Original subtitles

You know, after Jurassic Park,

that decade really changed what filmmakers and producers thought,

"Okay, now this is possible, this is possible."

And those were the exciting days.

Those were the days where people would come to ILM

and ask for things that had never been done before.

We didn't know what the next thing was.

We had to rack our brains and look around for ideas anywhere.

I think a lot of people pulled scripts out of their drawers

that had stuff in them that couldn't previously be done.

But now we're saying, "Okay, let's check with ILM whether it can be done."

This is so huge. How are we going to do this?

How do you make water look like water?

How are we going to simulate that?

How can we make this real enough so that it can actually work?

How do we not, you know, freak out about this?

And how do you move ahead and keep it fresh and new?

And that's hard.

I was asked by George to come to New York for the press screening...

The first press screening of The Phantom Menace.

And then there was all the interviews that happened after those.

Hi, I'm Doug Kriegel

- from KNBC in Los Angeles. - Nice to meet you.

- I'm Kirsty with The Movie Show. - Oh, great.

What's the hardest part of bringing something like this to the screen?

When you get the script and you read it and there's an innocent line like,

"7,000 Gungans march out into the ground battle."

And though, there I was, incredibly proud of the collective work that ILM had done.

And as the line of questioning continued through that afternoon,

my heart started to sink, because I was picking up on a theme,

which was these reviewers weren't necessarily enormous fans of Jar Jar.

Thank you, everyone.

George invited me to fly back with him on his private jet,

and Lynne Hale printed out all of these reviews,

gave him a stack of print.

Over the hours, he just worked his way through the pile.

He looked up at one moment and he just caught my eye,

and he just waved me down.

He said, "You don't look very happy. What's up?"

I said, "Well..." I pointed at the pages.

"They don't like Jar Jar."

And he said, "I've been through this before.

"I didn't make the movie for them."

Yeah. No, I think they couldn't imagine a goofy character like that.

Of course, you've got to remember,

in the original Star Wars, everybody hated 3PO.

- Sir, might I... - Shut him up or shut him down.

They thought he was annoying and stupid,

and it was a terrible character.

I don't remember people disliking 3PO.

Oh, well, how about this one?

You came to me and you gave me your design for the Ewok.

And I said, "No, no, no, no. Dare to be cute."

Cut it out.

"Make them cuter. Make them little teddy bears."

And you went, "Uh..."

You rolled your eyes and you sort of slumped out of the office.

You know, I'm trying to appeal to a very large group,

and the group really consists primarily of 12-year-olds.

- What's your favorite character? - Jar Jar Binks.

I liked Jar Jar Binks because he was funny.

He goes, "Jar Jar is amazing."

I said, "Yeah, but we did all this... We tried so hard."

And he went, "Hey, hey, hey, hey.

"Did any one of these articles say he didn't look real...

"that Jar Jar wasn't believable?"

I said, "Well, no."

He said, "Well, then you did your job, didn't you?

"You and the team made this character alive.

"They just don't like him."

One of the stars is a pure animated creature

- named Jar Jar, is that right? - Right.

I had a hard time understanding him, by the way.

Meesa Jar Jar Binks.

I will never let Jar Jar live on this stage.

The ease of web page creation

has led to a number of sites dedicated to bashing

the childlike bipedal frog from The Phantom Menace.

With all the websites that popped up,

it kind of drove the narrative to traditional media.

If you made a website back in those days,

you were considered some sort of computer genius.

One website is even calling for George Lucas to recut the film,

citing the ease he should have at deleting a digital character.

Was that a mixed review? Fantastic.

You know, I went to the premiere and it was weird.

There was this weird kind of thought of it's just going to be Jar Jar

and I'm not going to be there.

But in the film, it was very obviously me.

Then, boom.

Getting very scared and grabbing that Jedi, and, pow...

And then, when I saw my name in the credits,

I was like, "Oh, okay. I'm there, I'm in it. I did it."

Can you talk a little bit about Jar Jar's backstory?

I know he explains a bit in the movie, but I couldn't understand him.

At a press junket,

I was asked this very ridiculously obscure question about Jar Jar's sexuality.

I was taken aback because Jar Jar's a seven-foot amphibian.

So, um, I didn't quite know how to answer that question.

Um, but that's when I kind of realized that

people were seeing something that we weren't prepared for.

After that, it was just like this flood of backlash.

What is that accent based on? I mean, it sounds vaguely French.

No accent. No Jamaican.

No Patois. No Creole. No French.

No German. No nothing.

So Rob Coleman and Ahmed Best

were pretty much devastated by the response.

What did you tell them?

I told them "You're in the movie business.

"80% of the people in the movie business get trashed.

"Personally.

"In very, very destructive ways."

That's when I heard that we were trying to exploit

this poor amphibian creature with Rastafarian hair.

We were racist.

Jar Jar's a racist character.

He has a stereotypical Black walk.

He has a pep role.

I'm not suggesting that George Lucas is a racist.

What I am suggesting

is that George Lucas has tapped into unconsciously

some racist and stereotypical conceptions of Blackness.

It really was just draining,

you know, to constantly have to defend the work.

Because that point cloud is so representative of my performance

and it almost is a physical signature,

even if you talk about the character, you're talking about me.

