John Dykstra interview pt.2

INDEX: On the Dykstraflex | on ILM | on CGI | on Hancock | on Spiderman | on Stuart Little | on Batman And Robin | on videogame development | on future projects | on favourite SFX films | favourite own SFX shots

Continued from part one

Richard Edlund frequently says that he doesn't miss the world of photo-chemical effects at all. Do you feel the same way?
Oh yeah, I don't miss it at all. In fact the reason I got out of motion-picture visual effects was because it became so difficult to do multiple-element composites in film and get a realistic-looking result. You always ended up with a compromise. I moved into electronic media and started directing and doing visual effects for commercials because I could get twelve tape machines, run them through a mixing board and do a twelve-element composite in one pass. I had much more flexibility, much more control, and if I got one that I liked, I got a keeper.

Did CGI creep up on you as an artist or were you part of that experimental period before Abyss, T2 and Jurassic Park?
That's really easy - CGI didn't creep up; CGI came with a bang! John Whitney and John Whitney Jr. did The Last Starfighter, and it became obvious that there was going to be a point…it wasn't a question of 'if', it was going to be 'when' we were going to be creating images in the computer, simply because of the flexibility of the tool. I went into doing commercials because I could work with electronic media in a reduced-resolution medium and a much smaller screen, and I could get away with a lot. So I could do lots and lots of crazy trick stuff, really great illusions, without the limitations of film. By limitations I mean that it wasn't presented on a sixty-foot screen with optical printers having to do the composites. What I kept watching for - and this is simple - the moment that you could take film into the digital environment, create a digital negative and output a print from that negative that was indistinguishable from the real negative…that's when it became viable. That happened quickly because of the speed at which computers and visual development in computers accelerated.

The cameras that we used on Star Wars and subsequent visual effects were built in the fifties, and the optical printers were just as old. The movements they used were even from the twenties! So this was an incredibly slow process of development because of the mechanical requirement. When we got into digital…there's Moore's law, where the bandwidth and computing capacity doubles every year. Apply that; if you figure that it doubles every year and you could do that with optical printers, you can imagine the growth in visual effects that could have occurred prior to the advent of the computer. But you couldn't. Computers got better incredibly fast. I remember the days when people would come in and say 'Look at this!' and you'd go 'Well, it's not very good', but they'd say 'Yeah, but we did it with a computer!' [laughs]. Well, it still wasn't very good. So we went from that stage to an image that was indistinguishable from real film in about five years.

Someone like Phil Tippett obviously had to reinvent himself totally after Jurassic Park, which he did very successfully…did you feel in the same position at the time?
Absolutely. When I saw the ability to put the film through a process without the generational loss as an incredible advantage. I could take original negative, I could put it in the electronic medium, manipulate it and bring it back out. That was the seminal step. Now I have the ability to improve my manipulation in the digital world. And it's lossless, because you're dealing with digital information, so you're not dealing with analogue where it can go a little bit too much this way, a little bit too much that way. You can be precise about how you handle your colours, contrasts, image size, image softness, fit…all of that.

I came back when I did my first Batman movie [Batman Forever], and I thought okay, we can use computers to do some of this stuff now. It was very limited in what the application was, and we still did a really huge amount of that stuff mechanically and with miniatures. But what it allowed us to do was design shots that were significantly more innovative; before, we were limited to how fast you could move the camera and how quickly you could stop it, and whether or not you could carry depth-of-field in order to make a miniature look full-scale - meaning whether or not you could get enough light. So we were working in this world where we were hamstrung by the vagaries of reality; in the digital world, you have no such problems.

You crossed over with total success to digital SFX - does an artist like yourself, with a background in photo-chemical effects, have anything unusual to bring to CGI work that computer-bred artists don't have?
I think that standing with one foot in both worlds is an incredible advantage. There are two reasons: one is that there's still stuff that is better done with miniatures and real photography than with a computer. People who've come up through the computer world, only using computers, don't have the experience with…I guess what it is is ingenuity. We had to be ingenious - we had to create illusions. We had to make something look like it did something rather than actually having it do something. In the computer you can make anything do anything. In those days you had to think of things in terms of the 'Occam's Razor' approach to making it happen. I think computer-effects tend to become very top-heavy, very complex…sometimes to the film-maker's disadvantage.

Part 3: Hancock...

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

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