Its also the very first movie to be fully animated, from start to finish, by ILM.
And here, hes been telling us what happened next…
[Laughs] Exactly!
I came into the process just before ILM went into asset development.
We had about two years to complete the film.
I was just coming off theHarry Pottermovies and was looking around and saw this.
I love classic movies, that sort of thing.
It seemed like a really cool fit to me.
They took a chance with me and they let me go for it.
What can you carry over fromHarry Potter?
Because, presumably, you had the choice between doing this and attacking Hogwarts?
[Laughs] Yeah!
The focus of our work really became about storytelling.
How do we express the point of this shot?
How do we get across this feeling?
It was a very different thought process for me.
To begin with, that was Gore.
His aesthetic for this film was that sort of stillness.
He wasnt making an animated feature, he was making a live-action movie.
He was constantly telling the animators to tone it down.
We need these subtle moments, these awkward weird moments.
He really wanted that in the film.
So, what was your hands-on role in the production?
I was the visual effects supervisor.
We used the standard visual effects term.
I was basically in charge of all other departments apart from animation.
Hal Hickel, he was the animation supervisor.
I oversaw all of the other departments.
So, there was layout, lighting, modelling- It was a big collaboration.
I dont want to make out I did everything.
John Knoll came back onto the show later in shot production.
It was a big group of people doing the work.
Ive been calling our look photographic, rather than realistic, because weve got these animals running around!
You cant see down there, because the film wouldnt be able to expose that.
It plays really well into what were good at, which is our live-action visual effects side of things.
Really, the whole process started out with modelling the characters.
Crash and Gore had these character designs that were really super-detailed.
Every character has their own little story to them.
Then we started building environments, which also got stepped up to be super detailed.
They had to match the characters.
We took the environments to a much higher level than we originally thought wed have to.
So, Gore would do that and walk around and frame up shots.
Hed say, This is a great angle.
Maybe we could use that.
Or he might say.
This set is too small.
And then would go off and animate.
At the same time, our modelling crew and everything would make the full hi-res environments.
But our creature department really stepped it up, and they wanted everything to look really detailed.
They did really good cloth set-ups that ran very well.
And then all of that gets packaged up and delivered to the back end of the pipeline.
Everything Ive talked about is front end.
And then it goes over the wall to the back end.
The lighters could light the shot, render it, and we could be done.
That is one of the differences.
The lighters can just do their job and be done.
Then we do lighting.
For every sequence we did lighting keys.
We picked a few shots out of the sequence that we felt were representative.
And hes amazing, a great guy.
Always willing to give us his opinion and tell us what theyd do on set to light things.
And thats a little bit different from most feature animations, too.
We didnt really have a colour art, or a look art.
We would get to each sequence and wed work through.
So, I knew again were not going to be doing that!
We figured each sequence and look as we went along.
When I first heard you were doingRango, it was clearly a departure.
This is a company used to producing a couple of hundred shots for a feature film and moving on.
Here, your responsibility is the opening frame through to the end frame.
How did that change the working methodology within ILM?
Did you follow the template from other studios, or just plough your own way?
Maybe the second part of the question is easier, which is that we ploughed our own way.
And we listened and we looked at it all.
And really, ultimately, we used the ILM pipeline.
We definitely made some changes to it, but the pipeline stayed intact and really pushed this film through.
Here, youve got to animate each of those guys.
So, we have to figure out how to get that done.
And these were characters without the edges knocked off in their design.
You had up to 200 in the film, I understand.
Can you tell us about some of the complexity of the work involved there?
Weve got hair, feathers, stammering, the eyeballs.
We did full-on corneas with refraction on the eyeballs, which is a no-no in a feature animated film.
We kind of ploughed everything we had in place into these characters, because their designs were so rich.
Gore wanted them to be as not-pristine as possible.
So, we were constantly adding dirt, and sweat, and grime.
It really pushed our hair and other technologies right along.
It goes right back to our live-action films.
We can now use all the hair development we did forRangoin our visual effects films.
There are a few examples.
One of thems not particularly exciting, but theres a campfire sequence, with the stick.
We didnt have anything in our toolbox for that.
We dont do a lot of effects sequences like that, typically, and we used Houdini for it.
The other thing we hadnt done extensively is large environments that had so much dressing.
There was something like over 800 props that were built that could get set dressed into these scenes.
We had a tool that wed developed called Metropolis for set dressing.
Its kind of like painting with set dressing.
you’re free to select rocks and spray them down onto the ground.
Or it’s possible for you to select cactus and pop them down wherever you want.
They became really huge and really expensive to render, but this was something we had to figure out.
We put in a lot of levels of detail and a lot of rendering efficiencies.
It took months and months to get the environments renderable.
ProbablyOnce Upon A Time In The West.
That was one of the prime examples that we kept going back to, over and over again.
Not only the look of the environments, because the Spaghetti Westerns are truly gritty.
We would use those films for reference for all sorts of things.
Dust: what does dust look like coming off the back of a horse?
We constantly went back to that film.
Lighting-wise,There Will Be Bloodwas one of our reference points.
Its a great film in terms of lighting.
It feels really natural.
One of my all time favourites, which isnt really a western, isLawrence Of Arabia.
Theres actually a couple of homages toLawrence Of Arabiain the film as well.
We took a lot of photography as well.
Those photographs are great, as they base you in reality.
If Im shooting down sun, the sky is a little bluer than if I was shooting up-sun.
Things like that, that we could get into our shot.
The saloon sequences are big lighting sequences.
Rango walks into this place, and hes supposed to say, Oh, shit.
Because these people are staring at him, the whole place goes silent.
There was definitely a build up to us lighting the saloon sequence.
We dove into it and we knew that Gore wanted it to be smoky.
And usually you dont have people smoking in an animated feature.
We really embraced it and went for it.
The smoke in the saloon added a ton of complexity.
The render times were enormous, because all the lights were volumetric.
Youve got the smoke running through that, the dust particles on top of the smoke thats drifting through.
Thats a good question!
A couple that I do know about.
Finally, ILM has lifted the standard here.
Obviously, theres a question now of where you go next.
Do you look at extendingRangos world, or something new?
From my standpoint, yes.
I want us to do more feature animated films.
Were in an interesting situation here, where were kind of a gun for hire.
I had such a great experience on the film.
I keep telling people itll be hard for me to go back to live-action now!
Tim Alexander, thank you very much!
And is out now.
