Foreword

I can’t see the point in the theatre. All that sex and violence. I get enough of that at home. Apart from the sex, of course.

–Tony Robinson as Baldrick, Blackadder

Who Brings the Sex?

“Make it look real.” That would seem to be the mandate of the visual effects artist. Spielberg called and he wants the world to believe, if only for 90 minutes, that dinosaurs are alive and breathing on an island off the coast of South America. Your job: make them look real. Right?

Wrong.

I am about to tell you, the visual effects artist, the most important thing you’ll ever learn in this business: Making those Velociraptors (or vampires or alien robots or bursting dams) “look real” is absolutely not what you should be concerned with when creating a visual effects shot.

Movies are not reality. The reason we love them is that they present us with a heightened, idealized version of reality. Familiar ideas—say, a couple having an argument—but turned up to eleven: The argument takes place on the observation deck of the Empire State building, both he and she are perfectly backlit by the sun (even though they’re facing each other), which is at the exact same just-about-to-set golden-hour position for the entire ten-minute conversation. The couple are really, really charming and impossibly good-looking—in fact, one of them is Meg Ryan. Before the surgery. Oh, and music is playing.

What’s real about that? Nothing at all—and we love it.

Do you think director Alejandro Amenábar took Javier Aguirresarobe, cinematographer on The Others, aside and said, “Whatever you do, be sure to make Nicole Kidman look real?” Heck no. Directors say this kind of stuff to their DPs: “Make her look like a statue.” “Make him look bulletproof.” “Make her look like she’s sculpted out of ice.”

Did It Feel Just Like It Should?

Let’s roll back to Jurassic Park. Remember how terrific the T-Rex looked when she stepped out of the paddock? Man, she looked good.

She looked good.

The realism of that moment certainly did come in part from the hard work of Industrial Light and Magic’s fledgling computer graphics department, who developed groundbreaking technologies to bring that T-Rex to life. But mostly, that T-Rex felt real because she looked good. She was wet. It was dark. She had a big old Dean Cundey blue rim light on her coming from nowhere. In truth, you could barely see her.

But you sure could hear her. Do you think a T-Rex approaching on muddy earth would really sound like the first notes of a new THX trailer? Do you think Spielberg ever sat with sound designer Gary Rydstrom and said, “Let’s go out of our way to make sure the footstep sounds are authentic?” No, he said, “Make that mofo sound like the Titanic just rear-ended the Hollywood Bowl” (may or may not be a direct quote).

It’s the sound designer’s job to create a soundscape for a movie that’s emotionally true. They make things feel right even if they skip over the facts in the process. Move a gun half an inch and it sounds like a shotgun being cocked. Get hung up on? Instant dial tone. Modern computer displaying something on the screen? Of course there should be the sound of an IBM dot-matrix printer from 1978.

Sound designers don’t bring facts. They bring the sex. So do cinematographers, makeup artists, wardrobe stylists, composers, set designers, casting directors, and even the practical effects department.

And yet somehow, we in the visual effects industry are often forbidden from bringing the sex. Our clients pigeonhole us into the role of the prop maker: Build me a T-Rex, and it better look real. But when it comes time to put that T-Rex on screen, we are also the cinematographer (with our CG lights), the makeup artist (with our “wet look” shader), and the practical effects crew (with our rain). And although he may forget to speak with us in the same floury terms that he used with Dean on set, Steven wants us to make that T-Rex looks like a T-Rex should in a movie. Not just good—impossibly good. Unrealistically good. Sexy good.

Have you ever argued with a client over aspects of an effects shot that were immutable facts? For example, you may have a client that inexplicably requested a little less motion blur on a shot, or for an object for which you’ve calculated the exact rate of fall from a known height to fall “just a little slower?” Do you ever get frustrated with clients who try to art-direct reality in this way?

Well, stop it.

Your client is a director, and it’s their job to art-direct reality. It’s not their job to know (or suggest) the various ways that it may or may not be possible to selectively reduce motion blur, but it is their job to feel it in their gut that somehow this particular moment should feel “crisper” than normal film reality. And you know what else? It’s your job to predict that they might want this and even propose it. In fact, you’d better have this conversation early, so you can shoot the plate with a 45-degree shutter, that both the actors and the T-Rex might have a quarter the normal motion blur.

Was It Good for You?

The sad reality is that we, the visual effects industry, pigeonhole ourselves by being overly preoccupied with reality. We have no one to blame but ourselves. No one else on the film set does this to themselves. If you keep coming back to your client with defenses such as “That’s how it would really look” or “That’s how fast it would really fall,” then not only are you going to get in some arguments that you will lose, but you’re actually setting back our entire industry by perpetuating the image of visual effects artists as blind to the importance of the sex.

On the set, after take one of the spent brass shell falling to the ground, the DP would turn to the director and say, “That felt a bit fast. Want me to do one at 48 frames?” And the director would say yes, and they’d shoot it, and then months later the editor would choose take three, which they shot at 72 frames per second “just in case.” That’s the filmmaking process, and when you take on the task of creating that same shot in CG, you need to represent, emulate, and embody that entire process. You’re the DP, both lighting the shot and determining that it might look better overcranked. You’re the editor, confirming that choice in the context of the cut. And until you show it to your client, you’re the director, making sure this moment feels right in all of its glorious unreality.

The problem is that the damage is already done. The client has worked with enough effects people who have willingly resigned themselves to not bringing the sex, that they now view all of us as geeks with computers rather than fellow filmmakers. So when you attempt to break our self-imposed mold and bring the sex to your client, you will face an uphill battle. But I’m here to give you some advice to help ease the process: Do it without asking. I once had a client who would pick apart every little detail of a matte painting, laying down accusations of “This doesn’t look real!”—until we color corrected the shot cool, steely blue with warm highlights. Then all the talk of realism went away, and the shot got oohs and ahs.

