DP: What was your progression through the ranks at Sony Imageworks to your current position of visual effects supervisor?

JB: I started here as a TD and was hired to work on Anaconda, as well as a test for Dinotopia with Ken Ralston. I was working with Steve Rosenbaum and I did the Dinotopia test as an artist. On Anaconda, because I had written the pipeline, I assumed the role of a lighting lead. When I finished those two projects, I ended up splitting time between Starship Troopers and Contact as an artist. After completing those I’d only been here a year. By then it was time for my review and I was angling towards a senior TD position. I guess Rosenbaum and the others had a different idea, and they were pushing me into a CG supervisor role. When the people I had worked with gave their reviews of me to the department head, they said CG supervisor was the position for me. I had no idea. Basically, I remember having a conversation with Stan [Szymanski, head of Sony’s digital department], and I said that if right now you threw me on a project as a CG supe I’d say you re crazy. He said, “Oh really? Because that’s the plan.” I want to be confident as well as competent and know how to do it before I jump into it. So I said I could see being a CG supe on a smaller project if I have a good mentor, so I’m not without a net. Jerome Chen and I ended up doing a couple of little tests for Dr. Dolittle and something for Paulie, a talking bird, and one day he came in and said put all that down, we’re going to do Godzilla. I thought, great, now it’s a big project without a net. At that point I became a CG supe within my first year of being with Imageworks. I CG-suped Godzilla, and when that wrapped, the same group went on to Stuart Little. Our titles didn’t change, but what we needed to do got upped a little bit. We were CG supes, but we also did a little bit of the work of a digital effects supe. We were on the live-action set and making a lot of creative calls. There was a lot to do on that side of things, and we were also writing code and building the pipeline. When Stuart ended I went on to Harry Potter, and there they upped me to digital effects supervisor. The idea was that Jerome was going to be the visual effects supervisor for Imageworks, even though Rob Legato was the productions visual effects supe [Rob Legato was employed by the studio Warner Bros.]. Then Jerome went on to Stuart Little 2, so that left me at the top for Imageworks. Since there was now no visual effects supe, then how could you have a digital effects supe? So kind of by default I was moved up to visual effects supervisor. I moved up pretty fast. I was only here a year and they already had me in as a CG supe. I did that for about a year and then I jumped to visual effects supe quickly.

DP: What does it take to successfully integrate a CG character into a live-action scene?

JB: If you can do more and more iterations quicker, that’s obviously easier. The counterpart, which is kind of where we are if you have a full-furred creature, is a first pass with one light taking 20 minutes just to process before you actually see anything. That’s really cumbersome. It’s weird because right now it seems like 90% of it is technical hurdles and 10% is the aesthetics for the artists. If lighting was infinitely fast, you could move lights around in real time, and if it was completely seamless and easy to use, then you could almost take the same paradigm they have on set. There you have a DP [director of photography], a lighting director and grips moving the stuff around. If the CG were that efficient, the TDs would be scaled down to a role similar to a grip. You’d have lighting directors coming through with multiple T who could just sit there in real time and move stuff around. As things get easier, it will go that way. When I first came in, you had to be highly technical because lighting was just script hacking. You had to be a programmer to do photo-real stuff. We didn’t have specific shader writers, because the people who wrote the shaders were the only ones who could do the lighting. It was heavily code based, so you had to be a programmer to do the shader writing and the lighting. As tools get easier, it’s literally just like moving a physical light around. Then it all becomes aesthetics. We’re getting there as the computers and RAM are getting cheaper and faster. The code now could probably be much faster because we’re really not completely utilizing concurrent programming. We’re not really parallel computing massive arrays of matrices and what not. If we can get into that, we can actually get faster and faster and faster. As things become increasingly faster, then it’s just like the real world. You don’t need a highly experienced, educated, highly paid person to move the light from A to B. You just need somebody with an eye to tell 100 people to move the lights. If you have one experienced person giving instructions, you could be lighting a lot of shots quickly. It’ll be like on the set where you have a director and a DP. It’s their vision. It’s not the actor’s and it’s not the grip’s. It’s not anybody’s vision except the director, the DP and the people who are paying for it. That’s just how it is. It works great now because of the way it’s structured. I like people like yourself who are creative and have a good eye and can do that, because it’s so cumbersome right now and I can’t sit there and hand-hold them. If I say, no, the rim is hitting him right in the face, then you go through and make the technical and aesthetic calls to correct it. If it was incredibly fast, though, you could have another type of person that sits there and directs people in realtime. Then you render it out and walk away and we’d see it on film.

DP: Does your eye for detail come naturally or is it something that has developed over your time as a supervisor?

JB: It’s both. It’s not natural to the point where it’s unconscious. It’s actually an effort and it comes from experience. In an extreme case, I had a project where there were two visual effects supes and one of them would come by and say one thing and the other would say another. Sometimes you work with supes that don’t necessarily know what they want. One day they want it red, and you make it red, and then they want it blue. Then you make it blue and they want it green, and then all of the sudden you’re back at red and you’re going in circles. On the other hand, I’ve noticed working with Jerome on Godzilla that he has a target. He says this is what I want. As long as you hit that target, you are done. I just knew that’s how you get things done. I never wanted to jack people around. I never wanted to sit there and go one direction and then come back in a circle. That is a conscious effort every time I talk to an artist. Whenever we start a shot, I try to figure out what I want and how to attain it, and then feed the artist the information at the time he needs it. I never completely flood them with every little detail. I start in broad strokes with what we want and that’s enough information for the beginning. As we progress, then I slowly get to more fine-grain specifics of what should be done.