Animation Artist

Ashley Scott (left) and Jude Law in A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

“What’s going on, I think, is that some DPs now are reacting to the digital future that they see coming where the images are so clean and they are making these movies really gritty. There are flares in them and there’s diffusion on them and there’s grain showing up,” said Muren. “The stuff looks really great, but it’s really hard to composite into it. We’ve been seeing this trend happening for the last year or so. And so a lot of work was put into getting just the right lens flare from a certain type of filter that he was putting in front of the camera, that under certain conditions gave things a certain look.”

ILM also created a number of robot characters called Mechas for the film.

Muren explained that “there was no other way to do it except in CG. What we had in the design was just so neat that it couldn’t be built for real. There was a whole set of problems to solve making the robots that look real.”

In one challenging scene, the audience sees the Nanny – a robot with the back of her head taken off. Muren reported that it was a time consuming rendering job to get it to work.

“You see her face, which is of course a real face acting the way only a human can act, but when she turns sideways the back of her head is all gone and there’s all the mechanical apparatus in there. It’s got a lot of transparency to it — lots of self illuminated lights on the inside,” said Muren. “We wanted it to look real so we used real people then cut away the parts of their bodies and replaced them with CG interiors.”

To create a futuristic robot Teddy Bear for some shots, ILM relied on a combination of Stan Winston robots and CG creations. But the Bear raised the whole problem of creating CG fur, one of the most challenging tasks for digital artists.

“When it actually had to walk and run and do that heavy performance stuff we did a CG bear” explained Muren. “We spent a lot of time trying to get the fur because the fur is very complicated and heavy. It had a lot of sheen to it and various colors on the fur, so there would be one level deep into and then it would curl and go to another amount of sheen and colors. There were many levels on it. In our fur experiments, the rendering times were like 18 hours to be able to get it. And then we managed to optimize it down to something more realistic and I think we got it in the four-hour range. But wherever we could, we cheated and did it with photomaps and stuff like that, when it was in the long shots so we weren’t dealing with the renderings. There’s no fast way to do fur. It’s still grueling to render.”

Muren explained that ILM is an SGI-based house, and that all of the company’s compositing and in-house software is designed for SGI’s Irix platform. For the fur rendering work, the company used Maya as the basic foundation, but he was hesitant to talk about software because for ILM, known for writing its own code or customizing existing packages, “so much of what we do is way beyond the package.”

In summation he said, “the whole show had so many different types of things in it, that it was really complicated for us. As soon as you solved one set of problems, you had another for another sequence.”

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