Real.
A dummy in a hammock.
I need a break.
Sometimes it's nice to turn away from the hoax videos
and the viral ads to look at the work of brilliant artists who pioneered the visual effects techniques
we now take for granted in our one click meme making.
From primitive to complex, ...
from dazzling ...
... to totally invisible.
Even if you don't use them, VFX are worth learning about because they're just plain cool.
Maybe I do make too many Back to the Future references,
but I have a perfectly legitimate excuse...
I really really like it.
(Look out!)
Back to the Future is a story about a couple of friends going to
unbelievable lengths to protect each other,
their loved ones and the world from destruction by a ridiculous, yet
somehow really cool garage built invention.
And if they succeed, the best they can hope for is that nobody will ever even know.
Responsibility for the entire universe secretly in the hands of one kid and one crazy guy.
I used to be a kid ...
... now I'm a crazy guy - the trilogy has a way of staying relevant to me.
And the half decade during which it was produced happens to be a pivotal time in the history of visual effects.
Led by the company that made them for these films: Industrial Light and Magic
ILM's logo used to be a magician coming out of an industrial gear, levitating a light, ...
but now it's just a gear and a light ...
... 'cause the magic's on the screen, baby!
[Record scratch]
The Back to the Future Trilogy is a fascinating time capsule of effects evolution.
The first film's handful of lightning and timeslice shots were
hand-drawn by Animation Supervisor Wes Takahashi
and relied on the same optical matting techniques as the earliest effects from the dawn of cinema.
Those storm clouds are made of
Fiber Fill by the way. Shot upside down at time-lapse speed while Visual Effects Supervisor Ken Ralston
crawled around on the floor under them, flashing a thousand watt light on and off.
By the time part three was in production
ILM was using film scanning and digital compositing to put some shots together pretty much the same way we do today.
But it's the second film that contains the most interesting assortment of techniques:
flying cars, ...
holographic displays, ...
floating hover borders and cloned actors ...
all interacting in free-flowing camera moves.
Today, some label all this computer graphics
while others are quick to point out that: "No, all this was done by hand before computers were even a thing"
But neither statement is totally accurate. Let's figure out exactly how computers were involved.
3D animation already existed
but in primitive form. It's used in the movie as almost a parody of itself:
The wacky backdrops of Max Headroom-style video waiters, ...
advertisements on the holo-billboard, and of course the holographic Jaws 19 marquee.
At the time CGI seemed destined to stay in the world of Cheesy TV graphics
and it would be another five years before it reached the realism of Jurassic Park.
So every proper Sci-Fi element you see in Back to the Future 2 was done with practical,
handmade miniatures. A real camera filmed a real tangible object with all of its
imperfections and tricks of the light.
This is a real eight-foot miniature building chock-full of lightbulbs.
This is a real miniature police hovercar made of vacuform plastic.
This is a real fifth scale miniature delorean with little servo articulated Marty and Doc in there!
That's so cute!
I just want to touch it all and play with it all day long!
*Grunts*
Of course, in all but a few cases - like the epic steam engine crash at the end of part three where
everything in frame was modeled at quarter scale -
the miniatures usually needed to be placed into real-world background plates.
But computers weren't involved in that either. The blue-screen process was done
photochemically and assembled on two custom-designed
optical printers in use at ILM at the time. One was nicknamed "The Quad" the other "The Workhorse",
but actually they both used to be one giant printer called "The Quad"
- It's a long, incestuous story.
The point is we've got the cinematography covered, but the model still had to move.
Now, in a handful of shots the full-size mock-up as well as the fifth scale miniature
Delorean, built by ILM's Model Maker Steve Galli and his crew,
were simply hung from cables and puppeteered in real time but generally this doesn't offer a lot of
control over the motion. That's why really old miniature work look so fake.
If you want real control over the motion you need ...
motion control.
See stop motion looks the way it does because you're just
estimating how things need to change from one frame to the next and moving them by hand
but if you could have a robot move them for you, based on precise calculations,
then the resulting movement would look perfectly smooth and realistic.
The earliest motion control camera rig
used on a large scale was the Dykstraflex system built by a team of ILM engineers for the space battle
sequences in a Sci-Fi story dreamt up by a strange young man named "George Lucas".
