VES - Saturday Review

To start off, I went with David of Meyemind, and a mutual friend from work. We left the Bay area around 2am on Saturday, and after a healthy (debatable) dose of Red Bull and more caffeine, we did the drive to LA. After a good five hours, we got into Santa Monica and had breakfast at a local IHOP before parking the car and heading into the Aero Theatre at 9am.

Our first session of the morning was Visual Effects Paradiso, hosted by Mike Fink, our visual effects supervisor for Constantine. Mike started off by showing us slides from the past 2000 years, which covered how people entertained others. Churches were the entertainment of the era, and people would flock to the local church to see frescos made by the artisans there. Frescos were painted with colored plaster, and once it was set, it was done. A "one shot take", as Mike described it. Following frescos came paintings, such as Michaelangelo's Sistene Chapel and Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, to name the more popular ones. As Mike delved into the more modern forms of illusion and visual effects, it was apparent to me that film is a storytelling medium, like canvas and churches were before. Photography and moving pictures came into service early in 1900s, and some of the earliest photography happened in the late 1800s! He showed a stunning photograph of the first human ever, which was a picture of a deserted street with a man standing nonchalantly in the middle. He described that the exposure was so long, all the moving vehicles and people were motionblurred away. Only this solitary figure remained. The reason? He was getting his shoes shined and stayed still the entire time the photograph was taken.

Mike continued with films of the early 1900s, describing how artisans were creating illusion with jump cuts and trick photography; shooting two parts of the film on the same negative at different times. While it is tame in our day and age, at the beginning of the century it was mystic and magical, this photochemical process of bringing life onto the big screen. Mike ended this great presentation with a short clip of some of the great advances in visual effects over the years.

Our second, and equally exciting presentation was Sin City, with some of the folks from The Orphanage and CafeFX. It was a shame that some of the crew from Hybride couldn't make it. I was looking forward to hearing them speak about The Hard Goodbye (Marv's story). Despite a third of the story unable to be fulfilled, it was just as exciting hearing these two talk about their development and creation of their parts of the film.

The Orphanage began with their development of That Yellow Bastard, and how they brought about the look. Everything was shot on greenscreen, as you would imagine, and The Orphanage spent a great deal of time getting reference and creating greenscreen extractions for the 4:4:4 HD video that was shot of the film. At the beginning of production, Robert Rodriquez gave each studio working on the film (Orphanage, CafeFX, Hybrid) a chance to create their own look for their sequences. Since Frank Miller's graphic novel was the basis for the film, one can see how each studio managed to create their own, separate look while still mimicking the ideal set in the graphic novel. CafeFX continued the presentation with the work they did for The Big Fat Kill. Like The Orphanage, they too collected large amounts of reference photography of areas and locales that would eventually be completely recreated in the computer. For a vital sequence in their part of the film, they created a virtual camera which was placed accurately in the 3D space of the scene that matched what was shot. This allowed everyone working on that section to manage in their head how each shot would follow the other, and how continuity could be maintained.

By far the most popular, and most packed event was the Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith presentation, hosted by John Helms and Jamy Wheless. Both of these charismatic individuals described, in as much detail as could possibly be in an hour, how they created the visual effects from this third film. From creating elaborate matte paintings and miniatures from Mustafar, the volcano planet, to simulation of muscle systems and cloth dynamics for the CG creatures and digital doubles, John and Jamy detailed quite a bit. Understandably, this was more of an overview with exciting and very detailed breakdowns and video of the many shots from the show, along with short joke dailies when artists had some slow time; an iClone commercial, a hamster wheel powering a clone vehicle, and marshmellows roasting over Anakin Skywalker, to name a few.

The 3:30 to 5:00 presentation was an interview, presented in the style of Inside the Actors Studio. Jim Rygiel interviewed a legend in the visual effects field, Richard Edlund. Jim interviewed Richard about his past and how he started in the visual effects industry, which was very informative on how he got his start! They started with a short clip of Richard's demo reel, which contained such classic films as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Multiplicity, Ghostbusters and Ghost. Truly amazing work from a very talented guy. Here's a short description of Richard Edlund as written in the VES2005 Event Guide.