But it wasn't just me as Jar Jar.

We were Jar Jar.

ILM was Jar Jar. George was Jar Jar.

I'm the face of it, but it was all of us.

We all hurt because of it.

And I felt as if I let everybody down.

I felt it was my fault.

I was 26.

What should have felt like the beginning of something quite wonderful

felt like the end.

I remember it was really, really early in the morning,

and it was one of those nights when New York City was asleep, you know?

And if you're from New York, you know New York never sleeps, right?

But there was no one on the Brooklyn Bridge.

No one. It was just me.

I don't even remember walking across it.

I just remember myself on the outside of the bridge

kind of leaning up against one of the big pillars,

and I see the Statue of Liberty.

And, um, what I think to myself is...

"I'll show every single one of them what y'all did to me.

"I'm going to make every one of you feel what you did to me."

So I'm leaning on the bridge and I'm getting closer and closer to...

Just going, you know.

Just being free of all the talking and people and the...

And then this really...

unexpected, out-of-nowhere...

whoosh, gust of wind blows just at me.

You know, out of nowhere, and I...

I lose my balance

and I just grab on to the side of the bridge.

And then I laughed to myself.

I'm like, "What are you doing?"

You know?

"What are you doing?"

And then, reality.

It was like New York just popped back up. Right?

I saw everything. I saw the lights, I saw the Towers.

Everything just came back to life.

And I was like, "Holy shit."

I'm...

You know what I'm saying? What am I doing out here?

And then, um, I got scared.

I got really, really scared.

And I was very happy that I was afraid, you know?

Because that meant I wanted to live.

I think the lesson that was learned from everyone who does CGI characters now

is to talk about the actor...

and not just the character as if the actors don't exist.

The hardest part about it is, I was the first person to do this,

and I was the first Black man to do this.

The erasure of artists,

especially African-American artists...

as pioneers in the industry is something that has been pervasive

since the industry's inception.

And it's something that needs to be talked about,

and it's something that needs to be rectified.

There were a lot of things that critics poked at with Episode I.

Choices George made or didn't make.

And certainly, Jar Jar was on that list.

Because Star Wars isn't just a movie.

It taps into the collective zeitgeist of just millions and millions of people

who found it to be the greatest cinematic experience

they'd ever had as they were growing up.

I understand the dislike from older fans.

The people that were fans of the originals

forget that they were kids when they saw them,

are kind of evaluating them with adult sensibilities

and not really understanding what the intent was.

You love what you grew up with.

And George had said, "I guarantee that later in life...

"10, 20 years down the road...

"kids who are 10 now are going to come up to you

"and tell you that Jar Jar is their favorite character."

It's just great to be in this room.

The energy is palpable and exciting and so very positive, you know?

Love it. Love it.

He would say things like,

"Twenty years from now, it's going to be completely different."

And he's right. It's happened.

I think everybody here, you know, was proud that they pulled it off.

The scope of the effects,

that level had never really been done before.

Also, there was so much work to be done,

that it was just a lot of good work for people to sink their teeth into it.

In the beginning of ILM, when we first moved into Kerner,

we had about a third of the main building.

Tiny, little thing.

Compare that today

where it's six blocks long and three blocks wide.

It's like a studio now.

ILM was scaling at the same time

as filmmakers were getting more comfortable using visual effects

and pushing the envelope

and resurrecting ideas that now seemed within their reach.

These heavy effects-driven projects can be really challenging.

A number of them were real nailbiters.

I am constantly in awe of how a crew of people at ILM

can solve pretty much any problem,

any filmmaking problem that's presented to them.

Back in those days,

when you were meant to do something that hadn't been done before,

the studio or the producer or the director was always saying,

"Well, let's do a test and see if you guys can actually pull it off."

There was a project came through

that Spielberg wanted to do involving a tornado.

He said, "Can you do a test shot for Twister?"

And this was a chance to do particle systems,

which really had not been done before.

There's no way to have done it with any technology that we know of.

It could be really horrific. But let's do it as a shot.

It was the digital version of gum and bailing wire.

You couldn't just go to your software store

and buy a tornado off the shelf.

Compute power was also still limited at that time,

so we had to be very efficient with creating these particle systems.

It was Habib Zargarpour who developed these particle systems.

All right.

They said, "You're the particle guy.

"You have eight weeks. Go."

Habib was the perfect person to come in

and make the software system

that you could animate like you could a character.

But you can move it in any shape, do it any way,

have speed controls, thickness controls, wind controls, all sorts of things.

I knew I wanted to be a designer since I was 13.

I grew up internationally...

in Iran, then Belgium for a couple of years,

south of France in high school.

The original Blade Runner was one of my favorite films of all time.

Still is. Through that film, I found out about Syd Mead.

Ridley Scott, the director of Blade Runner,

asked me to design the vehicle ideas for the film.

Then I found out that Syd Mead

went to Pasadena ArtCenter College of Design.

And I was like, "I have to go here."

I thought, you know, I could be an industrial designer, but for movies,

because then I don't risk frying someone with my toaster.

Like, it doesn't have to function.

It has to look good, you know?

When I saw Jurassic Park,

I got tears from emotion from seeing those visual effects, you know,

and wanting to have been part of it.

