The legend Douglas Trumbull. Photo courtesy of Douglas Trumbull.

Legendary filmmaker and vfx pioneer Doug Trumbull (2001: A Space Oddysey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Andromeda Strain, Silent Running, Brainstorm and Blade Runner) is back trying to make features after a 20-year absence. As always, he’s on the cutting edge of technology, developing a comprehensive virtual set system. Now based in Boston, he recently spoke with VFXWorld editor Bill Desowitz about his plans and progress.

Bill Desowitz: Tell me what you’re working on right now?

Doug Trumbull: The primary focus of mine is in developing some screenplays for some films I’d like to direct. I’ve got about four different projects in different stages, and I’m planning to shoot them all digitally with whatever is the best digital electronics cinematography camera available at the time, whether it’s the Sony 950F that’s coming out, and the Thompson Viper looks good. So I’m completely committed to the advantages of electronic cinematography as it relates to visual effects. Because philosophically I’m committed to the development of a completely comprehensive virtual set system that I’ve been working on for about five years that uses electronic cinematography and very accurate sensors of camera position, and sends that information through a processor, which gives you exact positional accuracy that can talk to my 3ds max or whatever computer graphics engine you want to use for a real-time virtual set environment.

Trumbull’s virtual set technology was used on Book of Pooh. Photo courtesy of Douglas Trumbull.

We did 52 episodes with this technology for Disney’s The Book of Pooh last year and we proved that it’s very robust and reliable. You can shoot a production with a small crew on a very small stage, and even though Pooh was kind of cartoony in style, a pop-up book with puppets, the exact same equipment would be used for full-scale live-action cinematography and computing horsepower goes up everyday, so making more photo-realistic environments is feasible. There’s usually a two-stage process to it where you shoot a reference set, which gives you the geometry of what you’re looking at, colors, the basic environment; and you shoot your foreground out with greenscreen or bluescreen and then go back in and post render the environment to the detail that you want and composite it. The advantages are that I think there’s going to be a transition over the next few years toward these kind of technologies because it’s a fraction of the cost of building physical sets and a fraction of the cost of going on location. And so there a lot of emerging scanning technologies…

BD: What is the leap you’re trying to do?

DT: There are bits and pieces out there that people have used over the last [several] years. Disney’s Dinosaur used LIDAR technology…I think Lucas has done a bit, I think Spielberg did some with A.I. People are using it more and more on a shot-by-shot basis more than on a conceptual approach where you never leave the studio. It’s feasible now, at least for certain films.

BD: Like Polar Express?

DT: Yeah, that would be a good one because he did a big virtual set type sequence for Contact and got his feet wet a lot dealing with computers and compositing and knows what’s feasible. I haven’t talked to him [Robert Zemeckis] directly, so I don’t know.

BD: When he opened up the digital center at USC, he told me that his dream is to shoot a movie entirely in the computer, so this may be very close to that.