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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 4.2 - MAY 1999
Bringing Spidey to Life:
Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company
an interview by Heather Kenyon
When Scott Trowbridge was looking for a digital effects
house to help him bring Spider-Man to life, he turned to the Kleiser-Walczak
Construction Company. Founded in 1987 by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak, Kleiser-Walczak
has remained on the leading edge of the computer generated animation and visual
effects field, working for feature films, special venue attractions and commercials.
Ranging from mainstream features like Stargate, Clear and Present Danger
and Honey, I Blew up the Kid to the evolving digital opera Monsters
of Grace, Kleiser-Walczak is a special company that mixes computer
animation and technology with a creative, new age, artistic atmosphere. With
offices in Hollywood and Manhattan, the company is headquartered at the Massachusetts
Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), which is a new, multi-disciplinary
super collider for the arts that is revitalizing the old mill town of North
Adams in the Northern Berkshires.
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| Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak. Image courtesy of Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company. |
Together, Kleiser and Walczak directed the amazing footage that amusement
park attendees are going to be able to experience at Universal's $2.6 billion
Islands of Adventure. Kleiser-Walczak produced all of the animation and developed
the new "squinching" technology that makes The
Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man the next evolutionary step in the ride-film
arena, and is sure to blow the socks off its riders. Kleiser and Walczak talk
about their own adventures in bringing about their contribution to this new
ride spectacular.
Heather Kenyon: How did Kleiser-Walczak get involved with this project?
Jeff Kleiser: We met the Universal design team headed up by Scott Trowbridge
and discussed the creative and technical challenges of Spider-Man, and there
was instant chemistry. We had solved many difficult technical problems for
Doug Trumbull in a variety of film formats including stereography, and had
demonstrated the ability to create super hero characters with life-like movement.
We promised that we would dedicate a crack team of animators for the entire
lifetime of the project (three years) to pull it off, and Universal gave us
the contract.
HK: What were the advantages Kleiser-Walczak could offer Universal?
Diana Walczak: Kleiser-Walczak offered a very strong creative team. Our production
designer, Kent Mikalsen, led the design of the environments. We convinced
Universal to change their plan to keep the environments highly simplified
and stylized as they are in actual comic books, to what we call a "comic
book reality" which was accomplished by including more realistic textures
with a surrealistically skewed color lighting palette. The final integrated
sets were built to match our environments and were greatly enhanced by large
scale printouts of environment imagery also provided by Kleiser-Walczak.
JK: We were also able to attack their problems with the full force of our
company, which includes some of the most capable technical and creative minds
in the field. Our team includes special software programmer Frank Vitz, previously
with Robert Abel and Associates; technical supervisor Jeffery A.Williams,
from Editel, Chicago; and lead animator Derald Hunt, from Turner Broadcasting.
Our headquarters in Western Massachusetts provided a secure and isolated production
environment in which the project could be produced far from the prying eyes
in Hollywood. Our Hollywood studio allowed Universal personnel to keep track
of where we were headed interactively. The combination of large format stereoscopic
experience and top quality human figure animation coupled with excellent technical
expertise made Kleiser-Walczak the natural choice for this unique project.
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| Concept drawing for basic set design and scene inventory by art director Kent Mikalsen. © Universal Studios Escape; image courtesy of Kleiser-Walczak. | Value study for initial light levels by art director Kent Mikalsen. © Universal Studios Escape; image courtesy of Kleiser-Walczak. |
HK: We are often told new rides or films are 'cutting edge,' when they are
actually a glitzier re-hash of the same thing. However, The Amazing Adventures
of Spider-Man really seems to take us beyond the cutting edge and deliver
a brand new experience. What is so special about this ride and how did that
alter the way you both directed, and produced, the animation?
DW: This project, like so many others we've been involved with, required that
we develop new technology in order to execute our design plan. We designed
the film environments, developed `squinching' technology to accommodate stereoscopy
while traveling past a screen, donut-shaped screen stereoscopy, and last but
not least, super-human Synthespian [a term trademarked by Kleiser-Walczak
to describe virtual actors] character animation.
