Truth and spectacle
VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie on the responsibilities and sensibilities required to lead a major project
“EVERYTHING WAS NEW AND EXCITING AND WE WERE FIGURING IT OUT ON THE GO”
It’s not many who have the opportunity, whilst still a teenager, to work on a Star
Wars movie. That was Kevin Baillie’s rather spectacular professional starting point in visual effects. “Always have a goal, right?” Baillie notes. “Always have a trajectory. I knew that I wanted to help tell stories using craft and technology.” Having become local young filmmaking stars in the Seattle area back in the late 1990s, Baillie and his high school pal Ryan Tudhope had been spotted by Lucasfilm and were soon after invited by producer Rick Mccallum to join the staff at ILM during their work for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
“For me, my experience working on Star Wars: Episode I was my first experience working in film,” Baillie recalls. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the best education I could possibly have asked for. I loved movies all my life.” Baillie goes on to describe the fateful moment when Lucasfilm came calling. “I get home one day and have a voice mail saying: ‘My name’s Rick Mccallum, I’m the producer on a little movie you may have heard of called Star
Wars, give me a call’. So, I call him back and he proceeds to invite Ryan and I down to Skywalker Ranch to see some of the work and meet George, and of course we said ‘Yes’ and had this amazing experience visiting Skywalker Ranch and ILM.”
Baillie continues: “We met some of our heroes, including Dennis Muren and Rob Coleman. They were our celebrities. We just bowed down to them and they were so encouraging. We also met Doug Chiang and his art department. At the time, it was like the most secretive project in the history of filmmaking and here we are, two 17-yearolds, just seeing all this stuff. Our minds are blown. We still had a year of high school left after that, so they didn’t offer us a job but said ‘Stay in touch’. So, we used our final year of high school to craft a visual effects project that was basically a no-brainer to say ‘Give us a job’.”
Once high school was done, Baillie and Tudhope went to work full time at ILM for the duration of production on The Phantom
Menace. “I had no idea if I was going to be getting coffee, making copies or working on the movie. I just knew that I was going to be part of the team that was helping in some way to make Star Wars a reality and, to further make things more hair raising, we knew 3D Studio and 3ds Max but we didn’t know the toolset they were going to be using down there, which was Electric Image for lighting and rendering, Formz for modelling and After Effects for
compositing. But, it really turned out that all of the concepts of learning 3ds Max, they all also applied in Electric Image. It’s just that the buttons were in different places. And the concepts of compositing just got easier when you learned After Effects, because it was really hard to comp in 3D in 3D Studio.”
The theme of collaboration and mutual support runs through Baillie’s reflections on the work of being a visual effects supervisor, and the Star Wars experience gave him an enduring insight into this. “So, we went through Star Wars: Episode I and that was an incredible experience. We worked directly with George Lucas. All throughout the film, Ryan and I each ended up doing about 800 shots of pre-viz for Episode I and probably 400 of which ended up in the film: a lot of it was space battles and ground battles and set extensions, the podrace. Less character-centric stuff. There are shots of the battle droids landing in their carriers that I designed as an 18-year-old. George would have his editors, Ben Burtt and Martin Smith, cut together ripomatics as a basis for the space battles, and it would then be up to us to work out how that transposed into Star Wars space battle language. Towards the end, once we finished the previz, ILM took our stuff and then made it look beautiful.
“George had liked the work that we had done as a previz team (only five or six people), and he said: ‘Well, if you guys want to do some final shots for the film, pick some stuff that you think you can do.’ And so, we got to do a bunch of lightsaber shots. I got to figure out how to make a lightsaber work in After Effects. How do you give it the right glow and the right vibration? There’s a shot where Watto rolls a dice and we needed a full CG dice when it landed, and I figured out how to do that in Electric Image. Everything was new and exciting and we were figuring it out on the go.