I didn't know about ILM until I was at ArtCenter

and my computer graphic instructor said,

"You know, ILM's coming to see if people can intern there."

So then they made the job offer.

When I started, I ended up on The Mask.

They said, you know, "When the mask comes off Jim Carrey,

"we want to make this green gas."

And I said, "Well, I can use my particle knowledge and create this green gas."

Particles have a mind of their own.

When you simulate them, you have millions of them,

and you have to just give them general guidelines.

You can have forces of attraction, forces that repel,

they can collide with things,

but you can't say this particle's going to do this thing.

Because there's too many of them.

And I got to use the particles on Jumanji...

to get the kid and all the animals to suck them into the board.

After that, the challenge came from Spielberg.

"Can you make digital tornadoes?

"If so, we'll make the movie.

"If not, we're not going to make the movie.

"No pressure."

Habib did all the really groundbreaking stuff on this

to be able to control the velocities,

and the currents and the density and everything of the tornadoes,

and making all out of CG little particles,

little points that you could, like, swirl, have swirl,

they could get hit by a current,

they could go up like this, they could move across the ground.

Habib was sort of a mad scientist.

It does really...

fun working with him as well,

because you could tell he would get so excited.

And I found this really infectious because, you know, he'd just go like,

"Come over to my desk... Let me show you something."

And then he'd basically pull up some physics setup

that he'd figured out how to simulate.

The concept we came up with is...

it's an F5 tornado, it's the biggest one.

We have to prove we can do it.

And it's surrounded by tons of debris.

And this is based on footage we saw.

It's so enormous,

that what looks like a speck is actually a car, or a truck, or a bus.

We filmed this plate from inside a car.

When you're driving along and you make a turn like this

and then, boom, you see this building

and there's the tornado right behind it and it's huge.

Rips the roof off, tears pieces up, they go flying all over the place.

The idea was one of the debris pieces comes towards you

and gets bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger... becomes a tractor.

This tractor crashes into the ground and the tire goes into the window.

We sent the shot to Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy.

Dennis was on the phone with them

while they're going to watch it for the first time.

I was under double pressure, because my daughter was due the same day.

I was on time. She was late.

They said, "Okay, we're gonna roll the film."

And just silence.

And, you know, they're watching it.

And then we hear, like, loud screams

and all these sounds, like, "Oh, my God..."

That was like, "Okay, yes, they like it."

And apparently, they didn't even have a script yet.

But they knew that they could make it.

If they could do a tornado, they could get a good script.

And so this particle rendering unlocked several things,

including water for Perfect Storm.

Water was something that was, like, "How are we going to...

"How are we going to do it?"

That was one of the things that had never been done successfully.

Well, if they can do tornadoes, maybe they can do massive storms at seas.

I was actually working at that time on Galaxy Quest,

but I'd heard that Wolfgang Petersen was coming up to ILM.

And being a huge fan of Das Boot, of course,

and him being a fellow German, I thought, "Oh, God, I want to meet him."

So I showed up in that meeting, and I said a few things.

And I still remember very vividly walking out of that room and saying,

"Oh, my God, I'm so glad I'm on a project, because this is going to be really hard."

I really enjoyed working on Galaxy Quest because it was just such a good script,

and the comedy was great.

That was a hell of a thing.

Then Wolfgang called up to ILM a couple of weeks later

and said, you know, "I want Stefen."

I think people were probably still at that point

talking about miniatures and water tanks and this and that.

It was just, like, mind-boggling.

How the heck are we going to be able

to make an ocean be directable by the director?

He wants to come in and say, "I want this wave to come in.

"I want it bigger. I want it to hold there for a moment."

How do you do that?

It had to be CG.

They say water and human skin is the hardest thing to do in CG.

How do you model water,

something that's constantly viscous, it's changing?

You know, everything's so natural.

You have the air and resistance.

You have temperature.

Everything affects water.

So we have to kind of find a way to translate that in a digital world.

This was my first big job.

They said, "You know, there's a smart guy that wants to work on the show,

"a new person in render support.

"His name is Masi Oka."

Hello, Mr. Lee. Nice to meet you.

- Is that Chinese? - And you?

- My name is Masi. Masi Oka. - Oh, Masi, yeah.

And he went on to become an actor on Heroes.

He says, "I'd like to look at the ocean simulation code."

And I'm thinking, like, he's not going to really understand it,

so, sure, go ahead.

And he came back the next day with a printout this thick,

and he goes, "I think we can make the Fourier transforms

"ten times faster."

We were creating revolutionary new technology,

just so we could digitally drown George Clooney.

And action!

The really tough thing with water is that

the droplets stick together and they affect each other.

When you're doing a tornado, the dust is mostly just this turbulence,

and they could just follow the turbulence.

But now water, especially up close,

you have these foamy pieces of water

that they stretch and they stick and they... It's like glue.

So we had these things, we called them blobbies.

And we rendered out hundreds of these blobby animations

of these pieces of really tiny pieces of water coming apart.

And then, when we're rendering a water splash,

we'd actually put these tiny movies of these blobbies.

So on a big scale when you watch the whole splash,

you have this sensation of this sticky water inside it.

