Veteran vfx supervisor Hoyt Yeatman earned his feature directorial debut by using his digital expertise to fashion a high-tech pitch that included a previs “trailer” for the project.

Like many visual effects supervisors, Hoyt Yeatman has long harbored a desire to direct. The former chief of DreamQuest Images and The Secret Lab has a track record that includes supervising effects on Armageddon, Mission to Mars, Crimson Tide, Con Air, The Rock and The Abyss (for which he won an Oscar), and he has wanted to parlay his knowledge into a shot at directing. With the recent announcement that he’ll get that shot — directing G-Force for producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney — he’s taken a big step toward that goal.

Clearly, successful affiliation with Bruckheimer’s mega-hits in the past helped Yeatman get considered, and he didn’t squander the opportunity. “I realized that no one in their right mind was going to say, ‘Here Hoyt, go direct something just because you do visual effects.’ I think Jerry gave me the break because he knows that I can execute things. But you can’t just build on the toys that you know how to play with. You have to build on something completely different — an original story with good characters. It’s very hard but it’s the only way.”

After coming up with the idea for G-Force (he gives credit to his six-year-old son for the inspiration), Yeatman applied his digital expertise to fashion a high-tech pitch. He used Maya animation to previs a one-minute “trailer” for G-Force, and accompanied that with a written “script-ment” and concept art, including a one-sheet depicting his characters in action.

The gist of the idea is that a group of talking “animal commandoes” thwarts the evil schemes of a home appliance-manufacturing mogul, who plans to harness his machines to take over the world. “It’s like Stuart Little meets Spy Kids,” laughs Yeatman. “Kids love watching machines beat each other up. We wondered how to incorporate robotic technology in interesting ways, so we started playing with appliances. We realized all the fun you could have with relentless rice cookers and terminator cappuccino machines. It’s a whole world of gizmos and gadgets.”

Technically, Yeatman envisions G-Force as a hybrid that mixes CG characters and live-action backgrounds, although he acknowledges it could be all-CG as well. He developed the idea through his production company Whamaphram, which he heads with producing partner David James, who will serve as Whamaphram’s exec producer on G-Force. Yeatman explains, “We chose G-Force, as our first production because it was something that I could see myself doing. It has economic virtues to it, like the fact that we’re putting our emphasis on a half-dozen characters and then trying to use the best of visual effects.”

Mission to Mars was one of the big budget features Yeatman had supervised. For his trailer, however, he used a stripped-down, Costco approach. All Mission to Mars images © Touchstone Pictures.

Perfecting The Pitch
Yeatman adds, “Having never done this before — pitching a project like this — we came to realize very quickly that the groups we’re talking to at that level have no interest whatsoever in how we would get it done. I could talk about all the amazing things we could do, but no one was listening. What they were really looking at were the story and the characters. The only way to reach them was to come up with something creative that would get their attention. “I think one of the reasons we were successful at the pitch is because we had a lot of visual materials with us. We had a one-minute teaser that we built in HD with the characters in it, with music and sound effects in 5.1 Dolby. It gave a little bit of the flavor of what this thing might look like.

“My first thought was to make the teaser in 35mm. But we realized that studio executives were not going to drive to a screening room to look at a one-minute trailer. We also thought about putting it on tape. But then I remembered when we used to give pitches for commercials at DreamQuest, and we’d bring tapes to places with a quarter of a million dollars of AV equipment. We’d sit down with a guy who couldn’t turn anything on because his tech guy wasn’t there! So for our G-Force pitch, I made DVDs that we could leave behind. I also bought a new Vaio laptop with speakers, so we were self-contained. We could flip it open and run it with stereo sound. I could have lunch with someone I was pitching, and while I was there I could give them a pair of headphones and play it for them. They could see what our idea was, and that got us going.”