digital color grading, it has been done by colorists for decades before the advent of computers and used in films which had no VFX at all. OR what upsets me when people considered something like Toy Story the biggest VFX film since all was done inside a computer, arghhhhh!
O Brother Where Art Thou did contain quita a few VFX shots, many by Digital Domain especially the flood sequence at the end. But the color grading can be done elsewhere (places like EFilm for example) on films with no single piece of VFX. Digital color grading is just a new tool. Anyway it's a (maybe slight) distinction. Though I guess films like Pleasntville have blurred the line.
Oh yeah, their inital setup had quite a few SGI boxes, I remember a photo of it. The thing is that places like ILM, Imageworks and others have been accumulating SGI boxes for years. SGI gear, especially the big boxes and servers have a very long lifespan, they are not thrown away just when a new model comes along. Not many years ago ILM still had Crimsons lying around though they might be used as doorstops now ;-). The economics before the advent of cheaper x86/Linux machines dicated that you didn't throw out SGI machines quickly. Besides ILM and Imageworks have more people so workstation wise they are gona have more machines there (though I'm not sure how many enter into the render pool in there, places like Weta and Rhytm and Hues or maybe PDI include the workstations into the nightly render pool). They also have several projects in their pipelines.
;-)?
Still Weta is probably among the top 10 VFX houses capacity wise speaking. Who wouldn't want to play in there
Probably. Supoposdely they work on King Kong for PJ next. Apparently they might work on the film versions of the Chronicles of Narnia and rumor has it a movie based on Neon Evangelion. A lot of people were only meant to be thre until the end of the year since they didn't have any other projects lined up afterwards. A chunk of them are also foreigners, rom the US, Europe and elsewhere so they might want to go back home regardless. They will certainly go on, it just depends on the timing on the nest projects as to how much they will downsize before ramping up again.
As far as ILM that's why they need to bid on a lot of projects. Pipeline has to be busy to accomodate the huge number of people and overhead. That's why they try to work on several projects concurrently, at the moment on Peter Pan, Van Helsing, Harry Potter 3, Ep. 3 and Master and Commander. They just wrapped The Hulk and if T3 and Pirates of the Caribbean haven't wrapped up they should do so in a week or 2 at the most.
It's the big dilema of finding the balance between size and capacity with workload and potential work.
Well there are sveral like that, but surely not every single scenery shot needed somethnig to be removed. Some of the NZ locations were a bit away from civilization (or at least the closest Holiday Inn). Wasn't Bag End and Hobbiton built pretty much isolated, though supposdely you can see a car driving in the distance in one shot. Some shot are real tight with mountains in the back or rock gaces etc. where no hting would interfere. Besides as the articles mention, there were 800 VFX shots in TTT. Im sure a 3 hour movie contains a whole lot more than 800 shots, meaning there must be some without VFX.
Yes but I don't consider the digital color timing part of the VFX. Before the digital era and even before Star Wars, there were/are jobs called colorists which would time (that is color correct) the whole film. They didn't have anything to do with VFX, if anything they have to work with the finished VFX shots to match them to the surrounding shots. Now grading is becoming more digital and it has some connection with VFX as it's sort of related to compositing since you have to match elements.
The LOTR trilogy is using Colossus which was made by 5D which went out of business and Colorfront got a hold of it and I belive Discreet acquierd them and the new product will be called lustre. You can read a bit about it here:
5D Colossus Grades "The Lord Of The Rings" Trilogy
Colorfront to Develop 5D Colossus
Interestingly I thought sometime the color correction was to extreme and too contrasting. There is a shot at the end of TTT with the 3 main characters after being victorious in Helm's Deep, and the shot of Gandalf (which supposdely has the sun right behind him) is really contrasting to the shots of Aragorn and Legolas in terms of saturation and flestones in particular and looks a bit softer. There are several shots like that in both films which made me groan a bit ut are not a real big deal. It kinda reminded me of the extreme color saturation and washout in some shot of Geonosis in Ep. 2. I still think O Brother Where Art Thou is the most consistent in terms of extensive digital grading, but that's just me.