He also founded Industrial Light & Magic as a division of Lucasfilm to make the effects for the movie.
I think it was called "Star War ...
... sss"
"Star Wars"? Star Wars.
The iconic POV shot flying into the trench of the Death Star? The Dykstraflex made that possible,
earning its namesake John Dykstra and the other developers an Academy Award in 1976.
This early system was just a hardwired camera crane controlled by transistor logic that moved around stationary models.
By the time the Back to the Future films were in production,
ILM had a more advanced computerized rig called the Vista Cruiser - finally computers!
Now, the cameras position, rotation, lens settings,
even shutter sync with another eight channels left for moving the models could be controlled simultaneously.
The idea is you program the actions of the camera, the model,
and any lights or moving parts that have to animate ahead of time
and then the rig films it by itself frame by frame.
The advantage is not just that the motion is nice and smooth
but that it can be repeated multiple times when you don't yet have the luxury of digital compositing tools
this is the only way to make things look right.
By lighting each take differently you end up with passes
that can be combined in the printing process to isolate the model
and match its look exactly to the background photography.
For instance, many flying car shots in Back to the Future 2 were in high contrast night scenes
and this was hard to simulate on blue screen
without spilling a ton of blue on the highly reflective delorean making it transparent.
So a bright fill pass was filmed against blue just to generate the matte of the car silhouette
then high contrast beauty passes were shot against black
and all were composited together to achieve the final shot.
Multiple passes were also used to assemble different models that had to work together in one shot.
The intro scene of the skyway has dozens of miniature elements
that were shot individually and choreographed to one camera move.
By the way, it's 1988 and match moving software is not really a thing yet.
So when you see dozens of individually animated skyway cars
tracked perfectly into a freehand crane move... That's a human!
A patient human named Charlie Clavadetscher
calculating and programming the movement by hand.
I can barely get an advanced 3D camera solver program to keep things from wobbling around in 2017
and I had to click like one whole button!
A Frame-By-Frame motion control system like the Vista Cruiser is great,
but what if I want to do effects with things that are alive like actors.
I need a system that can move in real time.
Another man once shared that dream:
This guy. This nerdy looking guy named Robert Zeme...z..pckis
He's the mastermind behind Back to the Future.
Judging by the confused expression on your face I feel I need to pause here
and explain something very important.
The first image on the first frame of the first Back to the Future movie is a title card
containing the name Steven Spielberg. This leads many to believe that
Steven Spielberg made Back to the Future - and let's get this straight:
Spielberg is an amazing, legendary filmmaker who as executive producer provided the resources and
opportunities for up-and-comer Robert Zemeckis to get Back to the Future made.
But Zemeckis co-wrote and directed all three films.
He made every creative decision. These are movies by him.
Steven Spielberg is to Back to the Future what YouTube is to Captain Disillusion.
Would Captain Disillusion exist without YouTube?
Probably not. But should YouTube be praised
for the amazing works of awkwardness that are the earliest Captain D episodes?
I don't think so!
That's something I alone have to live with.
After the runaway success of the first Back to the Future
Universal was dead set on making a sequel, but Zemeckis wasn't interested
because he doesn't like to repeat himself.
He didn't want to be pegged as the Back to the Future guy.
Oh...
Eventually he agreed
but only if he was allowed to make a different film in between.
So he directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit real quick. It only won three Oscars, and was only a slightly
revolutionary achievement in integrating live action and cel animation
into a well developed story where iconic cartoon characters from competing studios
shared the screen for the first and last time in history.
But in fairness he had to rush through it,
so he could dive straight into concurrent production on Back to the Future 2 and 3,
flying daily between Burbank and Sonora to supervise post on one whilst shooting the other.
Going on to direct a string of phenomenal films in all kinds of styles
and single-handedly dragging performance capture filmmaking into the Hollywood mainstream.
This man does not compromise on creative vision!
So it's his head shot with a possibly fake autograph purchased on ebay
that hangs on the wall of my office.
Creative ambitions of directors like Bob Zemeckis push visual effects technology forward
and for Back to the Future 2 he insisted on another breakthrough
that would profoundly impact the way we shoot effects films today.