BD: Looking back on Transformers, Scott, what are your thoughts about making the ultimate robots?

Scott Farrar: You know a lot of things have to come together in any film, and certainly that’s true in visual effects. You have an interesting combination of events: the kind of director that you’re working with, the kind of talents that you might have, certainly what the story provide you -- you’re only as good as the project you’re given. Not only is Michael Bay a good cinematographer in his own right but he’s also funny. This is the first picture I’ve done with him and he’s got this great, quirky sense of humor. And he told me one time that in a big, summer popcorn movie, there’s nothing like humor. And when he’d ask me about a scene, I’d remind him about that. And he loved that: this idea that these big robots are goofy. That was unexpected.

What I like is that each and every one of these nominees has a different aesthetic approach to making the film. In the case of Transformers, it was photoreal. It was our job to make these robots look real to the audience. Hopefully, it defied their own imagination, their own logic in looking at a CG creature. It looks like it’s a puppet, maybe it’s hydraulic, maybe it’s animatronic. But that was the puzzle that we were trying to create.

BD: Golden Compass was definitely your most ambitious project, Mike, and it certainly had its share of production problems. Just how difficult was it?

Mike Fink: It was not only my most ambitious project, but also the most ambitious project that New Line had undertaken, even more so than Lord of the Rings. This was an entirely different operation. This wasn’t Peter Jackson and Weta doing it all. And no matter how much Susan MacLeod, the visual effects producer, and I told them how difficult it was to achieve what they wanted, they just never believed it. We created two of the central characters in the movie and they had to have real relationships with this young girl that you had to believe. And you had to believe everything: all the other animals in the movie and you had to believe the places they were. It was a live-action movie, so the environments could take on an air of being in a parallel universe, but they had to feel real. As Jim Blinn said years ago about how you render things in computer graphics, “It doesn’t have to be real -- it just has to look real.” For me, it’s been a guiding tenet for years.

If there is a difference between Golden Compass and the other two contenders for the Oscar -- and believe me, these are the ones that I voted for in the bakeoff -- I think it comes down to the fact that for visual effects Golden Compass was an exercise in intimacy. And for Pirates and Transformers, it was an exercise in spectacle. And believe me, I think intimacy is a lot harder to pull off. So whether we win or not, I think we had the larger task of the three of us. And that’s not taking anything away from what the guys did on the other films -- I think they did a stupendous job.

For Mike Fink, the visual effects in Golden Compass was an exercise in intimacy. All Golden Compass images © 2007 New Line Cinema.

BD: What did you think of Transformers, John?

JK: It’s amazing to see how dense the geometry is on Transformers and how dense those models are with thousands of moving parts. When I first saw the designs, I wondered how they were going to make an animation rig to control this. Indeed, there was really no way to make a general, all-purpose animation rig for everything that needed to be done on a shot. Instead, they worked out a technique that was totally free-form and the computer could be looking at any part of the robot that was framed up well: “I really want to make this piston collapse and this little piece rotate and to able to support doing that there and having it pass through to the final model.” I think the quality of the rendering was very nice. They did a really good job of getting these nice car paint surfaces and scratchy metal and this stuff to really look good. And lastly, I think they made a big advance in digital destruction – making objects fracture apart in believable ways. I’ve done a little bit of that myself and it’s really hard to make things look good.

BD: So it’ll be easier the next time you’re confronted with that?

JK: Oh, I’m hoping it plugs right in.

BD: And what were your impressions of Golden Compass?

JK: I really like a lot of the environmental work. It’s not what people are talking about, but I enjoyed the big cityscapes, the dirigible and all that kind of thing. I thought that work was really beautiful. I really liked the daemons that follow everyone around, particularly the little ferret.

BD: It was all dependent on the believability of the animals.

JK: Yeah, when you are trying to animate animals that do things that real animals don’t do, that’s very difficult, and I think they did a very good job, in particular, I like when we first see the bear character when he’s in the workshop. I think he looks fantastic in that scene.