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Exclusive: The Muren Factor

Mar 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

An inside look at visual effects pioneer Dennis Muren.

 Web Expanded
Exclusive podcasts with Dennis Muren and colleagues
Look at creating the VES Award-winning sequence from the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica, including a video podcast of the sequence

Related Links
Digital Content Producer's and Millimeter's coverage of past and present award nominees/winners

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Lucas on Muren

When legendary visual effects pioneer and eight-time Academy Award winner Dennis Muren received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Visual Effects Society (VES) in February, luminaries from throughout the industry gathered in Hollywood to pay homage to Muren's contributions to the art and science of filmmaking. I took the opportunity at the VES Awards to sit down with Muren for an exclusive chat about his famed career and the future of the industry. Click here for further insight into Muren's career via exclusive podcasts from Muren and several of his high-profile peers and colleagues, including George Lucas, John Dykstra, Ken Raltson, and John Knoll.

millimeter: How did you wind up at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), working on Star Wars during the pioneering days of motion control?

Muren: I had been working on [commercials] at [Cascade Pictures]. That was work I really loved. Then [2001: A Space Odyssey] came out from Doug Trumbull. It was something I knew nothing about, but decided to try and find out. During that process, I met John Dykstra during a tour at Doug Trumbull's studio. Later, I heard he got the Star Wars job. I went and talked with him and got work [as an effects cameraman] on the show. It was part of trying to expand my toolset and skillset, and also to try and work with George Lucas. I wasn't involved in the design of any of that [motion control] stuff — that was all done by John Dykstra, Richard Edlund, Alvah Miller, and all those guys. I literally walked into this new technology, and [Dykstra] figured that, because I had done stop motion, I could figure out how to program and run his [Dykstraflex] motion-control system.

But it wasn't until Star Wars was over and I was working on [the original] Battlestar Galactica that I fully appreciated the power of motion control. I learned then that I could design shots that you could never do with traditional effects.

The original Battlestar Galactica was important in your development as a visual effects artist?

That was where I really understood the full power of motion control. It was something I could never have done on Star Wars, because the pace was just too fast. There, we got the elements together and followed George's vision, kept our fingers crossed, and either it worked or it didn't. But on Galactica, we got the opportunity to design shots ourselves and try different things — perspectives and graphic exchanges of objects coming toward you, and going away from you simultaneously.

I brought that into Empire Strikes Back, and the work we did on that film was way beyond what we did on Star Wars. But it was working on Galactica that did it for me, so I really owe a lot to John Dykstra for getting the opportunity to do that.

What followed was so much pioneering work on Young Sherlock Holmes, The Abyss, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and many others. With all those accomplishments, is it possible to say what the most significant breakthrough was, in terms of furthering the industry and pushing it toward what it has become today?

The power to change things in CG is just way too wonderful, way too important, so that is the overall thing. But I was pretty instrumental in getting digital compositing going, in pushing computer graphics generally. When we did Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985, I just thought it was an opportunity to see if anybody could actually do a real CG character, to see if this technology would amount to anything. That was a pretty risky thing to do — I was in that with John Lasseter, Bill Reeves, and Ed Catmull at Pixar, back when the company was part of ILM. It took six months to do those six shots. At that point, I began thinking — and I now do this on every show — what is the next thing going to be?

The CG stuff was then really pushing forward. In Terminator 2, we showed we could do digital compositing on all our shots, with no more matte lines or anything, in addition to a great CG character. To me, that was always the groundbreaking show — T2. Jurassic Park came along after that and was very important, plus it caught the public's fancy. But the groundbreaking show was T2.

But [Jurassic Park] proved you could make dinosaurs with skin as main characters. The original plan was to have Phil Tippett do it all stop-motion and then use CG to add blurs and try to get rid of the strobing effect. But coming out of T2, in our testing lab, we were able to get skin to look really good on a CG character for the first time, and at that point, I became confident we could do it.

But now, with CG being so ubiquitous, is it possible for the current generation of effects artists to innovate and pioneer entirely new approaches and technologies to the same degree you guys were doing 30 years ago?

CG is about where motion control was in the mid-1980s. It had been great for about 10 years, and then after that, it was all just variations on the same thing. That's largely what is going on with CG. I mean, if you put hundreds of shots into a show, and they don't have any meaning to the story, then so what? So, it is harder to go in an entirely new direction.

