Star Wars: Episode I "The Phantom Menace" is a milestone in the development of digital film technology. Creatures that are 100 percent synthetic are on the screen for almost half of the 130 minute film, and 95 percent of the picture contains some form of computer generated detail. ILM was able to create scenes with 7000 computer generated soldiers and other scenes with countless thousands of digital extras. Computer generated characters are able to talk and act in the film and digital artists are now capable of placing them in any part of the universe the imagination can create. Just a few years ago computer artists were struggling to make a single dinosaur seem real. Now they are capable of doing almost anything that men like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg can dream up.

Rob Coleman, the animation director of The Phantom Menace, says that when he was asked to direct the animation by George Lucas, he found the project to be both amazing and daunting. He explains, "You get the script and realize how much screen time the digital characters will have and you ask yourself, `Can we do this? Can we handle the kind of work George is asking us to do?' Being ILM you get used to taking on the impossible, but I'll tell you, I was worried because over half the movie requires computer-generated characters to interact with live actors. I wasn't sure we could maintain their performances with the live actors...that is a very high benchmark to hit every time."

Animation Supervisor Rob Coleman. © 1999 Industrial Light & Magic. Photo Courtesy of David Owen & Sean Casey.

ILM's First Animation Director
Coleman, who was the animation supervisor of Men in Black (1997), and a supervising character animator of Dragonheart (1996), is the first person at ILM to be given the title animation director on a feature. In the past the head of animation on a feature at ILM was called a supervisor. George Lucas considers his latest creation a live-action/animated science-fiction feature, so he felt it was important to honor Coleman with the new title.

It was Coleman's job to direct the animation of anything that had a head on it. He supervised a team of 45 animators who created over 60 digital characters that were well defined. They also animated thousands of extras. When he joined the company in 1993, ILM employed a total of 10 animators.

The animators put a tremendous amount of detail in both the major and minor characters. While some CGI characters had major speaking parts, others were simply added to give the film a greater sense of realism. For example, the role of a family of short creatures was simply to walk in and out of scenes. Other characters were relegated to being barely seen as a moving texture in the background. Lucas had artists add flying birds and other creatures to add further to the illusion of life.

The technical wizardry in the film is quite amazing. To demonstrate the skills of artists who work with light and shadow, Coleman showed me a scene where a man walks from a dark enclosed space into an open outdoors space lit with sunlight. The change of lighting was a digital effect. The scene was shot with a man walking in front of a blue screen. The background architecture was digital, as was the exterior space and sky. Everything in the scene was digital except the man.

Seemingly simple looking scenes in the film were often extremely challenging composite shots. Some shots contain footage shot in several locations. An actor filmed in London might appear with a background created in California and a sky full of clouds filmed in yet another location. Other scenes were even more complex. Some had 100 or even 200 elements composited together to make a single frame of film.

Coleman showed a crowd scene with a long procession wandering through it as an example of a scene with a lot of composite elements. The procession was constructed from several images of four people carrying flags. By shooting them over and over and adding different computer generated elements in between them, a composite artist created a long procession when the parts were finally strung together.

Coleman was one of the few people who had a copy of the entire production as it developed. His copy was updated weekly or monthly as things changed. "I was one of the only people on the crew who had my own copy of the movie through the entire production because I needed to look at each sequence. I had my copy for over a year and a half. You really need it. I don't know how you can direct a film with this much character worked in it and not have a copy of it. George understood that right away. Of course there was a security issue. He didn't want to share it with the world. I kept it in my office with a wrong label on it."