A few weeks ago we published a vfxshow on Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. We received some great feedback on this show and on our other ‘retro’ episodes. One person who emailed us was Tony Hudson, who worked at ILM as the CG Model and Creature Supervisor on the film.
Tony was on A.I. for 14 months at ILM and was good enough to outline some his favorite memories from the experience, which we felt had to be shared too. Here they are below:
– The frozen New York sequence was completely CG with the exception of the first 60 seconds of the shot before you dip down into the excavation, and the last bit approaching the Ferris wheel and amphibicopter. The first part was actually VistaVision footage from the Clint Eastwood film Firefox of flying over an iceflow. It was stabilized, looped about 10 times and then matchmoved (by hand, in Softimage, with no markers!) by Terry Chostner. All of the surface buildings were simple geometry mapped with paintings created in Photoshop by Randy Gaul.
– When we dip down into the trench, the last frame of the matchmove plate was projected onto the ground plane, something very simple to do now but a long process called “make sticky” at the time. Phillip Rebours was the TD on the shot, and he developed all of the shaders for this. I’m pretty sure all of the environment was rendered with Mental Ray, except the cube ship. The environment was modeled by Mila Golynskaia and Jack Haye and painted by Terry Molatore. I built and animated the cube ship based on Chris Baker’s boards for the sequence. The last part with the Ferris wheel was a Lorne Peterson miniature shot with the mooseflex camera. Softimage camera data was exported to the motion control system for matching, like we did for Mars Attacks!.
– Very few miniatures remained once we were done with New York underwater. Only the Statue of Liberty arm, the broken building we see in the foreground of the wide shot and the lion building, plus the underside of the tilted building were miniatures. Everything else was painted.
– For the underwater shots everything was miniatures except for the Ferris wheel, which was CG due to height restrictions on the main stage. All the animated seaweed was created with a very early version of Maya Paint Effects that I’d come back from NAB raving about. Unfortunately, you could not cast shadows with it, so Joakim Arnesson had to manufacture shadows from the holdouts and remap them to the plate. Sorry Joakim.
– Barry Armour spent months trying to create a curly hair primitive for Teddy. The first test rendering for Teddy was about 16 hours per frame. We got the time down a little, but what really helped was going the old fashioned approach. Tom Martinek had me create a new puffy version of Teddy, then he just displaced the hell out of it to make it look like fur. More than half the shots were done with this version of the model, including a close up.
– The Nanny Bot is one of my favorite shots ever. Brian Cantwell and I worked on the matchmove using the first version of Steve Sullivan’s “mars” matchmove module. Howie Weed did the model and Terry again did paint. I believe it was Katie Morris (Doug Smythe’s wife) who had the glamorous job of creating a clean plate behind the Nanny Bot’s head, what with the wind, the lights moving back and forth in the trees and everything else.
– We were also using previz on A.I. Larry Chandler did the ice trench, but the Nanny Bot was just storyboarded. Chris Baker had boarded the entire film for Kubrick, and we inherited all of that work. My memory of the progression on that shot was that we just assumed we would find a way to do it. Steve Sullivan had been making great progress on the mars module – remember this was before boujou or PFTack – but Steve was already doing automatic feature detection, optical flow and solving for geometric solids. Using a scan of the actress’ face, we created a digital model that was aligned in the mars solver over her face in the plate. We had to solve for the camera, the head and the shoulders. I then aligned Howie’s model in Softimage and added a rig. We also had to do a groom and soft body sim for her ponytail.
For more on the visual effects of A.I. you can download our vfxshow here. We also suggest you get your hands on Cinefex issue no. 87.
We love to hear from more artists on any of the older films we cover… if you have similar memories from a great project past – please drop us a line, we’d love to publish more of these retro spotlight pieces. Don’t let those experiences be forgotten !