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6/21/02
Spielberg Spider Man
Steven Spielberg’s neo-noir action/sci-fi thriller Minority Report opens today to much anticipation bolstered by rave reviews and an aggressive marketing campaign. The trailers highlight cutting-edge visual effects that promise to deliver a lot of cool. And based on those initial glimpses, nothing in the film looks cooler than the little mechanical spiders that aid law enforcement in their Orwellian duties. To get some insight into the creation of the spindly-legged futuristic version of a K9 unit, I caught up with Webster Colcord, one of two main animators on the spider sequences.
Webster Colcord is an animator’s animator. Stop motion, cel, cut-out, CGI… he does it all. And his list of credits proves he does it all well. At the tender age of 18, Colcord thrust himself into what he calls "production bootcamp" at Will Vinton Studios where he did stop motion work on commercials and the Michael Jackson feature Moonwalker. The experience he picked up there led to a job on the Disney feature James and the Giant Peach in 1995. Two years later he relocated to San Francisco to join up with PDI/DreamWorks where he served as senior character animator on the CGI feature Antz.
In 1999, Colcord re-teamed with James director Henry Selik for Monkeybone, an experience he looks back on fondly for the caliber of animators he worked with (Paul Berry, Tim Hittle Justin Kohn, Trey Thomas, and Anthony Scott) and the challenge of integrating stop motion so closely with live action. Recently, Colcord rejoined his pals
at PDI for work on several high-profile films including Spielberg’s
latest big-budget summer thrill ride. Webster Colcord: I was hired back on with PDI's commercial and feature effects division after Monkeybone wrapped, and we worked on several commercial and effects projects including the feature Evolution (I animated a couple of shots early in the film with a monster fish in a little tank). PDI/ C.A.F.E. did a few shots for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and I think that won us the job of doing the spider sequence. AMO: How hands-on was Spielberg with the visual effects? W.C.: Les Hunter, Henry LaBounta and Ryan Roberts would take shots down to show Steven in L.A. every two or three weeks. Steven would give us feedback, and he let the guys videotape him so that we got his requests absolutely correct. Often we would refer back to the tape to make sure of our interpretation of his gestures — ‘...the spider should be almost all the way out the door, stop, turn around, pause (Steven would gesture with his hand, fingers pointing for the forward direction of the spider) and then move forward...’ — that kind of thing. He was very specific, but he also reserved his comments when he knew that we had more work to do on a shot. Once Steven was satisfied with the performance, he never backtracked. That gave our lighting and effects guys enough time to move forward and really ‘plus’ the shots — adding that final 20% that makes the shots 200% better — like the little simulated water drips coming off the spiders and other little integration and lighting touches. Because Steven had such a clear vision for the sequence, there weren't a lot of re-dos and we were able to move forward at a steady pace. The schedule wasn't rushed. Our crew also did the shots of the ‘egg machine’ towards the beginning of the film. AMO: You've stated before in a previous interview that working for major studios allows for little artistic freedom and a lot of stress. Was this experience any different? W.C.: Well, it's really just a matter of being able to align your skills with what the director's vision is. The stress is part of the job, and in many ways it can be a good thing. Certainly being on a Spielberg show is extra incentive to do the best work. One thing however, on a purely silly and technical level... early in production on the sequence I was working on a SGI O2 computer, running Maya, and I could barely get any work done because the scenes were so huge, computationally speaking. We switched over to PCs a couple of months later and everything went much better, in that I wasn't sitting around waiting for the computer to refresh the screen every time I moved a leg. We wouldn't have been able to get the show done without faster computers, and as this kind of work gets more complicated and the scene files get bigger, the computers are going to have to get even faster. AMO: Were you involved in the spider design in any way? W.C: Only in the design and testing of the movement. How the little flippers deploy, how the legs pose, how they attach to someone's face. I was also involved in the scheduling, estimating how long it would take to animate each shot. You don't often think of that as being part of an animator's job, but it's actually a huge part. A.M.O: What were the technical challenges involved in bringing the spiders to life? W.C.: There were so many challenge areas for so many people on the team — from lighting, R&D, to character setup, color pipeline, to match-move, fx simulation, to compositing around all that splashing water — that I can only offer