I yeah I enjoyed Waterworld myself. It still doesn't erase the fact that the budget was about U$175 million, but the domestic gross was around U$90 million. Worst of all it was ripped and lambasted by most critics. I thought it was as good an action/scifi movie as any around that time. Some of the complaints were silly like Costner's character being too unlikable. Call me crazy but I don't need every hero or protagonist be the idealized goody two shoes. It's too bad we don't have many anti heroes or ambiguous shady one to keep thing more interesting.
Well just because you found it boring doesn't mean other people did. Not all expensive movies tend to lose money either. Pearl Harbor comes to mind which was the largest budget approved by Disney (though Dinosaur ended costing much more) and was among the top 5 movies of the year. Or maybe it's the exception that proves the rule ;-) (hey even Waterworld finished in the black counting all international revenue).
Well if anything you can't fault VFX with the story. But yes each prequel had over 2000 VFX shots. You have to read the article though, last film Weta did about 800 VFX shots and for this they are doing upwards of 1200. As their technology matures (Massive, muscle dynamics, subsurface scattering) you can even throw more things at to the VFX.
It certainly is a big setup, they are adding 1,176 new processors to what they already had (which was stated in an article some time ago). Probably ILM and Imageworks have a bit more though. The article says that they have the largets Intel deployment, but places like ILM and Imageworks, besides their Intel/Linux machine still have quite bit of SGI hardware around. An article on the SGI websitye a couple years back stated ILM had an 800 CPU Origin 2000 machine, and around 500 O2s. Since then a lot of the TDs, animators and compositors have gotten Dell Linux workstations and several of them keep the 2 machines side by side (the O2 and the Dell). ILM and Pixar also recently added to their renderfarm via RackSaver:
Pixar switches from Sun to Intel
Racksaver testimonials
AMD debuts server processor, readies 'Barton'
SGI Powers 5 Summer films
It certainly is nice that New Line is paying for this though. I'm sure other studios are envious ;-).
It's not only the increase ni speed but actually having more processors. In the basic PRMan setup you send one frame to each CPU. So if before they had 1000 processors they could send, theoretically 1000 frames at the same time, though of course some would render faster than others. Now instead is they doubled their capacity they can now send 2000 frames concurrently (again theoretical).
LOR: ROTK has even more VFX shots than the previous film so it does make sense increasing capacity. Things can be rendered overnight so they are ready for dailies next day. They might also use some of these also for compositing as WQeta Digital uses Shake which also has a batch renderer for Linux.
Shot here refers to standard movie terminology, that is what is between 2 edit cuts. I mean shots of just the New Zealnd scenery, like some of Rohan, require no VFX. Sure one VFX shot may go through different iterations but in the end it's still one shot.
And yes 1200 is very high. I usually consider anything above 400 VFX shots to be high. The Perfect Storm had less than 400 and Pearl Harbor and Ai had about 200 and they still feel VFX heavy. Asylum VFX, a small but very good boutique shop can only handle about 200 shots per project on average though they grew and upgraded so they could handle 400 for Master and Commander. When the makers even doubled that it was a bit too much for them.
Yep I must agree. My parents took me to see the originals, and my Mom loved it then and still is a SW fan. To me the movies were more aimed at the middle, teens, but adults and kids could still enjoy them. I still remember the time I saw ESB first time, the theatre was probably 90% teens that show.
Seems Lucas softened up (maybe in part because now the originals are considered classic kids films, even though they weren't that originally) and so made the new ones more tame, without the edge of the originals.
You do realize that a lot of people in CG and VFX don't like John Gaeta, who is the VFX supervisor for the Matrix trilogy because all his trash talk, right? Maybe he is severly misquotten or has zero social skills but I wouldn't give much credence to his opinions.
About the soulless statement, that is really funny coming from a guy who previsously worked on the VFX of Star Trek 5 and Judge Dredd.