The project in general was a very tough one.

I think the giant waves were definitely the hardest.

If it's small, you can kind of, like, simulate a million particles.

When you have this, you're talking about trillions of gazillions of particles

have to, you know, simulate.

We were under a crazy time crunch

because the level of complexity of that show

was unlike anything ILM had ever undertaken.

We needed to hit the deadline.

And we're dealing with not just one simulation.

They would have different elements, different kinds of mists and foams

that you would actually additionally have to simulate

and then render to composite together.

We had the wave simulations. Then we had the ship simulations.

Then the splashes. Then the foam.

Everything depended on everything else.

Sometimes it takes three days to render one frame.

So we would need 90 days to do one second of waves.

And you can't get it wrong.

If Wolfgang would say, "Can you make that wave go back a bit?"

That was not a simple thing.

And so the level of complexity of getting the look of stuff right

as well as the computation time

just necessary to render all of the shots

made it so that

we were really in danger of, for the first time, not delivering.

And that was just something that's a no-no.

ILM always delivers on time and on budget.

And so, it was all hands on deck.

And even though I wasn't an effects TD,

they said, "We're bringing you on. You're going to do effects."

I grew up in upstate New York when Home Box Office came into being

and you could start seeing things over and over.

Indiana Jones landed on HBO.

I would watch it over and over and over again.

I wound up majoring in cognitive science,

a cross-disciplinary study of linguistics,

philosophy, psychology, and computer science.

I knew I just wanted to get a foot in the door

at Industrial Light & Magic.

And so, right after I graduated, I headed out west.

And I got an interview at ILM.

They said, "Well, you're overqualified for this production assistant job we have,

"so we're going to make you

"a resource assistant in computer graphics for Jumanji."

And I was amazed. I landed in the right place.

The computer graphics department. This is what I want to do.

There were only probably about 300 or so people at ILM at that time.

And everyone just really worked together really well,

especially all the TAs.

We were all coming up together.

We were all in our 20s.

And so, we worked really hard,

but we also all played together really hard.

Perfect Storm was a really interesting adventure for me.

I jumped in and started learning how to run particle simulations

and render and light particle sims.

Up till then, I had never done any kind of effects work.

I really got so stressed out.

But it was also, you know, very exciting

when you're doing something that is so pioneering.

Can we do it? Should we do it?

In the end, it...

I don't know how.

I guess that's part of the magic.

Somehow, the team always pulls through and we all come together.

And even if it takes working seven days a week, um...

we deliver that thing.

I enjoyed going to the premiere

and just looking at the other people watching it.

You know, I didn't really watch the film that much.

I just watched the reaction of everybody around it at certain moments,

because that's the most satisfying thing.

The other thing that you notice, these shots go by...

Three, four-second, five-second shots.

And just thinking, "God, we worked on that for three and a half months,

"that one shot, and now it just goes by."

And that's the most important thing as well,

that nothing pops out as being odd.

So there is not a moment where you're breaking the illusion.

Come on!

It was really effects in service

of telling the story of these main characters.

And it was natural phenomenon as opposed to, you know, Galaxy Quest,

crazy critters, and ridiculous fantastical stuff.

I think it really opened the door to people realizing that

with enough brainpower,

we would eventually be able to recreate

anything you can see in the world.

I'm sticking air in your mouth.

Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you so much.

At the end of Episode I, I had no idea

whether George is happy, unhappy, dissatisfied, okay.

But then I got a call asking about my schedule

and when I would want to come over to Australia for pre-production.

"Oh, okay, well then, I guess they do want me on Episode II."

George often likes to look at some established production methodology

and ask why, and is there a better way,

some new way of working that nobody else really wanted to try?

Pretty much right at the beginning, it was,

"One day I'm hoping that we'll be able to shoot a film digitally.

"One day, we'll be able to do

"nothing but computer graphics and effects shots."

One of the big adjustments on Episode II

was switching to digital cameras.

That George was looking at

so much of the image pipeline being digital now,

that even if we shot something on film, we'd scan it into the computer.

It's a digital image now.

We were doing digital compositing on it.

We were adding digital characters to it.

Why do we need to have film at all?

Could we not capture the imagery digitally?

Because then it's going to be in the computer more quickly.

Skip that stage of going onto film.

And then skip the stage of going back out onto film.

Let's exhibit this digitally, let's project it digitally.

Let it be digital imagery all the way, start to finish.

George, would you like these lower?

I think the high wide is better.

We were working under the deadline

of trying to get all the digital equipment done for Phantom Menace.

Yep, that's good.

We didn't make it.

It took us about six years altogether to get the digital camera.

There weren't any. They didn't exist.

Okay...

what I got to do is get a camera company to build a 24-frame high-def camera.

We had a meeting with Sony

about what did we need in a digital camera

that we could use to shoot a motion picture with,

using the same equipment that was used to record HD TV at 30 frames a second.

Films are shot at 24 frames a second,

because that was the speed they found out that when you project it...

24 pictures a second... you don't see much of a flicker.

You know, it sort of is smooth action.

And I said, "Look, we really want to shoot digitally...

"but we need to make some changes.

"We don't want to change the internal dynamics of the camera,

"but it has to be shot at 24 frames."

