The character effects in Flubber presented Industrial Light and Magic with a new and unique set of problems, which called for equally new and unique solutions. How do you articulate a character made of slimy, sticky goo? How do you express acting with a character that has no face, and rarely has definable body parts of any kind? How does light reflect and refract through a transparent character? These are a few of the challenges we faced, and we had to find answers that addressed aesthetic, performance, and technical concerns simultaneously. Form had to follow function, and this thrust us headlong into the realm of the unknown and unproven. The title character in Flubber provided the animation crew with none of the usual tools relied upon for performance... facial features, dialogue, body parts. As a result, the animators had to go back to the absolute basics of acting, honing their pantomime skills and expressing feeling and emotion through sheer body language. One called it the "biggest, most expensive flour-sack exercise in history."To get a feel for the Latin dance number in this post-rave era, a dance instructor was imported, and the animators actually took mambo lessons for several weeks.

The plates for the mambo dance number were shot on an oversize set on one of ILM's stages.The camera moves, timing, and choreography were first created in a 3D environment on the computer, and cut into an animatic. These moves were then transferred digitally over to the motion control camera on the stage.This alowed us the freedom to plan and experiment with the sequence before any film was shot.The resulting plates were in perfect registration with the camera moves developed in the computer.The oversize set (three times life size) permitted us to get dramatic moves and angles that would have been impossible trying to cram a normal camera into the bric-a-brac on the actual set. We wanted Flubber to look as real as possible, and to integrate well into the real life environments in terms of lighting, shading, and texture.

It was decided that by using a raytracer we could best represent Flubber's solid, glossy surface finish, show his hundreds of internal bubbles, and accurately reflect and refract his environment, his own appendages and other Flubbers. In addition, it would allow us to see Flubber reflected in the elements of the set.This was the first show at ILM to use a raytracer for the main character, and the first to use one so extensively, since it was involved in every shot in which Flubber appeared. We developed surface and volume shaders for the Flubber raytracer, and also a technique to create "caustics"from light passing through the Flubber and illuminating the surface on which he was resting. In addition, it was necessary to find innovative ways to break down the scenes in the dance which contained over a hundred Flubbers so they would be more manageable, both from an animation and rendering point of view. Not only were the Flubbers, their shadows, and their refractions split into separate passes, but each of these subdivisions had to be broken down into still smaller pieces, due to the sheer weight of information these shots contained.