Woodsy's World of Star Wars: RANGO EXCLUSIVE CLIP and My Q+A w/ILM VFX Supervisor The Awesome Tim Alexander!!
Guess who I spoke with today? Industrial Light + Magic’s Tim Alexander, visual effects supervisor of the new animated feature film Rango, starring Johnny Depp! Rango is a collaboration with Gore Verbinski, director of all the Pirates movies, and Industrial Light + Magic, as it’s first feature animation which comes out this Friday March 4th! Oh and not only is Tim super talented but he also gives great last minute airport rides. Trust me on this.
It’s a Western, takes influences from the old spaghetti Westerns and even some inspiration from Lawrence of Arabia, one of Tim’s favorite flicks. You can see Rango, just like Lawrence, skipping through the desert, I mean with his red Hawaiian shirt. Tim says the audience will really feel like ILM went out on location in the desert to shoot this stuff, hot and sweaty! Oh yeah!
We are even blessed with a bunch of Easter eggs throughout the film, including tie fighters, that’s right I said TIE FIGHTERS! I was even told there’s an especially good hidden gem in the opening when you look into the owl’s eye. The owl’s reflection is actually the audience at Lucasfilm’s Premiere Theatre where they showed the ILM documentary. John Knoll, ILM visual effects supervisor, took a picture of the audience with his Iphone and used that reflection in the owl’s eye. I cannot wait to find all these eggs!!
So sit back and relax, as Tim and I discuss Hunter S. Thompson, lighting, costume changes and donuts!
LW - How come you guys picked a chameleon as the main character?
TA - That was pretty much already picked when we came on board. I don’t know where they got that idea from but the original concept art we saw had Rango standing there holding a martini glass with his red aloha shirt on and so it had that Hunter S. Thompson feel to it, there’s even a Hunter S. Thompson character driving a car with Rango and he’s got splats on his windshield so there’s like that direct homage to Hunter S. Thompson. Rango was always a chameleon in Gore’s mind.
LW - Any new types of special effects tools or software needed for this film?
TA - In the beginning of the process we reached out to a lot of people in the animation community and talked to them about how their pipelines worked and we realized our pipeline was probably going to work okay for what we had to do. The pipeline is a very general term for how we work. It includes software, processors and artists. Basically it is how we get from a concept to the final image on the screen. We really maintained the ILM pipeline, everything we did actually applies back to our visual effects and vice versa. But we found areas in the pipeline that we had to work on a little bit. We had something like 75 characters we had to build on this film and on top of that many variations, which took us up to about 120-130 characters.
We’d never really dealt with that many characters before and they all have costume changes so really what we worked on was efficiency of scale. So everything in the pipeline was to help us handle that much data because we had never had that many characters and props, and to render that many characters in a shot was a feat unto itself. All the characters have feather, hair and subsurface scannering so we were using all the bells and whistles from the visual effects side of stuff but on a much bigger scale.
Check out this Rango EXCLUSIVE CLIP!!
LW - Can you elaborate on how ILM enhanced its pipeline?
We have a check in-check out process called “Make take and get take” and what happens is when someone puts their information into the system, “make take,” it renders a movie on a “get take” of that same data and the artist gets a notice on their monitor to look at their movie file to make sure it looks like it’s what they put in.
We had all kinds of checks in there, like if corneas on eyes were turned off by mistake so that the animators could see the eyeball. There’s a whole bunch of little nit picky things that can get missed really easily so these are really nice visual checks on the data.
LW - What was the Rango production from beginning to end?
TA - ILM was on it for about 2 years, before that Gore and the story team were working for about a year and a half on the story so we came on in 2008 and we finished late 2010.
LW - Besides Rango, what was one of your favorite characters to animate?
TA - I loved Waffles you can see him on some of the posters, I think he’s based on a horny toad. He’s funny, he’s really funny, he has all the best lines in the film and the writer who’s Jim Byrkit voices him as well, which is kinda cool, so the voice is the film is actually the character’s writer.
LW - What were some of the challenges as opposed to the live action stuff?
TA - I think probably one of the biggest challenges but also the most rewarding was the lighting and I think it’s because we were all putting on hats we hadn’t put on before. On a live action film there is a director of photography who goes out there and shoot plates and then we get those plates back. There’s a lot of decisions made upstream by people like the DP (Director of Photography) and then you kind of have to mold into that.
But on this film it’s wide open, we can do anything. So to help us with that Gore hired Roger Deakins on, he’s a famous DP (Shawshank Redemption) he does a lot of the Coen Brothers’ movies, hired him on as a consultant so we could actually discuss with him if we got stuck on something. So it was a really great relationship to be able to have a real DP that could consult with us.
It was really neat for us because everyone had different jobs than what they were used to. Like we were kind of acting like DPs with questions like “How are we going to light this? What should this scene look like? How do we want it to feel?” which are often times decisions that we don’t get to make.
LW - So Tim, now that you’ve had all of this animation excitement, aren’t you going to be bored going back to live action?
TA - Well you know it’s funny, I have been telling people “How am I gonna go back to live action now?” Because it was such an amazing and fun process, being involved every step of the way was so cool. So we’ll see, I just gotta get back into it and see what happens. I’d love to, of course, do another feature animated film. I’m sure if we get the right project at the right time we’ll get right back into it.
LW - Any talk about doing Rango II yet?
TA - No it’s so funny we were at a press conference and Gore said “I just gave birth and you want me to have another baby?”
LW - What’s the main message you want the audience to take away from this film?
TA - A lot of people think that because it’s animated that it’s a little kid’s movie. Really, it’s just a movie. Gore was making a Western and he just happened to use animation as the technique for getting there. People consider animated films a genre, they expect it to be a certain way. But this isn’t, it’s a Western, it could have been live action but Gore chose to use animation to make the film.
LW - So Tim, normally I end my Q+A sessions with friendly pic of us and you are wearing my Princess Leia buns. However you’re in San Francisco and sadly I am not. What can we do about that?
TA - Buns, not sure. Should I put a couple of doughnuts to my head?
Check out the full trailer for Rango which Premiere's March 4th at Theaters here:
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