You know, the film industry is a 24-frame format.

They couldn't understand how one of the most successful franchises

would use a TV broadcast camera to shoot a film.

It was just unthinkable to them.

But getting the cameras done...

getting a lens manufacturer to build them...

Wow! That just was years and years and years.

You saw more detail in the imagery that you were getting

from the digital camera than we were seeing on film.

There were all kinds of disciplines that needed to be...

And is that the program?

...retooled a bit to work for the kind of scrutiny

that we were now seeing.

I remember the first day of shooting with a digital camera.

We had to bring the makeup department over to look at the monitor

and show them that doing makeup for a shot like that,

on a digital camera,

was more like you were doing a shot like that.

All right, this is a color study for the grand staircase outside...

Similarly, the art department went through a learning curve.

Even though the overall feeling was, yes, everything's going to be CG,

yes, there were almost 600 CG people...

but the model shop still had 80, 100 people in it.

We were still working away.

We're going to go ahead and grab as many parts as we can

and assemble as much as we have together.

The first miniature that was going to be shot digitally,

was Padmé's apartment, and I was the lead on that model.

We were really bracing ourselves for the fact that you might see things

that would normally be hidden by film grain.

There was a lot of tension in the model shop

before we took that first model out.

Very, very stressed about it.

This goes down here.

Doing a big film is like going into battle.

You have your sword in your hand and you're rushing to the forefront.

But if you fall to one knee,

Fon Davis will come along and lift you up on the other arm,

and you're back on the battlefield.

But if you fall to both knees and drop your sword,

Fon Davis is going to run by,

pick up the sword, and rush to the forefront.

Grab all these interiors.

My dad was Air Force during the Vietnam War.

He met my mom in Saigon.

And I was born... ...in 1970.

And then in 1975,

we moved to the United States at the end of the Vietnam War.

It was a mixed bag.

We weren't accepted in the United States being Vietnamese,

which is a different type of Asian than anyone had ever seen before.

And so it was always a little rough.

I was really into making models

and fabricating things and building things,

and that was where I could thrive and where I felt comfortable.

I thought Star Wars was neat,

so I went and looked up Star Wars books in the library.

Ha-ha!

This page here changed my entire path of my whole future.

This is the first time I had ever seen professional model makers.

And this is, like, Steve Gawley and Paul Huston

and Lorne Peterson, all those guys.

And I thought, "Wow, that's a job?

"I want to do that for a job."

Started checking out books and magazines with behind-the-scenes at ILM.

I used to see Larry Tan, Ease Owyeung, and Greg Jein in these magazines.

And I thought, "Oh, they let us do that."

Meaning, they let Asians do this job.

That made it somehow more viable as a career path for me.

This will actually break into several sections so cameras can get in.

This has to match the actual set that they shot in Australia.

This is our palette, the colors we got from the set.

There's a lot of metallics.

All these rooms are going to be lit.

You're going to be able to see the interiors inside,

and of course, all the exteriors.

Um...

Perfect.

When we took Padmé's apartment out to the stage

and we started shooting it...

the weirdest thing happened.

The miniature looked better in camera than it did in person again.

And we had no idea why this was the case.

We talked to the guys from Sony that were there to help with the cameras,

and they were talking about the CCD and how it collects light

and how it collects imagery.

Anything between two pixels, it's going to approximate what that is

and shove it over to one of the other pixels.

So what you see is not what you get.

It's going to look really sharp

because everything is being pixelated

in a way that is very sharp and defined and clear,

but you're still going to lose information in between each of the pixels.

It was an amazing thing.

Now we had these really, really beautiful, crisp, sharp-looking miniatures.

But that's not what they looked like in person.

It was a huge relief.

There's all those great shots following the ship

as you fly over the terrain and clone warriors are going by.

I wanted to see what the whole scope of the work was before we commence.

It's either we're going to do this all as a giant CD podrace terrain approach

or it makes sense to build a 20-foot spire

and a section of that landscape around it and do it as a model shoot.

I was really happy with the miniature work that we did.

It was probably my comfort zone.

I was a model maker when I first started.

And I was a camera operator shooting miniatures.

So this was something I have a great passion for.

It was a tool that I felt like I knew how to wield well

and get good results.

And as we got into Episode II and III,

I got told pretty directly...

"You need to get better at doing computer graphics,

"because computer graphics is the future.

"Right now, you are leaning on these older techniques.

"It's a crutch."

Yeah, we do need a new background.

"And I'm kicking this crutch out from under you for your own good,

"because it's going to make you better at what the future is going to be."

The good thing about the clone battle is it's only about 90 shots.

I mean, it could have been much worse.

90 shots, but 7,000 characters per shot.

I remember all of us... ...pretty much except for George Lucas

thought that we should do the clone troopers as actors in costumes.

Because we knew it would look good and be fairly inexpensive, actually,

because we would just crank them out.

Everyone fought for it,

and George was very dead set on doing that with performance capture.

And it was really funny

because John Knoll was one of the few people

who could have George Lucas' ear,

and actually pushed him so hard to do the clone troopers in practical

that one day George just stopped and he looked at him and he said,

"We're going to do the clones with mocap, and that's the end of it.

