Star Wars Lava Planet Sequence

So shooting in studio this week got me thinking about how major companies do it, and so my post this week is a featurette from Star Wars Episode 3.  It's primarily about building the effects for the Mustafar sequence, a fight scene on a lava planet. While it is mostly an ego stroking for Lucasfilm and Industrial light and Magic, there are a lot of cool tidbits in here. There is a lot of cool stuff about the compositors and matte artists. The matte artists build the background for mustafar, which is a space hilariously based around a gravel parking lot, but obviously with a ton of assets and art. The assets that are involved in the sequence itself, because they are a giant mix of different sources. Some of the lava is from a shot of an actual volcano, some if it is built with particle effects. The use of models along with CG is also really interesting to me. ILM puts a lot of emphasis on making real rocks and setpeices because it can be easily manipulated in a real scene. So what comes down is what parts of the scene need to be real models and what can be made in CG, and someone sitting down to composite the two. The same went for the lava, a lot of it is done with real shots in a miniature set. Lighting and real effects like smoke are key, and then they just film it as their overall wide shot.

Clearly there is a ridiculous amount of elements here, but I just find it really cool how they all come together.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

Transformers has always been one of my favorite series of movies, even when they were cartoons during my childhood. However the new movie trilogy has taken it above and beyond. The special effects were mind boggling and the effort put into this film was also just as shocking.

Industrial Light and Magic is the special effects company that created most of the effects for the movies and are known for their work in Iron Man 2, War of the Worlds, and Star Trek. If you visit their website you will understand what specific pieces they specialize in and how this company has made some of the best special effects in the industry lately.

The most amazing fact that I uncovered while researching was that ILM has a giant rendering farm for super complex effects like those in Transformers 3 and that is a great thing because without the ability to render large files, the amount of time it would take would be counterproductive. It was said that when the movie was in its final week of post-production that ILM completely shut down their rendering farm specifically to finish the film. Whats amazing is that this allowed for 200,000 hours of rending time which is equivalent to 23 days of render time in 24 hours.



I found myself continually in awe at the superb and intricate details and time that was spent to make every scene look extrememly realistic and making the robots look and move just like we would expect it to. The plot to the movie was terrible and the movie carried on for about 45 minutes longer than it needed to, but the special effects were so above and beyond that I was fine with it carrying on. All I could think was what was the next mind blowing stunts they were going to pull and create. A++++++ for ILM.

Jurassic Park

When I was little, my cousin used to be obsessed with dinosaurs, just like almost every other child. But when we would watch Jurassic Park, I would be scared to death thinking that the T-Rex used in the movie would break out from Hollywood's captivity center and come raging through my neighborhood. That's when my father had to explain to me that the dinosaurs used in the movies were not actually real, but instead animated robots with computer created effects.

Well 15 years later, and I'm learning the basic process of how these dinosaurs were created. The amount of work that goes into every scene with these creatures amazes me still, and I believe that with the technology available at that time, Jurassic Park is a beautiful example of how visual effects can make a movie. The team responsible is ILM, Industrial Light & Magic, who are known for working on many of the films we consider classic today, such as Raider's of the Lost Ark, E.T., and The Empire Strikes Back. In this article you can see some of the behind-the-scenes work with Dennis Muren, the creative director of Lucasfilm's visual-effects, and the incredible process that they would go through to create such imaginative worlds.

Now while I am truly amazed with the scenes that involve the Jurassic Park dinosaurs physically interacting with the actors, the scenes that you wouldn't necessarily expect to have CG were beautifully and artificially created and amaze me all the same.





I found a whole walk-through of the process in "Making of the Lost World: Jurassic Park" on YouTube, where the videos go into detail of the Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production stages for Jurassic Park. These videos show the interviews with different people involved in the project and show how certain scenes were constructed on every level. The fifth video of the seven can be found here (embedding was disabled) and talks about how each of the dinosaurs was modeled and created.  But if you go back through each video, you can see bits and pieces of CG used in each scene.

I found these videos very interesting because they show the process of researching the dinosaurs, creating the models, using the live-action animatronics, filming the scenes that didn't have moving models, building the dinosaurs on computers, and combining the footage with the CGI.

The Lost World: Jurassic Park came out in theaters almost 15 years ago in 1997. Comparing what I know about computer graphics now and what was available back then, it's no wonder to me why Jurassic Park is considered one of the greatest examples of visual effects and why Industrial Light & Magic movies will forever be considered classic.