October 23, 2000

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Special-Effects Shop Conjures Up A Perfect Storm

By Tony Kontzer

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ogic would suggest that if a filmmaker wants to create a movie in which the forces of nature descend upon the unsuspecting crew of a small ship, water would be part of the equation. Then again, movies and logic don't always go hand in hand. That's why, through the magic of technology, the water seen onscreen in Warner Bros.' recent hit, The Perfect Storm, was, in fact, painstakingly manipulated digital data.

Of course, such technology is only as good as the people controlling it. In the case of The Perfect Storm, the people in question were the talented folks at Industrial Light & Magic, the Northern California special-effects shop formed by George Lucas while he was making the original Star Wars. But as ILM visual-effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier is well-aware, even the best digital artists need access to the latest technology if they're going to wow today's effects-savvy audiences.

In creating the ocean, rain, and spray for the storm sequences in The Perfect Storm, ILM was asked to do the impossible--to mimic the appearance and behavior of the ocean, rain, mist, spray, splashes, and foam in high winds. "Our task was to model something that in nature is very complex," Fangmeier says. "How do you make all those things move like water?"

The answer came in the form of a team of more than 100 rendering artists, who together spent nine months hunched over Silicon Graphics Inc. O2 3-D modeling workstations. But before the rendering work could begin, Fangmeier spent six months getting the technology setup just right. Each of the workstations was equipped with the latest version of RenderMan, software developed more than a decade ago by Richmond, Calif., computer-animation pioneer Pixar Animation Studios, the shop behind the animated film hits Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and A Bug's Life. The software was enhanced by the ILM staff so it could recreate the surface appearance of water in its various forms.

To simulate the behavior of the water, the ILM team relied on Maya, a state-of-the-art 3-D modeling tool from Silicon Graphics subsidiary Alias/Wavefront. Again, rather than rely on the off-the-shelf version, ILM updated Maya with its own plug-ins.

Such control takes considerable time: Each frame of film created by the ILM team required two hours of rendering work--and with about 33 minutes of film to generate at 24 frames per second, that meant a total of more than 47,000 frames, or 94,000 hours.

Maybe filming on the open seas during a hurricane would have been easier.

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Illustration by Allen Crawford

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