"I don't want to hear another word." And that was the end of it.

- I'm with you there. - Okay. All right.

His goal was really always to push the technology

to inform his storytelling.

No one has ever done this.

Let's try it. Let's see if we can make it work.

Now, I didn't know if we were getting too crowded here.

It's when he turns to the dark side, and we figured...

Yeah, well...

And the scope and spectacle, of course, always grew.

A lot of the charm in Star Wars for me is the visuals.

You know, creating that spectacle.

Very good.

Very good.

You're about to die.

Extreme terror. Droids everywhere.

You're going to go to depressed hopelessness.

To acceptance of death.

- To acceptance of death. - Yeah.

Oh, nice...

George was very interested in getting maximum production value

on the budget that he had available.

And that meant don't build a giant set if we're going to see it for five seconds.

Let's just build the part that we really need to build,

and you guys can just do the rest in post.

Don't worry.

It's being taken care of.

There's a lot of little set fragments and a lot of blue screen.

Certainly, my sympathies were to the actors.

That'll do nicely.

Agree with you, the council does.

Your apprentice, young Skywalker will be.

Humina-humina-humina.

Sorry.

When it came time between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones...

I set about creating a digital Yoda to present to George

that we should be given an opportunity to animate Yoda.

When we were in preproduction on Episode I,

George had said that he wanted to do Yoda on Episode I as a puppet.

My first thought was, "Great."

Frank Oz is going to come in and perform the puppet.

That's a no-brainer. Yes. Absolutely. We should do that.

The reality of that was, um, not as pleasing.

The sculpt did not have the same charm that the original did.

His whole jaw structure is very different.

Well, he looks flatter.

Like, squished.

He was sick during the shooting of this.

It didn't look like Yoda.

His eyes are seriously...

It was really, really bad.

And action.

Always two, there are.

No more. No less.

Which one was destroyed?

I have one more damn line, Chris.

Will you give me a break?

Frank was hilarious.

He liked to stay in character when we were shooting.

But no one could see him.

So the way he interacted with people on the set

was just to be the puppet and talk to them.

Okay, here we go.

And action.

Um... I forgot my line.

- Master. - Master.

- That's a good take. Can I cut, George? - Okay, cut.

Oh, my arm is hurting.

Instead of being foam rubber as it was on Empire and Jedi...

Hey, Maria? I'll take him now.

...the puppet was made out of this silicone, so it weighed a lot more.

- Ready. - Okay...

Imagine holding this heavy puppet up above your head

for two or three minutes...

Cameras call mark.

...setting up and shooting a take.

- George would say cut... - Cut.

Yoda just died. What happened?

Okay. Shooting there, please.

Your... I'm sorry, guys.

On Episode II, what Yoda needed to do

was really going to be challenging for a puppet.

You know, he needed to walk around in a lot of scenes.

And then he has this big fight scene at the end.

The plan, pre-production on Attack of the Clones,

was that all acting scenes were going to continue to be the puppet,

and only the action and the fight would be digital.

And I thought, "No, we've learned so much from Watto and Jar Jar,

"I think we can handle Yoda now."

We were talking about the eyelids.

I pulled some shots out of Empire and we studied those.

You must unlearn what you have learned.

Also, the way that the lips push together...

Together and in a little bit.

We copied that performance exactly.

Including things like, you know, the little bit of wobble in the ears.

Frank would hold the puppet,

but he's holding it for a long time, and his hand would start to shake.

The ears would start to wiggle on the ends.

Even between land.

He told me, "Now, don't put any wiggle in."

It had to have the wiggle, because that's where we're used to.

Rob has a test to show you.

We went up to Skywalker.

CG Yoda.

I was so nervous to show this stuff.

These are animated renders.

They don't have any of the texture or pulp,

but it shows some performance.

Its energy surrounds us...

binds us.

Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.

And well you should not.

For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.

- Fantastic. - Thank you.

And at that point, he made the call, no puppet in Attack of the Clones.

You study what Frank is doing inside that head,

you can almost feel the hand kind of moving like that.

But I didn't want to go down in history

as the guy who helped create Jar Jar and the guy who wrecked Yoda.

Junior animators are going to have a tendency...

Yoda was alive and this amazing Jedi Master

and had all kinds of subtlety in his performance.

And I was so inspired by what Frank did.

It was one of the reasons I ended up doing what I do.

But if you go back with an analytical animator mind

and you watch it frame by frame,

we as the audience had projected so much onto that character.

Its energy surrounds...

In Empire, his mouth is basically just opening and closing.

It's not forming any real phoneme shapes.

When we did that with the CG model,

it kind of looked like we weren't trying very hard.

What I wanted to do was animate what I remembered Yoda looking like,

not what he actually looked like.

Frank had cautioned me.

"Hey, Rob, you got too much potential here.

"You can put too much into the face."

And I went, "I know.

"My intention is to honor what you did with the puppet

"and just give it a little bit more in the eyes

"and a little bit in the mouth,

"just to give us a little bit more range of motion there

"so that we can get into his head."

...grave danger, you are.

We didn't do full-on mouth shapes,

but we did just enough to have him form some of the vowels.

Some of the actions that we're doing with the head

in terms of turning were a little too young.

