Christopher Mitchell:
My job was to build and chain a lot of the creatures -- in this case
astronauts as well as the shuttle arm, the space shuttle, the satellite,
all of that stuff.
An animator actually goes
in and hand-animates anything between inanimate objects, such as hard-surfaced
satellites, spaceships, shuttle arms -- anything like that -- as well as
the characters in the film. In this case it was our computer-generated
stunt doubles of the four astronauts.
SPACE.com: So you
supervised everything in space that wasn’t a close-up?
CM: Everything that
we dealt with in space that was animated, ultimately went through my hands
at one point or another. Originally I was the only animator, and I was
trying to do a lot of it myself. It think the show earlier on started with
around 50 shots and ended up going to almost 350.
So I eventually oversaw other
shots that were being done that I was not able to do [myself]. I would
go in and get the models prepped and animated, and start most of the hero-animated
shots, which were the more difficult ones.
SPACE.com: Which came
first in the space sequences, the principal photography or the effects?
CM: Ultimately they work
in conjunction. The principal photography is done first, and then when
we put our sequences together it would be done with storyboards or rough
animatics.
The shots with real people,
close-ups, mid shots, whatever, would be done during the principal photography.
The rest we would fill in with CG characters as we saw fit, like the astronauts
in the airlock or anything outside.
SPACE.com: Just to
be clear, you were matching the look of your NASA footage, but you were
not actually cutting in any NASA footage?
CM: Nope. It was all
completely generated here; we used miniature models that were shot on stage
and a cross blend between that and computer graphics. For instance, we
would shoot a miniature space shuttle on stage, and if we wanted to animate
the shuttle arm, we would actually animate that in 3-D and then we would
composite the two together and match them properly with lighting in order
to make it look like they’re connected.
SPACE.com: So your
contribution to the film really begins once the shuttle launches?
CM: Yes, because I
was a 3-D animator there were a lot of other scattered compositing shots
throughout the movie. But as a whole, the majority of the stuff that we
did once the shuttle had launched -- that was our sequence.
I believe we did some black-and-white
jet stuff in the beginning, and we also did some centrifuge editing of
the faces when they were spinning around in the centrifuge.
SPACE.com: What is
the difference in animating a pod
race -- something that we don’t know, we’ve never seen before -- and
animating the shuttle, which we’re very familiar with?
CM: That was one of
the hard things that we had to come across with Cowboys, because
although most people can relate with the space shuttle and astronauts and
stuff like that, there has to be that level of realism within that stuff,
[but on the other hand] you can get away with a lot doing a pod race sequence.
For me, dealing with these
ships that fly 1,500 miles an hour and move in weird ways, there’s a bit
of freedom that you have as far as the believability. Whereas you could
take raw NASA footage, animate your computer-generated character to mimic
that, and you [still] have to get across that it is a real human in a real
spacesuit, so you have to keep it pretty close to home for people.
The hardest part I found
was the majority of people that would see our footage always assumed that
astronauts were moving in slow motion. You know, bounding across the surface
of the moon, when that actually wasn’t the case. They move in real time
as we do here, they’re just weightless, so a lot of people would expect
to see people moving slowly in space, but that’s just a misconception.
If you sit and watch the
footage, with these guys moving at the same rate of speed, it almost looks
fake.
SPACE.com: Did you
have to slow them down?
CM: At some parts,
we would have to slow them down and to add a little more weight to them,
but for the most part, we were pretty much able to come across with real
time.
SPACE.com: Where did
you get fancy? What was the headache shot?
CM: Headache shots
for me were dealing with compositing a practical model, such as the shuttle.
We shot it on stage, had a 7-foot model of the shuttle, and had to smash
a CG satellite over the top of that.
So it got a little tricky
because we’re blending the two together. You had to match move an element
within the same position or to use dynamics in order to shatter those two
together. So there were certain things we had to use in order to blend
that.
A lot of the other ones weren’t
as tricky as you would think because most of them were CG, and if you get
them all within your 3-D world, you can interact with each other pretty
seamlessly.
SPACE.com: How many
shuttles did you have?
CM: We had a miniature,
and we had the actual shuttle. The actual shuttle [was used] when the shuttle
landed, or when it took off. When it landed, what we did was replace the
names, we match animated the names -- "Daedelus" -- and we scarred up the
side of the shuttle, and we matched that on every frame so that when it
landed, we basically just edited the surface and replaced it. We tried
scarring it up a little bit, but that was actual shuttle footage.
Now everything that you saw
up in space was the miniature shuttle model. We did not actually have a
CG shuttle. The roll in front of the sun, the lens flare, that shot was
an actual miniature shuttle shot on stage.
SPACE.com: Why did
you use an actual model rather than a CG model? One would think CG would
be a lot easier.
CM: It would be lot
easier, but it’s actually cheaper to use a practical model. For a lot of
the shots we had, a lot of the tricks that we could use [involved] a combination
of movement of camera as well as movement of model.
SPACE.com: When you’re
doing CG, where does the expense come from? Creating it or render time?
CM: A lot of the shots
with CG astronauts deal with the reflections and stuff in the domes of
their helmets. Because you’re doing that in CG, you’re not necessarily
having [all of the elements in the scene] and you’re trying to reflect
that real environment into that glass. You have to reproduce all that in
the background in order to actually reflect it off of the glass.
[The render time on] some
of the shots could be hours per frame. We used Maya software.
SPACE.com: Did you
do the re-entry?
CM: [The re-entry
burn] was actually shot on stage with reflective material that we put on
the practical model, and by using gels and fans and bits of smoke we were
able to create that burning look, straight through the camera lens.
And it was quite unique the
way they used the certain types of black light, the gels on the lens, the
camera had a shaker, a slight bit of dust used to flow over the model as
well as actually using a fan, and filtered cones in order to get that thing
to look like it was burning.
As far as the little chips
flaking off of the wings during that, those were actually pulled off by
strings.
SPACE.com: And did
you have wire removal?
CM: For some of the
stuff we did, yeah, but it was so dark in the background, a lot of that
stuff you were able to get away with. But there was wire removal.
SPACE.com: The scene
when Clint opens the airlock door, is in the bay and then jumps over to
the MMU station caused a problem for some
of the astronauts who were watching the movie.
CM: Because they would
always be tethered? The reason that was not done was because in the actual
practical footage we were given, there were no establishing shots that
showed a tether. To [suddenly] have a tether on him going out the door,
people would have said "Wow, where did that tether come from?"
[For reasons of pacing,]
we cut to the chase and did "the Space Cowboys maneuver," which
means if you’re gung ho, you can just jump.
What do you think? Send your
comments to the editor.
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