Digital Domain used a videogame and gaming interface to create previs of proposed flight scenes for director Rob Cohen’s Stealth. © Sony Pictures. Courtesy of Digital Domain.

Loni Peristere, co-founder of Zoic Studios and vfx supervisor of both films (Serenity, Zathura, Pathfinder) and TV shows (CSI, Angel, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica), suggests, “I can’t wait to incorporate a game engine into our pipeline, as a tool for greater efficiency and designing shots. It would be great for getting the dynamics of a scene — telling the game you have an exploding building, for instance, and then being able to plan camera moves around that.” Zoic employs previs extensively for entire scenes, including camera motion control, using both Maya and LightWave. Peristere notes, “The engines will have to incorporate more cinematic features, such as the limitations of a dolly track or crane. However, using controls such as those for a PlayStation can really help with camera moves in free space. Weta Digital was able to use a game engine for flying virtual planes around the Empire State Building in King Kong, and was able to record and then recreate the camera moves very effectively.” Peristere believes that use of game engines such as the Unreal engine (which at present seems to be the engine of choice for previs) will be part of a growing trend of moving previs more and more into the hands of the director. “Whereas prices have to come down, and data commonality has to be increased, the use of game engines is only a matter of time,” he offers.

A third reason is that games and movies are becoming closer to each other, in many ways. Movies are increasingly loaded with game-like effects. Games are increasingly based on movies. Videogame-based revenues were actually higher last year than those of in-theater movies. Why not create the two at the same time, with some of the same tools? Up till now, games and films have been produced distinctly apart (with a very few exceptions, such as The Matrix trilogy). Much of the problem has been cultural as well as technological. Efforts at creating common file sharing formats between games and film vfx toolsets look like they will soon be successful — the technology can eventually be resolved. But the suits of Hollywood have never really gotten along well with the much looser culture of game producers. Efforts to bring game production in-house at major studios have often been spectacular failures. As a result, videogames based on movies are generally almost afterthoughts for the Hollywood moguls — the games are started well after the film design is complete, and are then given insanely short amounts of time to get completed — often as little as six to eight months (in order to appear on shelves in time with the film’s release) instead of the 18 months of production time that a videogame typically needs.

By Episode III, George Lucas tried out scenes in previs on a daily basis. He did 23 revisions of the first minute of Sith. Photo credit: Sarah Baisley (left) © & ™ Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Digital work by ILM.

This is a great pity, because so many of the new game releases are “branded” — increasingly, games are tied in with movies or TV shows. If a feature and its attendant game could really be partners in the production process, it could result in a vastly better game — and bottom line — for such a joint project.

Enter George Lucas, who has major credentials on both the gaming and filmmaking sides of the fence. His Star Wars series of games have been best sellers — and have consistently been ranked in the top 10 games within the years of their release. His films have been among the most popular of all time, and he has pioneered many vfx techniques — including those of previs. Lucas started long ago to realize that ordinary storyboard techniques were insufficient to get his ideas across to his pre-production team — or to help keep the hundreds of creatures, characters and environments organized and moving down a timely pipeline. For the first Star Wars film in 1977, he cut together World War II footage of fighter planes dogfighting, as a moving storyboard for the attack on the Death Star. That approach evolved into using miniatures of the snow speeders, as well as hand-drawn animations, for The Empire Strikes Back. By 1994, for the beginning of the second trilogy, Lucas hired vfx artist David Dozoretz and a team that used 3D animation toolsets to create rough film shots, similar to animatics, that could be used both to guide the production teams on location and the post-production teams adding virtual creatures and scene elements. For Episode III, the previs was handled by a dozen artists under Gregoire’s supervision, using 64-bit AMD Opteron-powered computers running Maya and Adobe After Effects to create an immersive environment. Lucas would come to try out scenes on a daily basis, pre-shooting scenes to his heart’s content. He did 23 revisions of the first minute, at a small fraction of what it would have cost to have it done in full post-production. Lucas has stated that the use of previs trimmed at least $10 million off the film’s budget.

Given Lucas’ vision and vast resources at the new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco, it’s not surprising that ILM is developing previs with the LucasArts game engine and testing it on one of their upcoming releases. What we’re saying is, ‘Let’s make this like photography; do it in realtime,’” suggests Lucasfilm cto Cliff Plumer. “This is something we’ve been developing in conjunction with LucasArts — to hand the previs to the director. It’s almost like a game. The director can plan how to shoot a live-action or block a CG scene. Contained in the application are libraries of lenses and so forth. But, we can also record the camera moves, create basic animations and block in camera angles. And instead of handing rendered animatics to the CG pipeline, we have actual files — camera files, scene layout files, actual assets that can feed into the pipeline. It gives the crew input into what the director is thinking.”