And I would put a little bit of bobble in them.

We're watching our actions in the mirror,

and we're putting that in frame by frame.

Certain shots, and I can tell who's done which shots...

I can see the characteristics in there.

It's really subtle, the differences between what's overacted

and what's not enough to get the point across.

In grave danger, you are.

It got to a place where it felt like it lived in part of the puppet aesthetic

and part of the live-action aesthetic.

The shroud of the dark side has fallen.

Begun, this Clone Wars has.

- Look how sad... - Yeah. Poor little Yoda.

Oh, come on, guys.

- Now, that's pathetic. - I know.

I keep getting these notes saying, "Has to be a little sadder."

So I said, "Go sad. Really make..."

All right, sad is not the right word.

All right, so I got the right reaction.

- He's reflective, he's concerned. - Right.

- He's upset. - Okay.

On a shot like this, they're probably going through 27, 28 takes

trying to get a certain moment just right.

I just wonder about his ears.

The droop at the end?

Maybe let them stay up a little bit more.

- Keep them up? - This Clone War has...

- It's nerve-wracking. - Yeah.

- No, I think it'll work. - Okay.

Kind of like you're getting taken to the principal.

Delete a couple keys.

Hopefully he likes it.

In the early days of computer animation,

if we had the crutch of talking,

we could keep the characters "animated" alive.

Their aliveness would fall off many times when they stopped talking.

We weren't thinking about the internal voice.

I understand.

Directors and editors cut to reactions all the time

so that audience members can read the scene

from another character's perspective.

Someone's listening to someone.

Do they trust them? Do they not trust them?

So for me, the high bar was to earn a nonverbal reaction shot.

I wanted to earn that from George.

That nonverbal close-up didn't come until later.

It's Yoda turning back to look at Palpatine.

And we see in his face that he doesn't trust Palpatine.

And the audience gets to see that through Yoda's facial performance.

And that was...

We made it over the high bar.

And in fact, a frame of that ended up on the poster.

Hello, Frank.

There's Rob. Do you see him?

- Hi, Rob. How are you doing? - Yeah.

- How is the animation going, guys? - I think it's going well.

I must say, these guys have done a great job.

- I think you'll be proud. - Yeah, they don't whine like I do.

They do. They follow your every footstep.

Frank wrote me a letter at the end of the production

and he was incredibly kind.

Exceptional skills, he has.

He said, "You found the sweet spot."

"Now I don't have to be underneath the stage perspiring for hours."

"All I have to do is the voice, and you guys do all the work.

"I like this.

"Congratulations, and thanks for staying true to Yoda's character."

I'm surprised. Didn't think he'd like it.

So everybody saw the letter

that Frank Oz sent myself and all of you this week?

Yes.

It's a triumph on our behalf.

So hopefully the fans will like him as much as Frank and George do.

Hats off to you guys.

I'm very proud of what the team was able to do there.

Thanks.

I think it's going to be more like...

- More like that height. - Okay.

Is he going to turn around and get off, or hop off?

How does Yoda get in and out of a chair that's too tall for him?

Levitate.

Here's this two-foot tall Jedi Master

- who sort of hobbles along with a stick. - Yeah.

Then he's fighting Count Dooku with a laser sword.

That's a huge jump.

Enormous. Enormous.

The sentence that stopped

most of our hearts at ILM in the script was,

"In a fight that defies description, Yoda and Count Dooku battle."

That was it.

So I'm immediately over there to talk to George.

I said, "So, George, there's this sentence."

And he just starts chuckling.

He goes, "Yeah. You've got to figure that out."

I'm like, "Excuse me?" "Yeah, yeah. Off you go."

So I said, "Well, what's the style of fighting?"

And he said, "Think of him as the Tasmanian Devil."

And I thought of spinning.

I'm like, "No, don't tell me that. I don't want that image in my head."

We started to work on Yoda fighting.

Look at this. You get this?

I would think of him more like a frog. He would spring around.

- He has big thighs. - I see.

Illegitimate child of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.

Oh, man. Very disturbed picture in my head right now.

Rob has this look when he's worried about things.

I saw Rob walking across the set,

and I was like, "Hey, man, what are you going to do for this Yoda fight?"

And he goes, "I have no idea."

"No one has ever seen Yoda move.

"This will be the biggest moment of Attack of the Clones.

"Let me just help you craft this fight."

Ahmed had studied martial arts.

He's also a huge anime fan.

So I said, "Come to the crib. We'll watch some videos."

He was showing me some samurai animes,

and we were talking about different fighting styles.

Like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and stuff.

It's just all starting to go into the head.

Then I saw Swordsman II, the Jet Li film...

and these ninjas, and they start flying.

The panic just went... boop.

Now I could see Yoda.

Okay, do a lens change on the Technocrane.

- Now you're up against it. - A vampire.

I didn't think you'd do that to me, George.

'Cause he's so small and Dooku's so tall, I had to get them moving around.

When would Yoda be on the ground?

When would he go up onto Dooku's ship? When would he flip over here?

Should he be using two hands here?

His arms are so small.

We could cheat it and still get it with one hand,

lift it up, and have the other hand...

But, yeah, it would be in a more samurai-ish pose.

That process was six months.