What you have to do is keep coming up with really good ideas, and then learn to use restraint with them and combine them with traditional designs you learned in art school. Everybody has to do that — visual effects artists, editors, even actors. Everybody has to keep working to change their toolset until something new finally comes along.

So what do you prognosticate will be the next big innovation?

There will be digital people coming along eventually, though I'm not interested in that, but people are working on it. Maybe 3D [filmmaking] is going to come out as something really special. I certainly hope so. The idea of getting the audience immersed in the story is a big opportunity. I'd like to see that happen — real 3D stereo in theaters. I've seen what [James] Cameron has shown, and I worked on a test for him for his [upcoming project], Avatar.

We'll see better skin simulations and better faces going on, and better dynamics and fires and stuff. But those are all clever applications of existing tools. I'm talking about something as fundamentally [industry-changing] as motion control or CG — new tools. I can't really see anything like that happening right now. I'm hoping, though, that 3D will allow you to design stuff that will seem truly different — that idea of designing and watching a movie in a 3D cube or something, that would be really great. It will be something interactive, some kind of immersive group experience. I could have a lot of fun designing a movie entirely in 3D.

What's up next for Dennis Muren?

I'm at ILM one day a week. I look at dailies and am working to have the company keep up with certain technologies we are building — trying to keep our software and hardware interfacing with people in an easier way, moving closer to being able to create images in realtime. We're getting closer with that. And I'm also doing a bit of consulting for Pixar.

But the main thing I'm working on is a book for computer graphics artists. It's a manual — not a memoir or anything like that. It's about teaching CG artists how to observe things, and how to then apply that to the work we do. It will make my job easier if I can help younger artists learn this skill.

SEE OUR EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS WITH PREVIOUS VES LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD WINNERS:

John Lasseter
digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/video_exclusive_lasseter_pov

George Lucas
digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/video_exclusive_lucas_pov

Lucas on Muren

George Lucas first met Dennis Muren over coffee at 2 a.m. one day in the late 1970s, while Muren was working the nightshift as a visual effects camera operator on Star Wars. Their relationship grew from there to the point where Muren became far more than just the senior visual effects supervisor/guru/mentor at ILM. He became a close friend and creative partner of Lucas, and the artist most closely associated with Lucas' success in transforming the visual effects industry and filmmaking generally into the digital realm. Thus, Muren says it was a “no-brainer” for him to ask Lucas to present him with his VES Lifetime Achievement Award in February.

At the VES Awards ceremony, among other things, Lucas told me that Muren has served ILM for decades as a kind of living bridge, linking creative ideas, technical achievements, and financial sanity together.

“The great thing about Dennis is that, over the years, he's been open to new ideas and expanding the way we do things,” Lucas says. “He always looks to get the job done the best possible way, while never losing sight of the artistic side of what we're doing, in addition to the financial side. He always tries to find the happy medium between those two elements.

“He was right there when I started the computer division [at ILM]. There was a certain animosity on the part of the special effects people about these guys next door that I had installed, who were going to be doing things digitally. And Dennis was the only one who decided to walk across the alleyway and see what they were doing, and help facilitate the integration of digital into ILM. With Young Sherlock Holmes and Willow, he was the first one to embrace the technology, and try to see if he could make it work, rather than arguing about why it would never work.

“Then, as years went on, he was always at the forefront in terms of Jurassic Park, which was a major breakthrough as far as I'm concerned, in terms of how digital effects could be employed. He was the one who said, ‘Could we try to do this completely digitally?’ Steven [Spielberg] and I said yes, and Dennis took that step, and it paid off beyond our wildest dreams.”

But beyond his technical achievements and creative vision, Lucas also credits Muren with always staying calm when things get hectic. “He always manages to be the calm water in the middle of the storm,” he says.

In addition, Lucas says Muren was willing to serve over the years as ILM's grizzled professor, mentoring new generations of effects' supervisors. “One of the main principles we have at ILM is to bring people up through the system, train them, and ultimately give them every opportunity to be all they can be,” Lucas says. “Dennis has been a stalwart at ILM in helping to train people, helping to move them through the system.”

Indeed, Lucas says he himself has learned much from Muren's approach to filmmaking over the years.

“Among other things, I learned that things do not have to be hysterical to get the job done,” he says. “It's such a nice feeling to be working with people who are not always in a crisis situation, or who may be in a crisis situation, but don't spill that off on the director and everybody else around them. They methodically go through it all and solve problems, and if there is a really serious problem, they come and tell you in a calm and rational voice.”
— M.G.

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