Interview With Todd Vaziri, ILM (Part One)

 

Through an odd set of encounters on the Internet, which would take too long to explain (maybe some other time), I've been talking with a compositor at Industrial Light + Magic, Todd Vaziri. He's been kind enough to take time out of his schedule and life to answer some questions that some members of a visual effects message board and I had for him about the summer blockbuster, Transformers.

Sibulsky's Rants and Ravings: The official count for shots - that I’ve been seeing - says about 650 total, with ILM doing 430 shots. Was ILM’s work almost all character stuff, or was there other work involved? What did the other VFX houses do?

Todd Vaziri: ILM’s work was extensive and mainly revolved around the characters, all the Autobots and all the Decpticons, and all their associated sequences, with a few exceptions. That means Optimus Prime, Megatron, Ratchet, Bumblebee, Jazz, Ironhide, Starscream, Scorponok, Blackout, Barricade, Bonecrusher, Devastator, Frenzy and when the Autobots come down in their endoskeleton form.

We also had some shots that were not character-related. For example, the opening shot of the movie (the cube in space) and the cube in Hoover Dam. The Cybertron Flashback that Optimus shows Sam and Mikaela, that’s ILM.

The other main house was Digital Domain; they did the Arctic Circle sequence, a couple of shots of Frenzy’s severed head, the cell phone that turns into the Nokia-Bot. I think they did the meteor shower, the stuff that hits Dodger Stadium and a couple other shots. They did a fantastic job.

Asylum did some shots as well, but I’m not sure what those were.

SRR: What, exactly, do you do as a sequence supervisor (or, as the film credits, digital artist supervisor)?

TV: I was a little surprised seeing that, but it makes as much sense as 'sequence supervisor', I suppose. It’s been said that ILM is pushing towards a less compartmentalized assembly-line-type specialization and going more towards a digital artist realm/model. And that absolutely been happening – and it was very obvious on Transformers.

Usually, for the big sequences in every movie, we try to assign one or two, or if it’s intense, three supervisors to a sequence. I was a supervisor (along with Leandro Estebecor end and David Hisanaga) on the base attack, the very first scene of the helicopter turning into Blackout, and laying waste to Soccent Operations in Qatar. I was also on the Scorponok desert attack sequence, along with Nigel Sumner. I also supervised the end battle that takes place after Megatron and Optimus Prime fall from the rooftops, along with the aerial shots of Starcream, and other shots here and there.

What does supervising mean? Generally speaking, we try to standardize styles and techniques, while maintaining continuity of the sequence. It's our to help the artists make things look constant throughout the shots, to interpret our VFX supervisor’s intentions for the scene, to be a conduit.

SRR: Are you still working on shots?

TV: As supervisor, I’m still working on shots – there’s no question about that! We usually try to tackle the first big, heavy hero shot that sets the tone for the rest of that sequence.

SRR: How long did you work on this project?

TV: Personally, I was on the show for 11 months or so; the longest I’ve worked on a single movie. I had a lot of fun; the crew had a lot of fun. Many said that it was the most fun they’ve had on a show at ILM, and that says a lot. We had a fantastic crew on the ILM side, and Michael was really happy with our work.

SRR: Lots of the articles on the Internet have praised the modeling, animation, and lighting teams, but shots are made or broken in compositing. How challenging of a show was it in that regard?

TV: As a compositor, I love that kind of question. In certain ways, compositing on Transformers was kinda classic in that we had our plates and we would comp our creatures into those plates. Michael Bay and Scott Farrar, our visual effects supervisor, shot very dense, very dirty plates with lots of smoke and fire in them, which absolutely made compositing that much more of a challenge. The shots look really raw and real, and that brings a lot of realism to the shot, but it makes compositing much much harder.

But it was great working on a plate-based show for a change. Nearly every shot had a background plate, from with we rarely deviated. Yes, we had some amazing set extensions and synthetic environments, but many of the shots for "Transformers" had its own plate. The nice thing is that the art direction and spontaneity is already there-- when you work on a film like "Star Wars" or "300", which was almost exclusively shot against a greenscreen, you have to do a lot of work to create the world. For "Transformers," the world was already created - we just had to put our characters in it. And with all that smoke and dirt, it was really tough.

"Transformers" was shot with anamorphic lenses, which gives the film a distinctive look. Everything looks a little weird through an anamorphic lens. There’s all these little aberrations, how light hits the lens and the flares and glints from that, and your depth of field is really shallow. You can have the most beautiful daylight render of a robot, but if it doesn’t sit there with those same aberrations, it doesn’t look real. 