“Something that helped bring our confidence up was that we’d kind of seen the example that our teacher in high school, Rick Nordby, had set for us where he was patient, kind and generous with his time, and we quickly found a couple of people at Skywalker Ranch who had those same attributes: one of whom was Ben Burtt and he took us under his wing and invited us to his house for dinner. He really tried to help us feel comfortable and confident in the
environment so that when times got tough, we always knew he’d be there and have our back. And it was the same with the guy who ran the (previz) group, David Dozoretz, and with Rick Mccallum. We felt like even if things did fall apart for us they’d be there to help pick them up.”
After work on The Phantom Menace concluded, Baillie was more than ever convinced that working in visual effects was what he wanted to do. With that focus in mind, Baillie and Tudhope secured jobs at newly established studio The Orphanage. “Because they were a small, growing company there were a lot of opportunities for the people that joined early, and I got to visual effects supervise on my first project when I was 25 years old. It was one of the Harry Potter movies: Goblet Of Fire.
I wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity that early in life had I gone down a more traditional route.” After several years at The Orphanage, Baillie left and reconnected with familiar former ILM colleagues as new collaborations came into focus.
LIKE MINDS: COLLABORATING WITH ROBERT ZEMECKIS
Moving on from The Orphanage, Baillie reunited with his Star Wars prequel colleague, Doug Chiang, who was then part of establishing Imagemovers with director Robert Zemeckis. They were in the throes of work on A Christmas Carol (following their landmark mo-cap movies The Polar
Express and Beowulf). “When I went to Imagemovers Digital, I thought, this is a great chance to create a space for really great relationships to happen, because they were hiring some of the best people from all over the world. That was attractive to me: this big melting pot of making relationships.
“ZEMECKIS SAID TO ME, ‘I WON’T DO A MOVIE WITHOUT YOU ON IT.’ WHICH IS A HUGE COMPLIMENT”
I was going there as a digital effects supervisor, so I knew I would have access to Bob Zemeckis and to sort of start to get to know him and his style, and hopefully one day I could show him I had what it takes to be part of his team. I knew I was going to have to earn it.”
Baillie reveals that “A Christmas Carol was a brutally hard film to do, because we were building a studio and doing the movie at the same time, so we were just laying the tracks right in front of the train the whole time. A lot of the scenes that I was responsible for were going pretty well, so I would take on some more here and there.” Baillie recalls that conversations
with Zemeckis about the scenes he was responsible for “would always go really well. I always felt that was pretty good. I just wanted to do my best for him.”
After A Christmas Carol concluded, Baillie moved onto another mo-cap feature at Imagemovers entitled Mars Needs
Moms. After that project, Baillie and Ryan Tudhope had a breadth of experience with which to reflect and look ahead. “Ryan and I were talking, saying that ‘We’ve seen The Orphanage, that’s scrappy and doesn’t have a lot of resources, and we’ve seen the studio that has all the resources in the world – let’s make something that combines the best of all worlds’. So we started Atomic Fiction, and used cloud computing to have lots of resources when we needed to and scale down to nothing when we didn’t. We started Atomic Fiction in 2010 and one of the key things for us was: ‘This could succeed on its own, but what would be
really amazing would be if Bob Zemeckis was willing to put some work on his next show here. Do you think he’d be willing to do that?’ So, we go down to his office to pitch him on this idea that we had for a visual effects studio and he’s like ‘Yeah, yeah, whenever my next thing comes up, I’ll give you a call.’”
Baillie continues: “Almost a year went by and he was taking a little bit of a break and figuring out what his next thing was.” That next Zemeckis movie would be Flight. “And that was the beginning of our relationship with Zemeckis. That show won a couple of visual effects awards and every movie since then has been working with Bob. He said to me, ‘I won’t do a movie without you on it.’ Which is a huge compliment.”
