Animation Artist

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Industrial Light + Magic has a long history of developing its own tools and techniques for creating special visual effects. From Star Wars through to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Jurassic Park and The Perfect Storm, the company has always been at the forefront of visual effects work.

For A.I. Artificial Intelligence, the company created computer graphic robots called Mechas, a robotic teddy bear (complete with painstakingly accurate fur) and a futuristic CG vehicle called an Amphibicopter that flies through New York City, which, thanks to ILM, is half submerged underwater. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of ILM’s work on A.I. was the new techniques developed to allow Steven Spielberg to storyboard, visualize and compose complicated bluescreen shots set in Rouge City.

But the film took a long time to come to fruition. It was 10 or 12 years ago when Stanley Kubrick first contacted ILM’s Dennis Muren, ASC, who served as visual effects supervisor on the film, about how he might tackle some of the demanding visual effects for A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

According to Muren, whose credits include such effects work as all of the Star Wars movies, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, “I had been talking on and off with Stanley for 10 or 12 years via telephone, and then I heard from him in 1993. He wanted me to come over. I flew there for Thanksgiving dinner. He talked a lot about A.I. at that time. He kept a lot hidden from me, but he told me about the robot child and New York being submerged under water. He was sort of drilling me on how I might do it. He had seen Jurassic Park and he thought by now maybe the technology was up to being able to make this movie. But he was still searching for ways to do it.

“I kept hearing from him about that for years after that,” added Muren. “He had somebody shoot oil wells in the North Sea which was a suggestion I had made — that we might be able to use the oil wells as tracking points and put buildings over them. And we were ready to do it. But he just decided not to proceed on it at that point and went ahead and did Eyes Wide Shut.”

At the same time, Kubrick had been talking to Stephen Spielberg about making A.I.

After Kubrick’s death in 1999, with some 1,500 storyboards done and a 100 page synopsis of the film, Muren said that it would have been a “shame to have it sitting in a garage somewhere and never seen.”

Hence Kubrick’s family decided to offer Stephen Spielberg the opportunity to make the film.

“Stephen knew about as much about it as anybody,” said Muren who admitted that, “I was surprised that it was still around.”

The film, lensed by DP Janusz Kaminski, ASC, tells the story of a robot boy’s development, as he becomes almost human.

But did Speilberg stay true to the original vision?

“The story is very similar, but it’s still Stephen’s movie. It has much more heart than Stanley would have given it. Stanley would have given it that incredible edge that he brought to his films,” said Muren, “But it has definitely become a Stephen movie. It’s not trying to be a Stanley Kubrick movie.”

Dennis Muren, senior visual effects supervisior on A.I. Artificial Intelligence

For Muren, one of the most interesting aspects of the project was developing tools to enable the director to visualize, pre-vis and storyboard shots in Rouge City — a CG city that was filmed in front of a huge 160-by-60 foot bluescreen. The system made use of existing broadcast-oriented virtual set technologies, video game rendering engines for storyboarding as well as software written in-house.

The challenge for Spielberg working in front of such an enormous bluescreen would have been to try to compose in his mind’s eye, with nothing to go by until the backgrounds were composited in later.

According to Muren, Spielberg is “a very spontaneous director and we like to give him the opportunity to change his mind. So we came up with an approach where we could actually see a composite on the bluescreen stage of what the background was going to look like in real time.”

Where other directors might have had to resort to very fundamental camera moves in front of such a huge bluescreen, Spielberg was able to see the background composites live in real time on monitors around the set. This also gave the talent a frame of reference.

Muren reported that “we probably spent four months getting the whole package to work and all of the pieces to fit together and then writing our own stuff to make it bullet proof because it can’t fail on the set with all the talent there.”

ILM’s on-set visualization supervisor for A.I. Seth Rosenthal, who was in charge of developing the system, reported that it relied on Rademac’s camera tracking system (which was developed at the BBC for broadcast applications) and a rendering package from Brainstorm SP, as well as in-house software.