And Michael doesn’t hold back, stylistically, everything goes – he’ll shoot right into the sun, or a practical light source. He uses lots of backlight, and contrast, and our robots were going to be doing the same thing. So, all those things had to be as honest and true as possible.

Oh, and all the wild camera moves, like hand-held moves, cranes, all of that kind of mayhem makes compositing harder.

All of this was guided by our amazing compositing supervisor Pat Tubach.

SRR: How much miniature work was there?

TV: Just a few shots. ILM’s model shop was spun off into its own company, Kerner Optical, and they did a fantastic job on the film. Their biggest set-up was the Clinica building miniature. Megatron and Optimus fly through the entire length of the building, destroying an entire floor and emerging from the other side. It was a beautiful miniature, and the shots featuring the stage shoot turned out really well. There's a spontaneity and plausible randomness that is in those shots.

SRR: What was your greatest challenge/problem on the show?

TV: I’d say there were a couple of really hard challenges. The actual transformations were really, really complicated– the rigging, animation; how complicated would these things be, in terms of how they move from vehicle form to robot and back. We originally thought we could be 'honest' and animate in such a way, like ‘this piece tucks under the tire, and is present here in vehicle form.' Of course, we threw all of that right out the window - the complexity and sheer number of transforming pieces made that process impossible. Our animators really came up with some beautiful transformations. Figuring this out was a process of exploration; there’s no manual or blueprint that we could have followed.

The other challenge is that Michael Bay is extremely demanding when it comes to the quality of the visual effects. He shoots a lot of car commercials, and he knows what it takes to make those cars look sexy. Making our animated characters look like they belong in Michael’s world was something that we had to learn, and it took us a while to get it right.

SRR: What was the most complex shot, in your opinion?

TV: On this show, looking down the pipeline, some shots would be complicated on the animation and rigging side, but would kinda come together quickly on the lighting/td/compositing side.

But in terms of shots that were all-around hard, I’ll throw one of my shots in the ring: the helicopter-to-Blackout transformation at the beginning of the Qatar base attack. We had a very complicated model and transformation and animation and rigging that was really, really dense. It was one of the first shots we did.

In addition, there was some particle work – just as Blackout starts transforming, the soldiers start firing, which lights him up like a Christmas tree from all the sparks. I had to animate all those sparks, and I placed them all in After Effects. Jeff Grebe did an amazing job lighting the CG copter. To make things even harder, the real helicopter that you see earlier in the sequence was in the shot, so I had to get rid of the real chopper. Everything beyond the foreground soldiers is a complete synthetic environment, and that was a real hard thing to do. Those soldiers had to be retained, which was lots of work by the roto geniuses at ILM, under the supervision of Beth D’Amato. That shot was really really hard, especially since we tackled it so early in production.

SRR: What was working with Michael Bay like? Is he as 'hands on' and intense in terms of his VFX as he is in his live action shooting?

TV: In a word: yes! If you’ve ever seen behind-the-scenes footage of Michael on one of his shoots, you’ll see him with that bullhorn, talking with someone right next to him with it. If he had that bullhorn in visual effects dailies, he’d use it. There’s no question that he’s a demanding director. He’s looking for something sleek, stylish, cool, and has to be plausible. And it can’t be fakey-tricky kind of stuff – he’s not much for the slight-of-hand. He really wants the shot to look right, the first time you see it.

I always joke that every one of his shots is a signature shot for the movie; every shot is a hero shot. And as long as you think that way, you’re gonna do fine. He knows what he’s talking about, he’s worked with ILM in the past and he’s got the lingo down. He loves the give and take between him and ILM. He loves pushing and pushing and pushing us further and further.

He pushes everyone that is making the film, and that’s how you get a film that looks like "Transformers."

SRR: Michael Bay is known for always wanting something in the shot that was photographed. How often was there a completely computer-generated shot?

TV: I can maybe think of perhaps only a handful in the movie. Ones that I can think of are the opening shot of the cube flying through space, getting hit by asteroids and entering Earth’s atmosphere. That was all synthetic – we didn’t go up and shoot that stuff…

There was a shot where Optimus Prime was giving a quick history lesson on Cybertron to Sam and Mikaela in the alley, which starts with live-action, but then we go into all CG. There were a lot of rooftop shots where Optimus catches Sam, and is straddling the two buildings. The whole scaling down the sides of the buildings had angles that were so dynamic of Optimus grabbing the sides of these buildings – grabbing fire escapes, windows, basically destroying the faces of these two buildings. There was no way we could have even shot plates to get close to that. Those buildings are entirely synthetic, although based on a lot of photographic reference.

 

Go on to Part Two!