Second he is as guilty as what he is ragging about. How much talk has there been about the all CG humans and environments in Reloaded and their technological superiority? What wa it, like 1200 VFX shots too. What was the story point of many of the VFX except trying to be cool and hip for the sake of it? How much crap talk has there been about they have raised the bar so high in VFX that it'll never be touched? Imagine if the folks at ILM had said they had raised the bar so high with Jurassic Park that no one would be able to reach it? Gaeta is the only big VFX guys who has been very unprofessional and even insulting to others in the business. Even some of his speeches makes it look like he was solely responsible for the greatness. One thing is certain, seems Gaeta and Mr. Silver are made right for each other.
Sorry but I think I'' take opinions of others more seriosuly. That is not to say that the rest of the folks at ESC and the other facilities didn't do a great job and are taleneted and have more class.
LucasArts makes computer games. Maybe you are referring to ILM?
Sheez I guess you are one of those people that think that computers have a button "render and animate dinosaur" right. What is ILM's fault about the story content on the films they work on. They get contracted and have no say on story. Would the food caterer, gips or electricians in that sense be also responsible for the story?
Computers are just tools, just like pencils and clay. The artists at Aardman, ILM, Pixar and all other places arereally taleneted people that work on different media. Would you discount photographic art as cheating just because the photographer doesn't use a brush and canvas?
I believe Lucas has a bit of diabetes from what I rmember, the one that is more beningn and can be controlled witha good diet and doesn't require insulin. It does tend to make him gain weight easily and it's indeed a health risk. Maybe it was mentioned in the 60 Min. Ep. 1 piece a few years back?
If you want to nitpick start wiht the date. Pixar wasn't officially sold to Jobs until 1986.
Well that was 1986, and no small change then. You have to remember that was also around the time Lucas got divorced from Marcia. The group (the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division) that formed Pixar was not composed of hundreds of people either, it was a small dedicated group maybe around 30 or 40 people (depends also how you count, like the people involved in EditDroid or SoundDroid which remained part of the Lucas empier for a few more years). Also back then CG animation for entertainment was ostly relegated to TV commercials, it took almost 10 years for Pixar to get Toy Story out and Disney had a lot of reservations, it was far from proven. Back then it was a very good deal for all parties involved, Lucas, Jobs and Ed Catmull.
ILM also got other stuff besides the money. They got an agreement with Pixar that they would be the first facility to get access to any technology developed by Pixar, mainly PRMan. ILM also get deals from other vendors, SGI in particular with their JEDI agreement (which just expired or is about to). They are one of the beta sites for Alias/Wavefront so they get new versions of Maya, and they had at least an agreement with Softimage (don't remember its exact nature).
But you are right if they setup a good distribution deal they could reap huge rewards. It's still a risky proposition.
Well but that happens in all movies. The question then is about fairness. Sure there were shots in Ep. 2 that made my teeth grind, like the wide water shots in Kamino. But on avrage most of it was good. There are teeth grinders in other movies by other studios too. What about the wargs and Frodo underwater in the marshes in LOTR:TTT. I've hear even many people complain about the hobbits on Treebeard walk in the night. Besides it's the same there too in some instances, film the actors blue screen, film miniatures, create CG and composite them together. On average too most shots were great but certainly not "perfect" (whatever that would mean). It happens all the time to everyone.
Well those shorts were done by an Animation division inside ILM. It's not like they spit off completely, though they did operate semi-independently, much like ILM Commercial Productions. It's very probable that some of the people involved will start forming the new division inside ILM. Patty Blau has been at ILM for ages, she is in the perfect position to head it. Tom Bertino, one of ILM's Animation Directors and director of Work in Progress, was slated to direct the first ILM animated feature. If you check the credits of the short, they are composed of regular ILM folk. It's not split off, just a separate pipeline. The production team (dierctors, producers, etc.) will be separate, but the artists wil be from ILM. When ILM had Commercial Production going on, many of the artists switched back and forth between the VFX pipeline and the Commercials pipeline. For example, Hans Uhlig, who directed the Synchronicity short, besides working in commercials also has worked on films like The Perfect Storm and I believe Dreamcatcher. Mary Beth Hagerty (now at Radium) worked on commercials like the First Union ones but also worked on Episode 2.