DISTINCTION
Men in Black
Rob Coleman, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM)
The animation crew around Rob Coleman faced many challenges when we began work on "Men in Black". Through computer animation we needed to bring a variety of alien creatures to life.
The animation crew faced many challenges when we began work on Men in Black. Through computer animation we needed to bring a variety of alien creatures to life. Most of the extraterrestrials were designed by Rick Baker and his crew, some of which existed as elaborate costumes or rod puppets. With the Mikey character, our animation team needed to exactly match those physical models and bring them into the computer realm. We were asked to make Mikey run, a pug dog talk, and have the pawnbroker Jeebs’ head grow back. But the most challenging creature we had to animate was the interstellar cockroach, Edgar Bug.
During the film, Vincent D’Onofrio’s Edgar character decomposes until the final standoff with the Men in Black when he sheds his human exterior and reveals himself to be Edgar Bug. The Bug, now free of its flesh cocoon, stretches to a height of nine feet; a combination of a cockroach, a scorpion and a praying mantis. The size and character of the beast, and the amount of physical interaction he had with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones made that animation especially difficult.
Based on an original design by Rick Baker, we created a completely computer-generated version of the Bug using Alias modeling software. The design was a complex mix of hard and soft tissue. Every shell piece and detail had to be modeled since the Bug had to hold up visually in several close-ups. The soft sections of the creature were animatable so that the belly could distend and the joints could flex. Particular attention was paid to the moving parts of the beast. Since the hard exoskeleton was so intricate, there was some concern about building the Bug so that it had as much freedom of movement as possible. The model, built with 827 pieces, was extremely complex. At the time, it was the most data intensive computer model we had ever built.
A much lower resolution Softimage version of the creature was used by the animation team to position and move the Bug. Each of the 120 moving parts of Edgar Bug needed to be posed and animated on a frame by frame basis to bring the creature to life.
We are all very familiar with insects and their movements and that’s the reference we started with when trying to design Edgar Bug’s locomotion and body actions. But this Bug was nine feet tall! Attention to gravity and weight became a concern right away - if the Bug moved too quickly or appeared to be too light we would lose the audience’s belief in this creature.
We wanted the movement of the Edgar Bug to echo the movement of Edgar the human so we turned to D’Onofrio’s human-with-a-bug-inside-him performance. Purposely, we added ticks and twitches to our animation to mimic D’Onofrio’s actions. However, unlike the human character, Edgar had six legs, no voice and a hard shell of a face which didn’t allow for any fine detail in facial expression. We had to convey Edgar Bug’s emotions through animated body movement only. The Bug had to act and interact with Will, really playing the straight man to Will’s comic performance. There were very precise timings we were working with; the Bug’s reactions and twitches were refined down to the frame. The final stand-off between Edgar Bug and the Men in Black called for several shots where there was direct contact between the actors and our computer creature. Combining an animated synthetic character with a human actor was very challenging.
Edgar Bug hits and kicks the actors and even eats Tommy Lee Jones, but the shot which called for the most demanding interaction between the synthetic creature and live actors was the shot where Will Smith jumps onto Edgar Bug’s tail. Like a wild bronco ride, Will must try and hold on while the Bug bucks him off.
The bronco ride shot was originally roughed in by the animator prior to shooting of any elements. The shot called for a tight relationship between Will, the Bug, and the camera move. The camera information, its pull back distance and speed, was worked out in Softimage using scale models of the creature and its surroundings. This information was passed onto our rigging crew who created a full scale blue-screen version of Edgar Bug’s tail, which Will Smith later used as a prop when "jumping" onto the Bug’s tail. After the blue-screen shoot, the footage of Will being bounced around on the tail was passed back to the animator who then, frame by frame, matched the action of the rigged tail piece with the computer-generated tail. That animation was very time consuming since Will’s path of action was so complex with all the bouncing and flopping going on. Special attention to contact shadows, rotoscoped edges and multiple matte passes ensured a good fit. Special shape animation on the computer model of the tail was necessary so that Will’s arms would appear to wrap around it.
In conjunction with the creature animation, very precise computer matching of the real camera was necessary in every animated scene so that we could guarantee that the Bug would appear to be shot from the same camera position and lens as the actor were. Much of the end sequence was shot hand held, so this camera match moving hat to be done frame by frame. Any discrepancies between the two cameras would show as the Bug slipping against the background.
The Tunnel Sequence, in which the Men in Black’s Ford LTD transforms into a rocket-powered supercar while being driven through Manhattan’s Midtown Tunnel, required a close working relationship between many diverse effects techniques. To create the sequence, Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith were filmed in a cockpit mockup on a bluescreen stage, with the camera moving to simulate car to car action photography. The precise camera motion from the bluescreen photography was tracked, frame by frame, and replicated by a CG model which moved precisely with the actors. Additionally, the same camera moves were translated to a motion control camera, which was used to photograph the tunnel backgrounds for each shot on a miniature tunnel.
The transforming 1987 Ford LTD, driven by the Men in Black, existed only as a synthetic, computer-generated model from the point where they enter into the tunnel until their exit out the other end past the toll booth. The CG model had to be built to initially match the Ford LTD that the Men in Black drive throughout the film. This CG model contained over 100 individual moving parts and was built to actually unfold into the rocket car shape from the original LTD shape on camera, without cheating the scale of objects or “morphing” the shape of the pieces. Over three months were spent sculpting the 2000 individual CG parts which made up the rocket car model. A unique hybrid of scan line rendering and ray tracing was devised to utilize a combination of dirt, specular, bump and reflection mapping while retaining the advantages of optically accurate, ray traced self reflections.
Technology:
Softimage, Eddie, Photoshop softwares
SGI Indigo Elan, Indigo2 Extreme, Abekas Diskus hardwares
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