Yoda pushes it away low and then jumps.

Once those pieces came together,

we animated that fight in about three weeks.

This is your first time actually seeing that.

Yeah. That looks good.

- Looks great. - Okay.

There was one missing part.

The entrance.

So originally, as scripted and the way they shot it,

the audience see the 800, 900-year-old Yoda come in that we knew,

and they immediately went into the fight.

It's just too much of a jump for the audience.

Here it looks like the whole thing is being held...

- Yeah. - It should look like it drops,

and then it sort of propels it in a direction.

- Then it's gravity that's taking it down. - Okay.

They then came up with a series of events that happen.

So Dooku is throwing debris at Yoda

and he's pulling the roof down on him,

and at each time, Yoda is able to just deal with it.

- I would suspend this moment. - Okay.

So that you have a chance to do something

- a bit more... Yeah. - Something extra with his hand.

And he can sort of do a little crinkle on his eyes.

- Okay. - And then he can open his eyes.

- Okay. - So maybe 12 frames or so.

Yep.

Then this next one is him pushing back the lightning.

We need to make it a little bit more deliberate than the videomatic

so that we can see the power of what's going on.

Slow the whole thing down maybe 20%.

And I loved that he added the lightning in,

because we had just seen Anakin get dispatched.

And here was Yoda taking the lightning and crushing it

and dealing with it immediately.

So it just told the audience that Yoda was at a whole other level

beyond where Anakin or Obi-Wan, who had been wiped out by Dooku.

Much to learn, you still have.

We've just gone a notch up here.

George said, "You know what we need?"

He can sort of pull it open.

Yeah, like Clint would do.

The cowboy pushing back his duster, revealing the lightsaber.

My biggest thing...

I was like, "Rob, if you don't put anything else,

"he has to hit a stance."

"Has to be like, boom... Like that Bruce Lee stance."

Tim Harrington came up with the idea,

and he uses the Force to pull the lightsaber into his hand...

and lights it up.

The second we saw that animated, everybody knew.

It was like, "This is something special."

Chewie! Chewie!

I saw it in San Francisco with a crowd on the first day.

They had no idea I was there.

I was terrified.

Very important moment.

I convinced myself we created something really great,

but in fact, it was going to be laughed at by the audience.

Enjoy the movie.

Whoo!

There was such concerns.

I remember that Rob was going to leave the theater or something

when the swordfight came up before they killed him.

Star Wars!

The scene's coming closer and closer,

and I'm, like, sliding down in my seat, because I'm waiting for the reaction.

When he pulled out his lightsaber, they went nuts.

You could barely hear anything,

because the audience was losing their minds.

It was fantastic.

That would be, like, the highlight of my life.

Fought well you have, my old Padawan.

But are you using the Force on the end there?

Yeah, with him? Are you making him flop around like a dead fish?

- No. - 'Cause I see you going like...

- No, no, no. - Action!

It's all magic.

I knew I could use those films

to make people believe that digital cinema works.

George, for want of a better term,

was becoming the poster boy of digital cinema

whereas many other, you know, directors were still skeptical,

not wanting to leave the comforts and the wonderful nature of film.

I was obsessed.

I said, "That's what I'm going to do."

Who cares about eye lines?

I'm going to turn the film industry into a digital industry.

After the release of Episode II,

I got asked to participate in this digital summit

that George held out at the Ranch.

There were some big names there.

I think Robert Rodriguez was there, Oliver Stone, Michael Mann.

There were a whole bunch of people there.

They were the people who stood up and said,

"Okay, this is interesting, I'll do this.

"If you build the cameras and you build the stuff, we'll use it."

But out of, what, 20,000 people,

there was a couple of hundred that said we'll do it.

This is like the gathering of the first group of people

that actually as directors use the medium.

I think what George was trying to accomplish was

spreading the word that the tools are viable

to let you shoot a film digitally and exhibit it digitally.

That this is nothing to be afraid of.

The tools are perfectly approachable.

And you can do a big movie this way.

Twenty years and tens of millions of dollars...

went into building digital technology.

I don't think anybody realized how much work went into that idea...

- Cut. - That was beautiful.

- ...of converting the industry over. - That was magnificent.

We're all individual artists. We all work completely differently.

We all see things differently, which is what makes it all interesting.

But this is cinema.

It has really to do with the eye of the artist,

what technology we use.

And it's like asking what brush you use when you're doing a painting.

Everybody else was just very down on it.

Because it changed everything.

It means you had to relearn what you had learned.

But I kept saying, you know, it's so much easier.

You can do anything.

If it's quicker and faster and better and it's more malleable

and you can do more stuff with it and it's cheaper, you know, why not?

'Cause we all are faced with this resource issue,

how much money they give us to make these things.

It's so much easier to do the things you want to do.

My entire tenure at the company

has been to follow on a lot of the things that I saw

that the original pioneers at ILM doing,

which was to gradually remove restrictions on how things were shot...

so that filmmakers can create visual effects

like it's any other part of filmmaking.

And a director can essentially ignore that something is going to be visual effects.

Don't treat it special.

It is like any other part of the movie,

and I'll handle any technical issues that pop up.

I want the filmmaker to just free the technical from their mind

and just think about story.