The Oscars: ILM Talks Star Trek
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Industrial Light & Magic more than raised the bar for J.J. Abrams' successful Star Trek reboot: blending the real and the virtual in a very creative way in making a more believable movie in space, and offering a number of advancements in simulation and lighting, which are discussed by Visual Effects Supervisors Roger Guyett and Russell Earl and Animation Supervisor Paul Kavanagh.
Bill Desowitz: Let's first recap some of the new tools you created for Star Trek and their impact.
Roger Guyett: As a broad overview, I would say that the project had all sorts of different challenges because it had such a broad spectrum of work. Most specifically, we did a lot of stuff with virtual pyrotechnics to overcome the issues of doing pyrotechnics in space and dealing with non-terrestrial kind of gravities. And just the creative aspect of being able to place explosions in a movie like this does have that level of space battle, combat, and that was a lot of fun for us to do.
BD: Audiences expect more realism.
RG: Right: And we're constantly looking at the way that we've solved those problems in the past. If you looked at Star Wars, they were just filming elements and compositing those into shots. But they're filming the elements in the real world, which has gravity, and what we were trying to do is overcome -- or at least respect -- the physics of real space. And that was certainly a big achievement on the show. The lighting style was certainly a big departure for us, and Russell can talk to you about the destruction.
Russell Earl: That was one of the other things that we knew we had to deal with from early on, including the destruction of planet Vulcan. So for that we knew we were going to have massive landscapes, we were going to be on the surface and then shots in space, where we were destroying full planets, so we worked with some proprietary tools here -- Fracture -- that we used to break up the surface of the planet or the terrain based on gross sizes, and that could be run through our physical simulation engine to then break and destroy and emit secondary particles of dust and debris. So we had to figure out an efficient way to do that in a variety of scales. In addition, a lot of the destruction was caused by our Black Hole, which was another big simulation.
RE: Yeah, and we had to direct it, so think about how this Black Hole would cause the destruction and everything would eventually collapse upon itself . At the same time, making it exciting and visually interesting.
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I forgot to state those points in the above comment are from a Viewers point of view. I have never been in the production part of Video or FX effects. The closest I've come is helping fix the Display Machines, a few film projectors and TV's so about all I know about making the stuff is from reading articles. But for 99% of the people that is all the closer they get also, so please enjoy what little visual displays you watch before opening your eyes each morning costs you money.
I remember how the FX visual effects were back in the time of Star Trek when it was first on TV. At the time it was mostly jump to a new film clip. Then it was overlaying one piece of film on to another. Then they started painting on the film strips. Then video came, and they could add text but it was still a film era in the 70's. With the 80's they at first could ad half screens and the size kept growing smaller as the electronics got better.
2001 A Space Odyssey was the first biggy in film, video started with cartoons and animations, because kids were not as pixel crazy as adults. In time during the 80's it got to be the animated station logos that seemed to start with local news broadcasts.
I began calling this stuff Video Pollution in the mid 80's. Now days to view a TV show with out these advertising pieces of Video Pollution it is getting to be you have a better chance of winning the State Lotto.
And for about half the viewers this info is not needed with EPG's (Electronic Program Guides) that have the next 3 days, a week or more of whats comming up. Even some HDTV's hold this information. I gave up my TCI cable for a Dish in April 2005. This removed my need for this self promoting banner garbage or polution so I did not even have to read the weekly TV Guide to see whats worth watching.
And this FX created Video pollution is now polluting a fifth of the viewing screen. And today you go to buy a DVD of what ever show you like and they do not even remove some of this pollution.
FX effects ad much to the visual content, but advertising money has slipped in and is polluting these special effects. It is now in 2010 eating up around 24 to 32 minutes of show time, that counts the show logo time fillers as each segment starts or ends even more as hour long episodes become two or three episodes.
What ever happened to true real produced content with the beautiful non advertising content Special effects added and enhanced. I know it costs money to ad the FX but now it is so cheap they use it's gifts to make self promoting Video Pollution garbage that is destroying the medium that it was invented to enhance.
In the early 90's I projected the pollution of TV/video will reach the 50/50 level in 2040. In 2009 it has arrived on a few shows, and at the current rate by 2015 making money off the visual content will have reached 100% of all content, and begin killing the medium that it was created for a death blow.
FX at first was benign but now it is a viral infection that will kill it's host. Video may live forever but will the FX factor and it's children kill the TV aspect of the medium?
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