DP: So when you look at a show, do you evaluate every shot and develop a vision for what each shot will be and how it will get there?

JB: Yes, to an extent, and you should. It’s a lot of work, but not relative to 100 artists spinning in circles for three weeks per shot instead of the one-week target. Then you’re talking about thousands of man-hours instead of me just taking maybe 10 and thinking it out. It’s just stopping, thinking and planning. You’ve gotta have a plan.

DP: I know from our work together on Harry Potter that in addition to having a plan, you always have a positive and encouraging attitude. How do you maintain a positive attitude for yourself and your crew?

JB: It never help s to have people who are completely stressed, negative, freaking out, and causing more pressure than there needs to be. It’s just putting it in perspective. This is a job. It’s a lot of work and we should take pride in it, but all in all it is a job. We’re making donuts, so to speak. When I first started, it seemed like it was the pressure of a brain surgeon. It’s like someone’s life is depending on this filmout. It’s not. We’ll do it again tomorrow. We’ll get it done, and it always does get done. Work is not my whole world and it shouldn’t be everybody else’s whole world. There needs to be things out side of work that you’re interested in, having a good time with, and you can spend energy on. That way you don’t just get bogged down with work 100% of your time. Personally, I’ve got to get out of the city. I like the mountains and the desert. That’s why I like riding motorcycles. I get out. On Saturdays when I ride at the track, it’s out in these crappy areas and it’s hot as hell, but it just feels good. It feels good just to be out in the baking sun.

DP: Do you have any methods, tips, or tricks you could share for lighting and compositing a scene and creating believable computer graphics elements?

JB: There are a million tricks. One is that you just need to stop. Stop and smartly set things up. People want inst ant results so they won’t spend a day correctly setting something up with no image to show for it. They’ll go straight for an image without setting things up properly. Then they’ll bang their head for the next two weeks trying to make it look right, but the lights just aren’t correctly set up. They’ll try to massage the paradigm they’ve got together, whatever the rig is, for two weeks. You just need to stop, move that light, create another light, and set it up properly from the beginning. A lot of it has to do with the difficulty in the tools. It takes time to create another light with another shadow. That’s why we re trying to make shadows much easier. I noticed a long time ago that some people didn’t want to put shadows in their lights, or even create another light, because it was a pain in the butt. It used to be even harder. The idea is, and eventually it will be, that lights will be shadowing. That should be a given. All lights should shadow. You shouldn’t sit there and have to worry about where shadow map files are going to go and the names, and so on. That’s actually why we set the pipeline up the way it is with all the naming conventions and standards. You don’t have to worry about where things are and how they’re named.

I was on a show recently and we were trying to do a particular type of animation. It wasn’t character animation, but rather long, animated camera moves. We were struggling with it, and we’d ask for these very small changes that wouldn’t come. We fought it for weeks, and it turned out to be a result of the camera and parenting system being set up incorrectly. In the beginning, I said I don’t care if I don’t see anything for three days. Just set it up correctly. You know, they went straight to the image to quickly produce stuff. Instead of stopping and setting it up correctly for a day, we fought it for two weeks.

[Figure 2] A close-up shot of fur benefiting from optimized testing, from the 1999 film Stuart Little.

As for specific tricks, there are hundreds of them. If you’re trying to sit there and see how a new light works, don’t render a fully furred creature at 2K with motion blur [see Figure 2]. You have to optimize for testing. It’s a good idea to start with quick renders that are cropped, fast, and low quality just so you can see where the lights are. Start with a sphere. I’ve asked that from people for a while. I don’t want to see the troll. I don’t want to see a furred dog. I don’t want to see anything but a ball. Just give me a sphere that looks integrated, and then put the dog in. Of course, the dog won t look right, but it’s a quick way of initially setting up lights. I’ve noticed when people resist doing things, it’s because they re difficult, so you just need to make it easier, or even automatic. I’ll sit there and say it needs a little something, like bringing the rim a bit this way. I come back the next day and the rim lights still not moved. I’ll ask every day just to bring the rim light around. It turns out all they were doing was just upping the intensity, because that’s the easiest thing to do. It needs to be brought around. You need to move it. The entire process was an effort by the artist to avoid a re-render of the shadow maps. Well, the simple answer is the light has to be moved and the shadow maps need to be re-rendered, because it’s not going to look right otherwise. If you just stop and analyze the situation, you’ll realize it only takes about two hours of processor time to render new shadows. Everyone wants instant results, though, so they go for the quick fix even if it’s wrong. You just can’t achieve instant image creation right now. I ask to move a light and the artist wants to avoid a re-render of the shadow maps. They think maybe making the falloff a little different or adjusting the wrap around will fix it. It doesn’t work the next day or the next day, and three days later it still doesn’t look right. OK, now you’ve wasted three days and three iterations of film because you didn’t want to stop and spend one or two hours in the first place. Even if it’s a whole day, it’s worth it.