this one little anecdote about a personal experience of mine: For the shot in which the spider lifts up the glass lid of the ‘health flow’ and holds it up on his back while the other spiders come out, I had to match move the spiders body frame by frame to that lid, which was held up on the set by a string. There was just the tiniest little jiggle to that lid which you only noticed when it was projected from 35mm. So for days I would zoom into that portion of the scene, make tiny little ‘y’ axis translation tweaks (every frame), export the models and wait for the lighters to render it and watch the film. You could only see the slippage when the shot was in motion, but finally I got it ‘locked-in’ after days of work. I hope. AMO: How was the work divided up between you and Ryan Roberts? What was your working relationship like? W.C.: Ryan Roberts was the lead animator on the project and he actually met with Spielberg and had a large hand in designing the way the spiders moved early on in the project. He did some early tests… that Steven had seen, nearly a year before we began any actual work on the sequence. Ryan is incredible in that he started as a self-taught cel animator and then learned Maya. He can do character setup from the ground up and is a great animator as well. He did the CG horses in Spirit and is currently working as a character TD for Disney. He and I were the two main animators on the sequence, with Marco Marenghi, Mariko Hoshi and Steve Lee contributing as well. Often Ryan would hand his shots off to me for final tweaking and I would check for intersections and making sure that the legs were sticking to the floor. It was easy to miss little things because there were often eight spiders in a shot, with three legs apiece — a lot of opportunities for legs to crash into each other. Most of the time Ryan's main goal was to keep consistency in the performance, making sure that the posing and timing of the spiders felt proper from shot to shot. It was Ryan who devised the different walking and running spider cycles, and the formula for getting a three-legged animal to walk believably. I was responsible for a bunch of the shots leading up to the tub, and Ryan did all the shots of the spiders interacting with Tom Cruise. The overhead shot was touched by everyone on the project, with Ryan as the lead. Marco did a lot of match move animation on the people, which was used for spider interaction and shadow passes. AMO: Now that hardware and software is getting more user-friendly, do you think animators from traditional backgrounds are becoming more sought-after for computer animation work? W.C.: The peak of the hiring craze when the studios were eager to bring on traditional animators and train them in CG occurred in '96-'97. Things are different now, and there are a lot of schools producing eager grads who know the software already. Really though, the best CG animators usually have some traditional experience. AMO: Do you think that feature film CGI work will eventually get to a point where it can be done by one person and allow for auteurism to re-emerge in the visual effects field? W.C.: It's already at that point and there are a few guys who I've worked with who can really do almost every aspect of the process — all the way through color grading, match move, animation, lighting, fx simulation and compositing — the ‘Ray Harryhausens’ of CG. If you look around, you can find a few of these people scattered about the globe, doing short films or individual shots for big effects films. However, on big budget effects movies the stakes are so high and often the shots are tweaked right up to the delivery date so you need the manpower to handle that. I think that there will be some indie fx films to emerge with single small effects boutiques handling each show. And the line between the director and effects supervisor will blur, as with Ray Harryhausen and Stanley Kubrick in the past. On the Minority Report spiders, Ryan Roberts contributed a lot of ideas that PDI's character TDs incorporated into the setup, and he wrote great little custom Maya interfaces as well. I mention this because in stop motion, the equivalent to a character TD is the machinist who builds the ball-and-socket armature, which goes inside the puppet. The best stop motion armature builders, like Tom St. Amand, have experience in animating. The equivalent is true in CG, someone with actual experience animating the characters will do the best character setup. AMO: You also mentioned a couple years ago that you would like to do a live-action/stop motion feature. Are you any closer to that goal? W.C.: Not really. But I finished my short cel film, Extreme Man & Insane Boy and it and my other shorts are going to be shown on the U.K. Sci-Fi Channel on a show called Head F?!k. Most of my films are showing on AtomFilms as well. And I'm shooting another Mad Doctors of Borneo film in my extremely limited spare time. Webster Colcord is currently working on the effects crew for the third installment in the Matrix trilogy. * Special thanks to Dylan Staley for assistance. |
© 2002 Animation Magazine Inc.
  
   
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