Your client reacts to your work emotionally, but they critique technically. When they see your shot, they react with their gut. It’s great, it’s getting better, but there’s still something not right. What they should do is stop there and let you figure out what’s not right, but instead, they somehow feel the need to analyze their gut reaction and turn it into action items: “That highlight is too hot” or “The shadows under that left foot look too dark.” In fact it would be better if they focused on vocalizing their gut reactions: “The shot feels a bit lifeless,” or “The animation feels too heavy somehow.” Leave the technical details to the pros.

You may think that those are the worst kind of comments, but they are the best. I’ve seen crews whine on about “vague” client comments like “give the shot more oomf.” But trust me, this is exactly the comment you want. Because clients are like customers at a restaurant, and you are the chef. The client probably wants to believe that “more oomf” translates into something really sophisticated, like volumetric renderings or level set fluid dynamics, in the same way that a patron at a restaurant would hope that a critique like “this dish needs more flavor” would send the chef into a tailspin of exotic ingredients and techniques. Your client would never admit (or suggest on their own) that “oomf” is usually some combination of “cheap tricks” such as camera shake, a lens flare or two, and possibly some “God rays”—just like the diner would rather not know that their request for “more flavor” will probably be addressed with butter, salt, and possibly MSG.

The MSG analogy is the best: Deep down, you want to go to a Chinese restaurant that uses a little MSG but doesn’t admit it. You want the cheap tricks because they work, but you’d rather not think about it. Your client wants you to use camera shake and lens flares, but without telling them. They’d never admit that those cheap tricks “make” a shot, so let them off the hook and do those things without being asked. They’ll silently thank you for it. Bringing the sex is all about cheap tricks.

Lights On or Off?

There are certain visual effects supervisors who pride themselves on being sticklers for detail. This is like being an architect whose specialty is nails. I have bad news for the “Pixel F*ckers,” as this type are known: Every shot will always have something wrong with it. There will always be something more you could add, always some shortcoming that could be addressed. What makes a visual effects supervisor good at their job is knowing which of the infinitely possible tweaks are important. Anyone can nitpick. A good supe focuses the crew’s efforts on the parts of the shot that impact the audience most. And this is always the sex. Audiences don’t care about matte lines or mismatched black levels, soft elements or variations in grain. If they did, they wouldn’t have been able to enjoy Blade Runner or Back to the Future or that one Star Wars movie—what was it called? Oh yeah: Star Wars. Audiences only care about the sex.

On a recent film I was struggling with a shot that was just kind of sitting there. It had been filmed as a pick-up, and it needed some help fitting into the sequence that had been shot months earlier. I added a layer of smoke to empirically match the surrounding shots. Still, the shot died on the screen. Finally, I asked my compositor to softly darken down the right half of the shot by a full stop, placing half the plate along with our CG element in a subtle shadow. Boom, the shot sang.

What I did was, strictly speaking, the job of the cinematographer, or perhaps the colorist. The colorist, the person who designs the color grading for a film, is the ultimate bringer of the sex. And color correction is the ultimate cheap trick. There’s nothing fancy about what a Da Vinci 2K or an Autodesk Lustre does with color. But what a good colorist does with those basic controls is bring heaping, dripping loads of sex to the party. The problem is (and I mean the problem—the single biggest problem facing our industry today), the colorist only gets their hands on the shot after it has already been approved. In other words, the film industry is currently shooting itself in the foot (we, the visual effects artists, being that foot) by insisting that our work be approved in a sexless environment. This is about the stupidest thing ever, and until the industry works this out, you need to fight back by taking on some of the role of the colorist as you finalize your shots, just like we did when we made those matte paintings darker and bluer with warm highlights.

Filmmaking is a battleground between those who bring the sex and those who don’t. The non-sex-bringing engineers at Panavision struggle to keep their lenses from flaring, while ever-sexy cinematographers fight over a limited stock of 30-year-old anamorphic lenses because they love the flares. I’ve seen DPs extol the unflinching sharpness of a priceless Panavision lens right before adding a smear of nose grease (yes, the stuff on your nose) to the rear element to soften up the image to taste. Right now this battle is being waged on every film in production between the visual effects department and the colorists of the world. I’ve heard effects artists lament that after all their hard work making something look real, a colorist then comes along and “wonks out the color.” In truth, all that colorist did was bring the sex that the visual effects should have been starting to provide on their own. If what the colorist did to your shot surprised you, then you weren’t thinking enough about what makes a movie a movie.

Bring It

One of the great matte painters of our day once told me that he spent only the first few years of his career struggling to make his work look real, but that he’ll spend the rest of his life learning new ways of making his work look good. It’s taken me years of effects supervising, commercial directing, photography, wandering the halls of museums, and waking up with hangovers after too much really good wine to fully comprehend the importance of what he’d said. I can tell you that it was only after this particular matte painter made this conscious choice to focus on making things look good, instead of simply real, that he skyrocketed from a new hire at ILM to one of their top talents. Personally, it’s only after I learned to bring the sex that I graduated from visual effects supervising to become a professional director.

So who brings the sex? The answer is simple: The people who care about it do. Those who understand the glorious unreality of film and their place in the process of creating it. Be the effects artist who breaks the mold and thinks about the story more than the bit depth. Help turn the tide of self-inflicted prejudice that keeps us relegated to creating boring reality instead of glorious cinema. Secretly slip your client a cocktail of dirty tricks and fry it in more butter than they’d ever use at home.

Bring the sex.

Stu Maschwitz
San Francisco, October 2007