Richard Edlund has made his career in visual effects and it has been an extraordinary journey. His early collaborations with George Lucas resulted in the formation of ILM and fostered a new era in visual effects. This collaboration also produced multiple Academy Awards and nominations: Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Return of the Jedi, and Poltergeist. His talent continued to be recognized with the formation of his own visual effects empire: Boss Film Studios which produced many more Academy Award nominations from some very memorable films: Ghostbusters, 2010, Poltergeist II, Die Hard and Alien3. Richard has also been recognized internationally with BAFTA Awards and additional BAFTA nominations. The Television Academy of Arts and Sciences has recognized Edlund with an Emmy Award for his visual effects work on the sci-fi Mini-Series Battlestar Galactica and an Emmy nominatino recently for Angels in America. Outside of his projects accomplishments, Richard has served the visual effects community for the past 10 years, as a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and as Chairman of its Visual Effects branch. He also chairs the Academy's Scientific and Technical Awards Committee. As a result of Richard's efforts with the Academy, the art of visual effects and the talented folks responsible for the this craft have become more celebrated and recognized by the film community at large.

The next session, which ran at least a half hour longer than scheduled, was titled Next Generation: The Future of Gaming. The panel was comprised of Don Daglow from Stormfront Studios in Marin, Lorne Lanning from Oddworld, Tim Miller from Blur Studio, and Habib Zargoupour from EA Vancouver. While there was no immediate showing of the next gen boxes and what they were capable of, Don and Lorne described the state of gaming and how it could possibly be improved, as well as how many artisans from the film side migrate to the game side. Sometimes to express their creative juices as well as have more control. Tim showed some videos which were shown at E3 earlier this year, Hellsgate:London and Warhammer 40k:Dawn of War. Both these cinematics were extremely well done, and it's a testimate to what is capable from extremely talented individuals that have the chance to expose their creative side. Habib showed the audience some of the work he was doing for the next gen XBox360 machine, called Need For Speed: Most Wanted. While we watched the video, we were impressed at the image quality, speed, and overall awesomeness (can awesomeness be overall?) of what we saw. At the end of his showing of the work, he stood up and announced that what we had just seen was an alpha version of NFS: Most Wanted running in realtime on alpha XBox360 hardware! He continued to demonstrate how the realtime effects were created for the game, from bump mapping and normal mapping to atmosphere day and night changes. It was extremely impressive, and this was all running at HD 1280x720 resolution from a projection screen. It was very nice, especially given that this console and the game won't be out until November of this year! I eagerly look forward to what the next gen consoles can do, both in terms of immersion and graphics.

Our last presentation of the evening, starting a little after 8pm, was Batman Begins. Paul Franklin, from Double Negative, described his companys work on the film which covered miniature compositing of the Batmobile, the monorail of Gotham, and the cityscape of Gotham and the miniatures which went along with it. While his talk was exciting and very informative, we had just been up for almost 20 hours straight, with only having a few hours sleep from Friday night. I was struggling to keep my eyes open, and instead closed them and listened to him talk about the struggles and onset experiences which plagued them during their shoot in Chicago and in the local England film studios. This presentation ran a little long, ending at around 9:40, with a presentation of Batman Begins. We finally ended up leaving the Aero Theater at around 12:30am, and finally got into the hotel at 1am.

While I'm at it, I thought I'd review the Comfort Inn and Suites at LAX in Inglewood that we stayed at. For three of us with my Emmy discount card it cost us 90 bucks for the night. We stayed in a smoking room, which I unfortunately found out was the only one available to us since we checked in at 12:30am. A neighbor in the other room was blasting their TV until around 2am, and overall, the quality really stunk. No wi-fi access, smoky room, and really bad service. I give it a quarter star out of four. Next time I'm sleeping in the car.

And since you've been reading this far, here's a treat! The Batmobile was there, in the flesh at the theater, and I got a chance to snap some pictures of it! Without further ado, the Batmobile.