Back to the Future with THX 1138
The Star Wars trilogy isn’t the only cherished George Lucas icon to get a new digital look, on DVD. THX 1138, the director’s first film from 1971 about an oppressive futuristic underground society obsessed with consumerism, has also received ILM’s CG treatment for a new director’s cut (Warner Home Video, $26.99) that hit shelves last month. In a VFXWorld exclusive, DVD vfx producer Paul Hill and CG supervisor Henry Preston discussed their “summer project,” which consisted not only of heavy cleaning (and grain removal from Lowry Digital) but also the creation of new 3D shots to add greater scope and detail to the underground factory and surrounding environs where THX 1138 (Robert Duvall) and his colleagues work and live. They even did a greenscreen session for a locker room shot of a robot cop containing partial CGI, and Preston himself can be seen driving a train for one of the BART extensions.
Bill Desowitz: Let’s first talk about the new footage and what it consists of.
Paul Hill: Certainly George went back in and re-edited using some outtakes and other stuff. Because of the Northridge quake, a lot of the original footage was water damaged. That’s why we knew when we went in that we were going to have to do some extensive restoration work. So before I came onto the project, George went through with the editor, picked a bunch of stuff and re-edited it slightly, just to make it more what he wanted. He realized that there were scenes he wanted to expand upon… at the time with the budget that he had, everything is claustrophobic. That was still an important part of the film, but he wanted to expand upon how huge that claustrophobia is. You see a lot more BART trains going by underground and things like that.
BD: What about the new shots?
PH: There’s a shot where you walk by a window and see a complex outside where BART pulls in and thousands of people get out. There’s a shot where you see the factory where THX works…it begins where you see this computer-generated factory sequence and then it pulls down and you see all these people standing and working. Those people are actually from some extra 16mm footage that we had. We combined the really old with the really new. Then, for example, when THX and the hologram are getting in their car in the parking garage to drive away at the end, that was filmed at San Francisco Airport. That universe has been expanded with more parking garages and BART trains. We were trying to give the impression that the city was huge with the effects that we put in.
Henry Preston: The main change is the car chase, which has a lot of fully 3D shots. It expands the space and George was trying to figure out how to raise the ceiling on this movie. Another thing. If you look at this movie, it was filmed in every single tunnel in the Bay Area. Not all of them match.
PH: What we did with the color correction is give everything the same look — it’s much less obvious that they are different tunnels.
HP: We added some crowd stuff when they’re escaping from the white void that opened things up quite a bit.
PH: That’s true. It was the `70s and they were having enough trouble finding people who were willing to shave their heads. Taking what we had, we took out the back wall and just filled it with millions of people.
HP: Yeah, we ran our crowd software and actually developed some software called Rent A Crowd for that, where we would take crowd stuff from other movies that we had stashed away. They were walk cycles.
PH: But now they had to be bald and they had to be wearing white.
HP: We didn’t run any new MoCap sessions for this, but we always thought we had thousands of walk cycles, so we should grab them and use them and that’s what we did. And so George wanted us to be as cost-efficient as possible, so that was one way.
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