Baillie notes that “Bob subscribes to the François Truffaut quote: ‘An incredible film is the perfect blend between truth and spectacle’ and he always focuses on genuinely, emotionally truthful storytelling, but it has to have spectacle. The thing about Bob that I have grown to really love, and this is obvious from his films, is that he’s not afraid of doing new stuff, of leveraging technology to tell stories in a different way. And that even comes down to one of the reasons why he does long-takes: he gets a kick out of figuring out a way to do something in one shot that another director would need three or four cuts to do. It’s a dance: it’s very tricky from a camera perspective and from a performance blocking perspective. The thing that makes working with Bob special, and why he has a team that he works with again and again, is that he really trusts the people around him to bring their A-game.”
Baillie further defines the spirit of this collaboration in terms of how the director relates to the visual effects team. “Working with Bob, I feel meaningful: like I’m bringing something to the table. He doesn’t geek out on technology. He’s not a technical artist in the hands-on sense. But he makes an incredible amount of effort to understand how he can use the tools. So, he isn’t going to know how a 3D projection onto a match-moved face is then blended into a thing in comp, using these AOVS to give a result. He says, ‘You understand it. If you tell me it’s going to work, I trust you to make it work.’ As a VFX supervisor, I have a sense of ownership over making it work.
“That approach is why he’s not afraid to use new technologies on a production. He can just have an idea and he knows enough about the tech, where he’s saying: ‘Well, this thing that we did on this show, and this
“WHEN WORKING WITH BOB, AS A VISUAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR, I HAVE A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP OVER MAKING IT WORK”
thing that we did on this show… if we put these things together and added this third sprinkle of fairy dust, it’s going to do what we need from a storytelling perspective.’ I’ll be sitting there at the table with my eyes the size of dinner plates going ‘How do we make that happen?’ Bob can tell by the look on my face whether or not it’s too crazy of an idea. Then, he can just drop something like that and go and focus on the story, knowing that his team has got his back and that’s true in every other aspect of the production. Bob likes to make movies fast, too. His AD, Lee Grumett, is a key part of that. Bob drops ideas in his lap all the time and he’s got to figure out how to unwind it. Bob is the consummate collaborator.”
Baillie goes on to reflect on what the latest ‘iteration’ of visual effects production means, and how it makes the entire filmmaking approach more holistic. “On the live-action filmmaking side, we have this wonderful history and building of expertise. There’s generational knowledge that’s been built, and in the early days of visual effects, until really recently, VFX (for cinematographers) was like this complicated technical process that happened behind this curtain, and it didn’t even happen until after they were onto another project. And the only window they had into that process was the VFX supervisor and the producer and everyone’s talking in hypotheticals because, aside from a test or two that you might have done in production, it was like most of the work was going to happen later.
“And when you got to the point of ‘Should I key this from the left or the right in an
all-cg scene?’ the DP was already on some other show and wouldn’t even be available to talk to you about it. So, here we are in an aggregate historical context, like a very junior group of people making decisions in the absence of these people who have decades, or even a century, of cumulative experience in the craft.
“And what virtual production allows us to do is it opens the door to all of that expertise, and all of this cumulative history that these people have. We can now invite them into the VFX process and say: ‘Now, you can do this too. You can help us, and we’re going to leverage your expertise to make the film look like the best thing that it can’. And that just wasn’t possible before real-time technology.”
Coming full circle as the conversation concludes, Baillie recalls the pivotal moment when his dream of working with visual effects crystallised for him, and listening to him speak makes it clear that this memory underpins his efforts today: “My first movie in theatres was E.T. My dad took me, and the popcorn bucket was up to my eyes. And ever since then, I’ve loved movies that were spectacular films. I didn’t really give a thought to what the common thread was to all the movies that I loved were. I just loved them. Ryan and I saw
Jurassic Park when we were sophomores in high school and it just blew us away; it completely floored us. I think I saw Jurassic
Park 12 times in the theatre, and I just couldn’t get enough of it.
“It was at that point that I realised the common thread with all of the movies that I really loved was visual effects, and using technology and craft to tell a story that couldn’t be told in any other way.”