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MillimeterDual Processing
Jul 1, 2001 12:00 PM, by Michael Goldman
Effects guru Dennis Muren didn't know that Steven Spielberg, his friend and long-time collaborator, was going to take over Kubrick's A.I. until he read it on the Internet. Even then, Muren wasn't convinced, not only because of the Internet's reputation for inaccuracy, but also because Spielberg had never told Muren what is now common knowledge: that he had been collaborating with Kubrick for years on the project.
Then again, Muren had not told Spielberg about his consultations with Kubrick, either.
“[Kubrick] summoned myself and [ILM colleague] Ned Gorman to visit him on Thanksgiving, 1993, shortly after Jurassic Park came out, because he wanted to quiz us on how we would do the effects for A.I.,” Muren recalled last month in his ILM office, just as the A.I. project was wrapping. ìHe pulled out a long list of questions and drilled us about everything. ‘How would you do the robot boy?’ ‘How would you do New York underwater?’ It went on for five hours. Then, we went home, and periodically over the years, I'd hear from him, asking questions. In fact, he called just three weeks before he died. He wanted us to do an invisible fix on a shot from Eyes Wide Shut, but we ended up talking mainly about A.I..
“All those years, and I never knew he was talking to Steven about it. When I read it on the Internet, I thought, this will never happen. Then, one day after Stanley died, Steven had a list of questions for me. I told him I had been talking to Stanley about all this, and he said, ‘really’? Then, he informed me that he and Stanley had been discussing the project for years. A little later, Steven pulled out tons of conceptual artwork that Stanley had commissioned [from comic book artist Christopher Baker], and I was amazed — there were about 1,500 finished storyboards. Stanley had shown us a few sketches at that 1993 dinner, but I had no idea there was this much artwork.”
Spielberg hired Muren to serve as co-visual effects supervisor on the film, along with ILM's Scott Farrar. Muren and Farrar played crucial roles in bringing most of Baker's sketches to life for A.I., now a Spielberg film inspired by Kubrick — or a Kubrick film, directed by Spielberg, depending on whom you ask.
Even Muren doesn't really know.
“I think it was more appropriate for Steven to direct the film, and even Stanley told him that before he died,î says Muren. “I think Stanley's problem was that there was this whole fairy tale Pinocchio aspect, and that was a struggle for him. In that sense, this feels like a Spielberg film. On the other hand, the look is very Kubrick, and much of it comes directly out of the planning he did. Much of the effects work revolves around those original storyboards — putting New York and Coney Island under water, building Rouge City, the Flesh Faire, that's all Kubrick. But the film only has about 200 effects shots, and Steven chose a human actor [Haley Joel Osment] to play the robot boy, which is different than what Stanley was planning. Based on my discussions with Kubrick, I think this would have been much more of an effects film if he had directed it, and the boy would almost certainly have been CG or animatronic.”
Building the AI's futuristic environments was central to the illusion that Spielberg was trying to create. Some of the sets were painstakingly built and filmed as miniatures, such as the underwater Coney Island. But Muren says that for time and budget reasons, much of future Earth had to be represented digitally or with a combination of models and CG, such as the film's Rouge City sequence.
For the scene that takes place in Rouge City's main square, ILM took what Muren claims is an unprecedented step for feature films: The company built a real-time virtual-set compositing tool for Spielberg. The idea was to permit the director to see his characters in their CG environments, or mixed with shots of miniatures, instantly.
While real-time virtual-set technology has been aiding the broadcast world for years, Muren insists the approach represents “new ground” for feature filmmaking.
“Steven could walk on the set, move his camera around, and see the composite in real-time, with no set delays,” says Muren. “He got a picture locked to TV quality, not film quality, but certainly good enough to let him pick his shots. Since the CG buildings in Rouge City are story points, it was crucial that Steven be able to place them in specific ways in relationship to the actors. Even TV virtual sets are not quite the same application as this because they are used, with certain limitations, for live broadcast. Here, it was used as a tool for the director, while eliminating waiting time on set. This is a crucial point because it means this technology, in the future, can be used to budget effects. The real-dollar cost of each CG building can be radically different, so if a director could know in advance that one half of a building would not be in a shot, we could build the CG to those specifications, reducing time and costs. I definitely see this technology going in that direction in the future. On this film, it was a production tool that saved time, and ultimately, better allowed the director to realize his vision.”
ILM engineers actually developed two pre-viz weapons for Spielberg. The first was a virtual storyboard tool that allowed Spielberg to view simple CG versions of his set before shooting. This he used to help block out actor positions and practice camera moves.
“That system was put together using a video-game render engine, and we wrote into the software various camera lenses so that Spielberg could take virtual pre-walks on the set to study angles and things,” says Muren. “It was interesting watching Spielberg sit on the set with his laptop, moving his cursor around to study camera angles. It was sort of an augmented storyboard tool.”
But the biggest advance was the real-time compositing system used during filming. According to Seth Rosenthal, ILM's motion capture supervisor, it builds on the concept of broadcast virtual sets, with a few modifications.
“Our animation department pre-built CG versions of the environments — not necessarily the final CG, but close,” says Rosenthal. “It wasn't used for colors and textures — it was used strictly for shot composition. We ran a video tap signal from the Panavision Millennium camera, relying on 800 bar-coded targets on the ceiling to give our computer spatial data to call up the correct angle of the set as the camera moved around. That data went to an SGI Onyx system built into a special rack, running a virtual-set rendering software capable of taking tracking data from the camera tracker and rendering a good quality version of the CG world from that perspective. We also ran a modified version of Ultimatte software to cleanly pick actors off the blue screen and place them onto the virtual set.”
Rosenthal adds that, because of the number and complexity of the CG sets used in A.I., ILM built the system from scratch, rather than relying on off-shelf products.
“Overall, it worked like a charm,” says Rosenthal. “Which is a good thing, because the backup plan was the old-fashioned way: stopwatch, measuring tape, markers, paper, pencil. Now, we have a tool we can offer any of our directors. It gives you confidence on the set that you actually got the right shot. You don't have to wait in limbo until dailies to know if the comp worked or not.”
Would Kubrick be proud of such efforts to finally get A.I. onto celluloid?
“I know he'd be proud that those 1,500 storyboards didn't go to waste, and that Steven and the whole crew met the challenge of making these images realistic,” says Muren. “He'd also probably be proud that we all kept our work confidential for so long. He was a brilliant, driven filmmaker, so I'd like to think he'd be proud of all the effort that went into this thing. Spielberg claims he can ‘feel’ Stanley's presence, and I know he is pleased, so I guess it stands to reason that Stanley, wherever he is, is also pleased.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.