ILM lecture notes

[vejiicakes]

Today figure drawing was canceled in favor of hearing a lecture by some art directors at Industrial Light & Magic. They talked about work on a bunch of the movies they handled (Narnia, Indiana Jones 4, Minority Report, Van Helsing, A.I. to name a few) along with a buttload of slides and videos, which was neat. But the segments I liked best were, honestly, the inside look at the only movies they worked on that I cared about: Iron Man and all three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Awwww yeeeeah. I didn't watch the extras on any of the aforementioned DVDs so I don't know if this is all stuff I could've gotten from there, but I was wriggling anyway because THE ART DIRECTORS ON THESE MOVIES WERE TALKING TO US ABOUT THEM.

Pirates of the Caribbean

• We got to see a ton of concept pieces and character art that didn't make it into the film, mostly from Davy Jones' crew :D
• Gore wanted Jones' crew to be under a curse, not just some run-of-the-mill spell, and he wanted the effects on the crew to be clearly supernatural but look like they had some placing in reality as well. So the character designers spent a lot of time gathering references of human deformities and skin afflictions, fusing those with oceanic complements (like barnacle scatterings patterned after rosacea). My favorite was the jellyfish dude, where the artist played around with the translucent quality of jellies and some bulbous translucent skin condition, which I forget the name of but which was totally creepy seeing blown up on the large auditorium screen.
  
  They fused lots of other medical/creature details as well, like the underside of a lobster being segmented, which turned into an outward-facing lobster sprouting from the back of one pirate like an external spine. A lot of other designs got turned down because Gore felt they were too gimmicky, getting too far away from the curse as an affliction and too close to Jones' crew looking like they were turning into something in particular. Like this crazy looking turtle guy with a retracto head and flippers jutting out of his arms.
• Going back to the curse thing, Gore also stressed asymmetry. He wanted the curse on Jones' crew to really look like a terrible affliction, so the artists took a lot of care to design the transformations from human to sea creatures as unevenly and painful-looking as possible. Hammerhead!pirate was held up as an example of this play on attributes, where from the front his face looked like it could conceivably belong on a human head, but in profile view he resembled the thin, distinctive hammerhead shark snout that would in NO WAY fit a human's head shape. They looked at photos of rugby players with their noses bashed in to more fully flatten the pirate's human features to complement the sharky head.
• So it's a fortunate thing Will Turner's such a good guy and therefore not subject to the corrupting forces of the curse (or whatever). The odds were pretty well stacked against him in terms of turning out all prettily anthro-fishy otherwise -_-

Iron Man

• They designed fucking everything to have cues to Tony Stark's personality:
  
  Obviously, there was his home, where they looked into having extensive walling and overgrown forestation in his backyard to emphasize his reclusive nature. Eventually they scaled back on both of them, so that he'd look like he had actually.. you know, hired a landscaper.
  
  The Stark Industry offices were laid out like Disneyland. From an aerial view, you can see the legacy of the company with all the old office buildings, but then the closer you get to the freeway, that's where you get to all the newer and sleeker rides, er, buildings.
• We got some really nice concept art of the Iron Man suit assembly arms (with Tony Stark amid them). Favreau wanted for them to unfurl from someplace hidden away, so the artists had to really brainstorm to get them to look like they were coming up from a realistically tucked away space and not just coming out from nowhere, hence all the unfolding panels and such. But Favreau especially wanted the design on this part to cue in to Tony's personality as well--he wanted them scary, like the arms and the whole assembly pit had to look actually intimidating, as if they could so easily restrain and crush Tony because he was a wee thing and not, like, a car, but he was FEARLESS and WILLING TO SACRIFICE HIMSELF for the sake of his inventions and oh god that part of the lecture was hot...

Van Helsing (Which is not to say that I care about this movie, but there were some fun tidbits.)

• The director wanted the vampire brides' wings to look like they were sprouting from their gowns, and very much not batlike. Which sounded really annoying for the artists.
  
  Director: "No bones! No bones!"
  Art director: "HOW do wings work without bones??"
  
  Apparently they eventually went and looked at manta rays and stuff.
• "This was the kind of project where you just kind of giggle along as you work." (Re: the scene where the animators decided Dracula would be so poisoned by the werewolf bite that he would vomit his own guts out.) I'm thinking the entire production team was like this on the movie at large. I mean. HONESTLY.