Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/041392/0413460.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8KB | 167 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 68

They Put The ILM In Film


At George Lucas' Oscar-hoarding Industrial Light & Magic,
computer wizards are re-forming the face of movies

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by David S. Jackson/San Rafael


    There wasn't much suspense in the Visual Effects category
at last week's Oscars. The nominees were Hook, for its twinkly,
shrinkly Tinkerbell (created by a team at producer George
Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic shop), Backdraft, for its nifty
fire rampage (Industrial Light & Magic) and Terminator 2:
Judgment Day, in part for its liquid-metal cyborg that can
"morph" -- change seamlessly, seductively -- into any shape
(Industrial Light & Magic). And the Oscar went to . . .
Industrial Light & Magic, for T2.

    Dennis Muren, senior visual-effects supervisor at ILM, has
become a familiar figure on Oscar night, both because this was
his seventh Academy Award and because he is a towering gent
with lank white hair and a serene face. That picture -- of a
modern Merlin holding a gold totem -- is appropriate, for Muren,
45, is a wizard in the movie craft of computer graphics. In the
bland ILM barracks in San Rafael, Calif., he and his merry
alchemists wave a little wand over their Silicon Graphics VGX
340 terminals, and out comes the magic.

    As traditional special-effects experts, Muren and his
ILM-makers brought to life some of the most famous icons in
movie history, from Darth Vader to E.T. Now he is leading a
revolution in moviemaking. ILM has tamed the elements: fire and
water are notoriously tough to animate, but the company managed
the first convincingly in Backdraft and the second with the
slinky pseudopod in The Abyss. An ILM team led by Steve Williams
animated -- brought to life, if you will -- the T-1000 creature
in T2, which could transform itself from, say, linoleum into a
lethal humanoid weapon. "Movie effects have been the same for
a hundred years, and they're changing this year," Williams, 30,
says with a visionary's lack of modesty. "This is the milestone
right here."

    Computer graphics as movie art form -- a technical advance
that leapfrogs over the wondrous and cumbersome stop-motion
puppeteering of such effects geas Willis O'Brien and Ray
Harryhausen -- is just a decade old. The Disney film TRON, which
took place inside a video game, was the first to explore the new
technique. In the Steven Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock
Holmes (1985), a computer-generated knight wielding a sword
leaped out of a stained-glass window and menaced a priest.
Morphing, the big news in special effects, made its debut in
Willow (1988): a reclining tiger is smoothly transformed into
a sleeping woman.

    These days, morphing is everywhere. The swamis at Pacific
Data Images -- one of the half a dozen California studios
competing with ILM -- devised the melting pot of faces for
Michael Jackson's Black or White. Pacific has also changed a car
into a running tiger for Exxon and morphed a man's face into a
block for Schick razors. The process can be used to fuse
separate takes of a scene or restore damaged film frames.

    "Computer graphics," says ILM animator Mark Dippe, "has
become an essential design and communi cation tool.
Entertainment is only a small part of it." Hospitals use
realistic three-dimensional computer animation to walk doctors
through their next operation before they ever pick up a scalpel.
The FBI can simulate what a missing child would look like years
after a disappearance.

    Even in the live theater, computer technology can work its
wonders. George Coates' Invisible Site: A Virtual Sho, a
mixed-media phantasmagoria now onstage in San Francisco, tells
a story like TRON's or The Lawnmower Man's: of travelers and
hackers in a virtual-reality video game. But from the first
moment, with the image of a huge (computerized) concrete chute
belching (the image of) computer-generated smoke, the effects
are the real story. The audience, wearing 3-D glasses, watches
a live actor getting poked by a giant computer-generated glove,
or scenery changing with the tapping of a computer key. "3-D is
an old technique," explains Coates, "and computer graphics is
a new one. There were no rules for mixing them. We made them up
as we went along." The result is a blend of film, computer
projections and reality -- whatever that is -- that has the
viewer wondering, Is it live, or is it Macintosh?

    "We operate in a virtual world," Dippe says, and at ILM
the effects are virtually perfect. What the ILM makers can give
to the film image they can also take away, with a kind of
computer Clearasil that removes those unsightly production
blemishes. Until recently, the wires that held up "flying"
actors had to be erased laboriously, frame by frame. Now the
cables that supported Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell can be removed
digitally -- and the background restored the same way -- with
no evidence of tampering. The 2-in. pipe that supported Michael
J. Fox's space-age skateboard in Back to the Future was erased
to give the impression that Fox was zipping around in midair.
For Memoirs of an Invisible Man, computers removed Chevy Chase
from his clothes, then filled in the displaced background. "If
there's a problem on the set," says Williams, "no problem. We
can fix it."

    But these effects are like Lego blocks compared with the
task confronting ILM now: Spielberg's Jurassic Park, from the
Michael Crichton best seller about dinosaurs roaming through a
modern theme park. The mammoth mechanized beasts being assembled
at Stan Winston Studio in Van Nuys, Calif., will be filmed,
broken down into computer code and inserted onto the live-action
frame to interact with the humans. Spielberg's requirements for
absolute movie realism will mean a 21st century mar riage
between the modelmaking Gepettos in Los Angeles and the video
futurists in San Rafael. One ILM animator says the challenge is
"10 times more difficult" than bringing to life T-1000 in T2.

    "All this is just the first generation," Muren proclaims.
"There will be images you've never seen before." What he strives
for is "physical realism," making the effects not the star of
the movie -- showstoppers like the T2 morphing -- but so
realistic, so believable, that the audience never notices them.
"I don't know where the end of this stuff is," Muren says. "I
mean, how real is real?"

    With ILM at the console, who needs reality? "We have
conquered the physical properties of nature," Williams declares.
"We can do tree bark; we can do grass blowing and water
rippling. But we have only begun with computer-generated
humans." At the moment, special-effects experts have trouble
making the skin look authentic, and, as Williams notes, "hair
is hard." Not to worry; just to wait. "A real human being -- I
think we'll get it," he says. "Not much is impossible."

    But much of it is spooky. There is already talk of a movie
using a computer-generated Marilyn Monroe. Predicts Williams:
"Long-dead Presidents will be on TV, computer generated, giving
speeches. Actors who died 50 years ago will be starring next to
contemporary actors. We could even create actors who have never
been born -- guys you don't have to pay points to or give
trailers to. It will happen. And," he says, glancing around the
ILM lab, "it will probably happen here."

    Lest this young Einstein sound like a young Frankenstein,
Williams adds that computer graphics can help make only
better-looking movies, not better ones. "Essentially, this is
another form of pencil," he says. "If it's in the hands of
someone who can't draw, then it can't draw."

    And Muren, the benign sorcerer, would like to teach the
world to draw. He came late to computer graphics, taking a
sabbatical in 1990 to learn the vocabulary. "Now I want kids to
come up learning this stuff. I want everybody to think, `Jeez,
if he can do it, I can do it.' "

    Why do you want that, O Merlin of the movies? "So they
will grow up to make neater films for me to see later on."