JK: The fundamental new technology employed in Spider-Man is this `moving
point of convergence,' or `squinching' as we called it. Knowing that the audience
would be in a specific position with respect to the screen, Kleiser-Walczak
developed a technique that digitally pre-distorts the image on each frame
to compensate for the perspective angle of the audience's view of the screen.
This makes the screen appear to be a window on the virtual world rather than
a screen onto which the CG world is projected. The result is that the additional
depth cue of parallax (where foreground objects appear to move past faster
than distant objects) amplifies the 3D effect created by stereoscopy -- left
and right eyes seeing differing points of view. Two of the sequences use this
effect on a hemispherical dome, in which the imagery completely fills the
viewers' peripheral vision. This creates the impression of a truly massive
space and a gargantuan city.
We coined the term squinching here at Kleiser-Walczak and it refers to the
sound we imagined you would hear if you stretched a piece of film from its
perspective position (keystoned distortion) to its full frame position. Imagine
grabbing the four corners of a keystoned image on film and stretching it out
so the corners match the four corners of the film frame. The sound would be
sort of a sssssqqquuuiiiiiinch!
HK: Will this technology, or your new knowledge after working on this project,
be applied to anything else upcoming from Kleiser-Walczak?
DW: There are many techniques we developed for the animation and rendering
of this project that we will be applying to future projects, some of which
are in development currently.
HK: Spider-Man must be one of the first projects Maya was ever used on. With
the software still in Beta, Kleiser-Walczak began using it on this massive
scale production! Why? What were the advantages and disadvantages? You must
have been very confident with the product.
JK: We have been a beta site for Alias|Wavefront since I was one of Wavefront's
first clients in 1986 while working at Omnibus. We used their software to
choreograph the aerial space ship shots in Flight of the Navigator.
On Spider-Man, we were using the full complement of Alias|Wavefront software
including Power Animator, Advanced Visualizer, Dynamation, Kinemation, Composer
and Studio Paint 3D. We were a design partner in the development of Maya,
and very early on we began using Maya animation tools for their comparative
ease of use and flexibility. About halfway through the project, the renderer
became available to us, and we showed Universal a shot rendered with Maya.
We all decided it looked great and we would not only continue with the remaining
shots using Maya, but we would go back and re-render completed shots with
Maya. The Alias|Wavefront development team was very responsive to our problems
and we identified many bugs along the way. It is always a love-hate relationship.
The software company does not want to be held responsible for projects produced
using beta code because of the inherent risk that a problem could show up
that causes a catastrophic loss of time. On the other hand, there is no faster
way to find and eliminate bugs than to have a studio like ours bang on the
software in production and break it as frequently as possible. In the long
run, Alias|Wavefront was very appreciative of our efforts in bringing Maya
to market, and we were very appreciative of their steadfast support in getting
Spider-Man done on time.
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| From left to right, villains Scream, Doctor Octopus and Hobgoblin. Final render lighting by Greg Juby, Jeffery A. Williams and Dana Peters. © Universal Studios Escape; image courtesy of Kleiser-Walczak. |
HK: Finally, have you experienced the ride yet? What do you think?
JK: I was really unprepared for how exciting the ride would be. We had only
seen it as a mockup in Orlando that was pushed past the screen by a bunch
of grips, and the synch was only approximate. When I finally was able to ride
the real vehicle in tight synch with the film, I was knocked out by how convincing
the 3D effect was working. It really feels as though you are passing these
enormous windows into massive spaces, and the characters are so well integrated
into the scenes that you buy the illusion completely. During the fall at the
end, although I knew it was coming and had seen the footage in development
for a year, I screamed in terror; my body had a visceral and uncontrollable
urge to try somehow to survive the imminent impact.
Heather Kenyon is editor in chief of Animation World Magazine.
Note: Readers may contact any Animation World Magazine contributor by sending an e-mail to editor@awn.com.