A Tour of ILM

Rob Coleman and Blinking Yoda

ILM resides in a quiet semi-industrial area of San Rafael, not very far from where the VES Festival took place. It surprising how calm it's around, you would never guess that you are in the middle where some of the most fantastic film images are made. It serves to show the contrast, even the dichotomy of ILM: a magic place indeed, full of mystery and myth, but at the same time almost like just another company, where people strive for the best. After turning a couple of times around the block I parked, which is also surprising considering that 1200+ people are working somewhere around here.

Once inside the reception you start noticing that there is something going on. While the exterior buildings are pretty much non-descript, conserving their old and drab origins, you step inside into another world. The reception area is adorned with several mementos, a few posters here and even a few maquettes. I sat beside one that looks like a maquette of Big Ben (Hook). After a few minutes Suzy Starke, from ILM's PR Department came in, ready to escort me to the first stop, a brief visit with none other than Rob Coleman. I must say something about Suzy, she always makes you feel at home, and most of the thanks for the visit should go to her.

Lord Vader guards over behind the reception area at ILM.

Rob Coleman, who probably needs no introduction (but in case you have been in a coma he is one of ILM's Animation Director who has overseen the work in the Star Wars prequels among other projects), was waiting in his office. Suzy left us for a few moments and Rob and I talked for a little while. As you might suspect his office, like any self respecting animator, is a mixture of toy store and art museum. You could probably spend a couple of hours there just looking at all things in there and asking what they are. If that was not humbling enough Rob tells me how rare my visit is. His dad hasn't even come to see his office so as not to lose the mystique of the place.

Rob described the details about working on Episode 2. He was so busy again that he couldn't personally animate something for the film. On the back wall he pointed to a huge spreadsheet type chart or more like a Gantt type chart that detailed how the work was done for the film. All the sequences are broken down, with a tiny thumbnail to illustrate each sequence. The shots were spread all throughout the chart which represented all the weeks in the postproduction schedule. One could see how certain shots just took a few weeks to animate while others took much longer. Conceptually harder sequences were left for later. For Episode 2, Rob decided to change they way the animation team would work. On Episode 1 the animators were divided in teams for each of the major characters, like Watto, Sebulba, etc. with a lead animator in each team. For Episode 2, Rob decided to split the animators up in 14 teams, which were overseen by Hal Hickel and Chris Armstrong. Instead of assigning specific characters to each team, each of the teams received a sequence. Once they finished the animation the next sequence in the queue would be assigned. This made them more efficient, which was necessary because of the larger number of CG creatures and characters.

After that Rob proceeded to show specifically how the animators work at ILM. In one of his monitors he had Cari up and running. He pulled out the shot where Yoda is in the forward command center during the battle of Geonosis and asks a clone trooper to bring a transport. One of the first things you notice about Cari is its somewhat spartan look (looked like regular Motif) with no frills and thrills. But this is just deceiving as this application is very functional. On one window there was a shaded view of Yoda's head which serves as the playback window. Several other windows were also floating, one of them the one that has all the blend shapes or morph targets for Yoda's facial animation, in particular for his lip-synch. Each entry in this list has a descriptive short name and are color coded. Rob explained to me that to define the lip shapes and phonemes he and Digital Model Supervisor Geoff Campbell sat down to figure out and create the shapes needed by the animators. Rob selected the control for the eyelids of Yoda and by moving the lever you can appreciate a subtle movement as if Yoda is wincing. Rob brought another window which displayed the animation curves of Yoda, not only his eyelids but the whole set, just like on many popular animation packages. After making the changes Rob renders them and after a few moments, I could see the subtle difference in the animation (which is also playing the actual dialogue from the movie). It almost looks very simple, like anyone, even myself could do it. Almost...

For the primary skeletal animation, the artists use Softimage 3D. First, on a second monitor Rob pulled up a page from the ILM intranet section on Yoda. The page contained exhaustive documentation about Yoda, from how he should move, to describing all the built in control and constraints in his system. He then proceeded to start Softimage. This time we could see Yoda's whole body and Rob selected one of the IK chains to demonstrate briefly the setup. One of the advantages of Cari is that it is connected or can "communicate" with Softimage thus enabling to use of the right tool for the right situation. We talked a little bit about everything and I described a little bit about ILMfan.com. Rob pulled it up, but to my horror we can't read anything, all the letters are black on the black background and can only be seen by dragging for selection. Unfortunately the SGI machines only have a very old version of Netscape which is unable to display CSS correctly. A sense of urgency in correcting this emerged, but at least Rob seemed pleased that the main page was showing an announcement about one of his articles in the Star Wars Insider. After taking a picture of his office we stumbled into James Tooley and I'm so flustered already that I even forget the lens cap.

I must say one thing, if you ever have a chance to hear Rob speak, even remotely, don't pass the chance. He is a great, warm, articulate and animated speaker. But that's just the tip of the iceberg, he is a phenomenal artists who is one of the coolest and most approachable person you'll ever meet. I can't help but to thank him again for his warm welcome and generous time in his office.

Rob Coleman in his office.

After talking to Rob, we headed back to the reception area. For the rest of the tour we would be joined by several people. My other two companions were Duane and Steve, two very cool guys that had come from Skywalker Ranch where they worked. Besides Suzy, now we were also joined by Rachel Goodwin. After a few turns and twists we went into a screening room where we were treated with two compilations. First was a reel illustrating highlights of ILM's work over the years. Most of the clips were from the CG era and we got once again shots of such outstanding projects as the Jurassic Park movies, T2, Willow, The Abyss and Episode 1 among many others. Also included were shots of the classic era in particular the Star Wars and Indiana Jones saga. The second compilation was trailers for the recent and current ILM projects like Episode 2, Signs and Minority Report. During breaks Suzy explained the big picture of ILM, how ILM gets projects and the overall structure of the company. We also started discussing recent projects and I inquired Rachel about the Bourne Identity (which opened that weekend and Rachel just saw) since it was a project almost no one knew ILM was involved with. With her recommendation I couldn't wait to see it. We stood up and went into the bowels of ILM.

Duane sitting comfortably in one of the screening rooms.

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