DP: So when you’re getting elements, or when a TD is generating elements you’ve requested, do you rely heavily on 2D techniques to make those things better? Or do you prefer that the elements are lit and rendered as they will be in the final shot?

DM: It can kind of go either way. I think it’s sort of based on what the shot is. The comping tools are so great and the people are so good doing comping nowadays that you can almost shoot in any lighting and cheat it in the comp to get it right. I still try to shoot real elements as much as possible if we can get them to look good. Rain is a good example, since you can shoot that so easily. We’ve got a good library of real rain, but other things, like complex contrails behind crashing airplanes, you can never really shoot correctly. Those need to be CG. I’d say that if you’re in strong sunlight or if there’s a really dominant light source, then you need to customize it to the shot. If it’s a more general thing, though, you can be a lot sloppier with it to comp it in. That’s pretty much a judgment call as to what you can get away with. It’d be nice to do everything custom, but it’s probably going to be too expensive.

A lot of the things that we’re talking about are actually very insignificant to the shot. The important thing in the shot is that the plane’s crashing, not that it’s smoking out the back. You don’t want to spend half your budget making the smoke. If there’s some way that you can do that cheaper, even if it’s not quite correct but still looks real, then you sort of owe it to all of the other shots to not get bogged down on that one little detail in the shot.

[Figure 3] Dinosaurs benefiting from elephant skin reference, in the 1997 film Jurassic Park: The Lost World.

DP: So when you work on a film, how do you go about identifying your audience? Is it other people in the CG industry, you personally, your children? Who are you trying to please with these shots?

DM: I’m primarily trying to please myself, but still maintaining an idea of who the audience is. It certainly isn’t the CG world. It’s the director and myself. I know a lot of audiences respond the same way I do to things, which is lucky for me. If they didn’t, then I’d be making art films somewhere and nobody would be seeing them. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that would be the reality of it. Because I’ve got some common vision with the public, as do a lot of the directors I work with, I’m able to share it with a greater number of people.

DP: When we worked together, you were always able to provide very clear verbal descriptions of what you were after visually. Do you think that ability to communicate comes from your traditional experience, or is it something you’ve developed more on the CG side, or is it natural for you?