This year's "VES '99: A Festival of Visual Effects" was an awesome display of talent, technique and tantalizing teases of things to come in the next millenium for those in the know and those on the go in the visual effects community. Intended mainly for members of the Visual Effects Society itself, the VES '99 show ran a packed house for its entire run of Friday, June 4th through Sunday, June 6th, 1999 at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences complex in North Hollywood, California.

Compared to other VES shows of the past, this truly was a blockbuster event. On scale, it could be likened to a mini-Woodstock for visual effects artists that was days of fun and effects and nothing but fun and effects." And while many of the shows packed in big crowds, the presentations given by the visual effects staff at Industrial Light and Magic were sold out weeks in advance. This is not surprising given the amount of hype surrounding Star Wars Episode One:The Phantom Menace and its much-ballyhooed effects. What is pleasantly surprising, however, is that the VES '99 show also managed to pack the house for other, non-ILM visual effects events.

Speakers from all walks of the film and television visual effects community came to give detailed talks about technique-oriented subject matter. A list, in order, of the presentations given at the VES '99 festival starts Friday, June 4th with: Flat Earth Productions (FX house responsible for Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess), Robert Abel (in a presentation that featured Rob Legato and Ray Feeney among others), the stellar folks from SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), Ken Ralston (Sony Pictures Imageworks, Contact) and Dennis Muren (ILM, The Phantom Menace).

Saturday, June 5th began with David Barrington Holt (Jim Henson's Creature Shop), Rob Coleman (ILM, The Phantom Menace), NASA/JPL's Dr. Dan McCleese (Mars Exploration), Digital Domain's Rob Legato and company (Apollo 13) and John Knoll (ILM, The Phantom Menace).

On Sunday, June 6th the presentations were: Threshold Entertainment (Mortal Kombat) enduring visual effects legends Ray Harryhausen and Phil Tippett in a lively discussion of "how they did it" back in the Golden Age of Special Effects, and last but not least, Scott Squires from yup, you guessed it, ILM to discuss, yup, The Phantom Menace. A nice touch was that several old special effects movies ran between several of these shows. Among these were pristine cuts of War of the Worlds and the original Mighty Joe Young.

The presentations covered include ILM (spread out over two days), Threshold Entertainment and Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

The ILM Wizardry Behind The Phantom Menace
There was enough to be gleaned from the combined talks of Dennis Muren, Rob Coleman, John Knoll and Scott Squires to write this entire column about how they did the effects for the picture. Given so little space here to do so, however, I will need to limit this report to what I feel are the most important generalities, sprinkling in "tech" specifics where I may.

Senior Visual Effects Supervisor Dennis Muren's presentation was fascinating. Dennis, fresh from receiving his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, did a two hour exploration of the Gungan underwater world and how the Gungan/Droid battle scene was created. It was like watching Jefferson talk about how he drafted the Declaration of Independence. History talking about how he made history. Suffice it to say that, details aside, the running theme from Dennis' presentation was, "Don't obsess on the details."

With respect to creating the The Phantom Menace worlds of Tatooine, et al., Muren described how the Gungan scenes were constructed. Using pretty much (now) conventional set-building techniques that work in both practical and digital formats, ILM had to do very extensive pre-planning. The use of CG animatics for pre-planning this movie was extremely critical to understand how shots should come together and explains in part the richness of the final product. The underwater scenes often required more than 50 elemental passes, and this is not inclusive of all the layers that consisted of fragments or pieces of other layers. The Gungan battle scenes were almost all key-framed and required much cheating to get the renders down to a manageable amount of time.

Obviously not a lot of time was had to play with things just to see how they'd look. A funny bit about Muren's collaboration with director George Lucas came when Dennis confided with the audience that Lucas saw the picture as a B movie, and said not to obsess on the details, although everyone in this business knows that visual effects people by their nature do just that. In other words, if a ripple of water doesn't work out right or the motion blur on Watto's wings isn't exactly right, move on, hardly anyone (except for fanatics like the author, of course) will notice it. With so many digital effects shots in the picture it makes sense to not overwork a scene to achieve perfection. Judging from the movie itself, I think George Lucas may have been right. It's a masterpiece, effects-wise. Perhaps George's B-movie analysis could serve as a pearl of wisdom for the rest of the viz-fx community.