F/X of Time Are Inevitable

They seem crude by today’s standards, with their cheesy costumes and model spaceships that hang by very visible threads, but once upon a time, movies such as “The War of the Worlds” and the original “Mighty Joe Young” were considered special effects extravaganzas. Audiences thrilled at their invention and quaked at the power of their images.

No one back then could have foreseen a time when lifelike, computer-generated characters would interact on screen with real actors or when a few clicks on a keyboard could change the color of an actor’s hat or make his eyes point in a different direction. No one could have imagined the digitalized landscape of “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace” or the computer-generated dinosaurs of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” just as few people today can predict what movies will look like half a century from now.

The only thing that is certain is that because of the nature of movies, today’s breakthroughs will look hokey tomorrow--this despite all the eye-popping effects made possible by recent computer technology.

“The stuff we’re doing now in 20 years will look obsolete,” said Dennis Muren, one of the visual-effects supervisors on “Phantom Menace” who earlier this month became the first effects artist to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Because of landmark works such as “Phantom Menace” and last year’s Oscar-winning “What Dreams May Come,” and the preponderance of effects-driven movies such as “The Matrix” and “The Mummy,” the art of visual effects has taken center stage in Hollywood as never before. (Is it any surprise that the breakout character from “Phantom Menace” was Jar Jar Binks, a computer-generated alien who has both beguiled and annoyed audiences and snared the cover of Rolling Stone?)

So when the Visual Effects Society held its first annual conference recently at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, virtually every seat of the three-day event was sold out--an indication, organizers said, of how popular the field has become. The society’s panel discussions at the Showbiz Expo, which starts Tuesday and runs through Sunday at the Los Angeles Convention Center, also are sold out.

One of the expo’s more splashy events will be at a 3,000-square-foot theater where audiences can see behind-the-scenes visual-effects secrets. The society is staging the event in conjunction with the American Society of Cinematographers and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Art Directors.

“The audience will sit on what looks like a rooftop surrounded by buildings,” said Tom Atkin, executive director of the Visual Arts Society. As experts explain how a shot is created, audience members will see the effects being created around them with models and computer-generated images.

As visual effects enter new realms--notably with the strides George Lucas has made with integrating computer-generated characters seamlessly into stories with flesh-and-blood actors--it’s a matter of speculation as to where the field goes from here.

“A few years ago, people were talking a lot about what was going to happen,” said Stuart Robertson in a recent interview. Robertson is one of the Oscar-winning effects supervisors of “What Dreams May Come.” “In the future, would films have all [computer-generated] characters?” But he said that isn’t a realistic concern.

“As audiences grow more sophisticated, the special effects that once wowed them begin to look synthetic--they can see the seams,” Robertson said. Improvements in the field are taking us toward spectacular effects that look more real--not toward the abandonment of flesh-and-blood actors for pixel-thin ones. “All-synthetic characters have been around since ‘Steamboat Willie,’ ” he said. “Bugs Bunny was a synthetic character. He didn’t replace another actor.”

Others, however, aren’t so sure about the future. Rob Coleman, another visual-effects supervisor from “Phantom Menace,” doesn’t rule out the possibility of lifelike computer-generated characters that can do everything an actor can do, although he said it would be “a huge leap.”

“I think somebody is going to do it,” he said. Speaking of Industrial Light & Magic, Lucas’ company that did the effects for “Phantom Menace” and many other envelope-pushing movies, Coleman added, “We may be at the forefront of that.”

But Muren said such a day, if it comes, is a long way off. “The performance of good actors is very complicated,” he said. “You’re going to want that spark of human ingenuity.”

With three visual-effects supervisors and one animation supervisor making presentations, the visual-effects conference offered the first detailed behind-the-scenes look at how “Phantom Menace” was made.

Audiences, largely composed of other visual-effects experts and students, hungrily ate up the explanations and demonstrations of how tricky shots were put together.

“Phantom’s” visual-effects team said they all were fearful at the prospect of doing a movie with almost 2,000 effects shots--60 minutes of “Phantom’s” screen time involved animation--in 18 months, but Lucas tried to put them at ease by telling them it was just a “B movie” and that every shot didn’t need to be perfect. “You can take it to a certain level, and that’s really all you need to do,” Muren quoted Lucas as saying.

However, John Knoll, one of the effects supervisors, said that every time Lucas was shown a shot, he would suggest adding computer-generated characters or effects. “We got to the point where we were sort of afraid to show it to him because he was going to add elements,” he said.

Images of the animators are hidden in crowd shots, along with images of E.T. and the space pod from the Stanley Kubrick film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (The E.T. character appears in audience scenes during the intergalactic Senate meeting. The space pod is in the junkyard behind the flying bug Watto’s shop.)

Apart from the spectacular shots involving hundreds of Gungans and androids in battle or featuring pod races or giant fluorescent sea creatures, even many seemingly ordinary scenes were digitally enhanced. Hills would be added to the backgrounds of scenes or cloud patterns would be changed to form a more pleasing composition.

The supervisors also addressed rumors that some of the actors’ performances were enhanced by computers. Not true, they said, although they acknowledged that in some cases, they would do things like remove an actor’s blink because Lucas thought it distracted from a scene or combine performances from different takes, which might require turning an actor’s head in a different direction to make it work.