Let There Be Light!

"I guess the biggest challenge was the volume of complex shots," Squires says. "Our team alone had to deal with 561 shots in less than a year." Dennis Muren and John Knoll were handed out different volumes of shots, based on the complexity of the work involved. So Muren's team had to produce 310 shots, while Knoll's team tackled an impressive 1072 shots. In Muren's case, the number of shots was kept at a minimum because he needed to produce scenes that were completely computer-generated: the underwater sequence and the ground battle. And since an outside, daylight scene is the most difficult environment to create digitally, the ground battle alone represented quite a challenge.

"For my team, this meant twelve to fifteen final shots each week," continues Squires, "compared to the average output of about 5 VFX shots a week on a major motion picture. And we needed to keep the quality level up, of course. So part of the challenge on this movie was to find creative and clever solutions to problems. To speed up things, we needed to find a balance between digital and practical effects. So for certain sequences, we would shoot physical models, and then digitally enhance the footage. At other times, we might use a digital matte painting instead of having the computer render a new background for each frame. And so on. We even used salt, poured from fourteen feet up in the air, as the basic visual element for the Theed waterfalls."

However, as Squires points out, digital technology has reached a point where another type of challenge arises: "We also need to know when to say, okay, let's stop here," he continues. "One of the great things about this technology is that you can control everything to the Nth degree, but a lot of times you have to take a step back and realize that the element you're working on might end up onscreen for two seconds. And sometimes, it won't matter whether a particular piece of hair goes this way or that way. You just have to look at it realistically and make sure that your last few months on the project are spent finishing the film, and not making half the movie more perfect than it needs to be. Basically, we bring each shot up to the level George Lucas wants and needs. Then it's time to move on the next shot."

As traditional visual effects artists have discovered long ago, it is not always wise to do everything to make an effect absolutely perfect simply because the technology allows its users to do so. Most of the time, an element doesn't need to be perfect in real life to look perfect on the screen. It's a question of balance, and in that, digital technology hasn't lightened the burden. It may in fact have made it a bit heavier. But the wizards of ILM rose to meet the new challenges of visual effects, and stand ready to repeat the feat on Episode II. The 'magic' in Industrial Light & Magic doesn't only appear in the final product on the screen : It is part of the whole process.