Why cloudy days are no good for the werewolves of 'New Moon'

SCENE STEALER

Patrick Kevin Day spoke with effects legend Phil Tippett about creating the werewolf effects for "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," (and no, we're not talking about Taylor Lautner's supernatural 16 pack). You can read his previous Scene Stealer interviews and Liesl Bradner's Wizards of Hollywood series right here.

Darkness may be a visual effects artist's best friend, but his biggest enemy isn't bright sunlight -- it's the overcast day. So adding all those CG werewolves to scenes shot in cloudy Vancouver, Canada, was a particular challenge for "New Moon" visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett and his team. "On a sunny day, you get really nice contrasts, but with flat lighting and a furry thing -- the fur really soaks up the light and everything appears flat," Tippett said. "So to make it appear three-dimensional, we had to goose reality. We emphasized their shadows and used rim lights" to make the wolves stand out from the background. But that's not the only way Tippett and company played with reality. When that wolf checks out Bella, it's not a wolf's eyes, it's Jacob's. "We brought Taylor [Lautner] in and had him haul his eyelids back as far as possible and shot close-ups." They then added those eyes to the giant animated timber wolf used in the scene.

-- Patrick Kevin Day

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"New Moon" Photo: Summit Entertainment / Phil Tippett Studios

Kelly Blatz, Weta Workshop and the creatures of 'Skyrunners'

Any project that involves Weta Workshop demands attention. When Jevon Phillips heard that the New Zealand outfit responsible for the memorable movie magic of the "Lord of the Rings" franchise was working with Disney XD, he picked up the phone to find out more. Here's his report:

The Disney XD television movie "Skyrunners" is the tale of two brothers who stumble across a downed UFO and decide to keep it -- please, kids, don't try this at home -- and then proceed to uncover an alien plot to take over Earth.

Kelly Blatz (of the hit Disney XD gamer series "Aaron Stone") and newcomer Joey Pollari star as the brothers. For Blatz, acting became a career path of choice after he fell in love with Steven Spielberg's films of the fantastic, among them "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and Blatz's favorite, "Jurassic Park."

Recently, as the 22-year-old actor-musician took a break from meeting with the members of his "vintage-rock" band, Capra, he talked about coming face-to-face with a Weta-created alien creature in "Skyrunners."

"It was amazing," Blatz said. "We walk in there and it's all dark. This thing -- no matter how close you are it still looks completely real.  So everyone [steps back] -- it was really eerie. Just the lighting and everything. They built this thing that was so unique and frightening.  It was just this transparent thing with a mouth full of teeth... And these people were so great and so talented and so passionate ... we were picking their brains about working on "Lord of the Rings" and everything. I mean, these people are Oscar winners."  Here's a podcast of a longer "Skyrunners" interview from Disney XD :

The program airs Nov. 27, so if you're not at some Black Friday sale, you may want to tune in. But you can also have the alien ships come to you;  there's a Google Maps program that the telefilm's online team cooked up that allows you to put in your address, access satellite photos of the area and get back a picture of a crashed spacecraft at your doorstep. Why look, there's a crashed spaceship next to The Times building on sunny Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles...

-- Jevon Phillips

Photo credit: Disney XD

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More from the Wizards of Hollywood

The complex notion of destroying the world in '2012'

Scene Stealer

Liesl Bradner has interviewed many of the masters of Hollywood effects in our Wizards of Hollywood section of Hero Complex and today takes a look at a particular moment during "2012" in this installment of Scene Stealer.

The disaster film "2012" reunites director Roland Emmerich and visual effects supervisor Volker Engel, who first worked together 13 years ago on another end-of-the-world movie, "Independence Day." How apocalyptic times have changed. The key destruction scenes in that earlier film consisted of 90% miniatures, a common practice when things need to be blown up, leaving only 10% of the elements to be computer-generated.

By comparison, nearly half of "2012" is visual effects. Because of the complexity of the destruction scenes it was impossible to use miniatures.

"The limo-in-earthquake was the most challenging scene, as it could not be shot at all but had to be completely created in the computer with inserts of the actors reacting to the mayhem," said Engel from Berlin, where he is collaborating with Emmerich on "Anonymous," a quiet Shakespearean drama.

Except for a few shots of a real limo filmed against a blue screen, the five-second crane shot in a residential neighborhood was completely virtual. The bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood buckling with every crumbling house, swaying palm tree, fence, car, sidewalk, garbage can and the limousine were all computer-generated because each one of those elements had to be simulated to shake, break or tumble.

-- Liesl Bradner

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How Bruce Willis got a celluloid face-lift for his 'Surrogates' robot

SCENE STEALER

Patrick Kevin Day interviews some of the top talent behind the camera in Hollywood to find out how the achieved the movie magic we all see on the screen. His Scene Stealer feature (along with Liesl Bradner's series of Wizards of Hollywood posts) are intriguing glimpses in the EFX world and you can read more of them here. -- Geoff Boucher

In order to make 54-year-old Bruce Willis' surrogate robot look like a man in his mid-30s in the sci-fi film "Surrogates," Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Mark Stetson oversaw some work worthy of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.

"We started out with makeup," Stetson said. Makeup supervisor Jeff Dawn oversaw the application of straightforward cosmetic makeup, which was enhanced by cinematographer Oliver Wood's lighting. Then the digital-effects artists went in to the roughly 200 shots of Willis' surrogate and removed the creases of the actor's face frame by frame.

"It was a lot like doing concept work for a face-lift," Stetson said. And is this kind of digital de-aging popular with stars in non-science-fiction films? "We're getting into an area we really shouldn't be talking about," was all Stetson would say...

-- Patrick Kevin Day

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Photo: Touchstone Pictures

Creating 'Gamer's' killing field

SCENE STEALER

 

To create the grim and gritty battle-zone gaming environment of Slayer for the action flick "Gamer," production designer Jerry Fleming drew on his early experience working for Robert Altman, where he was required to create fully dressed environments to allow the free-spirited director to shoot where he pleased. "Gamer's" Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor "are the first directors I've worked with since Altman where I had to create a 360-world and assume that everything is always on camera," Fleming says. The production took over a downtown Albuquerque intersection for three months, with permission to close the streets only on Saturdays. The environment also included three large parking lots on each corner of the intersection. In one lot they built a massive city made from 60 large shipping containers that took two months and two construction cranes to put together. In another lot, they built an oversize wall of concrete and plaster, and in the third, they used 100 windows from a wrecking yard to create a faux terrazzo stone building facade. On Sundays, the production had to be cleaned up and quiet to accommodate the church on the fourth corner. Right next to the killing field.

--Patrick Kevin Day

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'District 9,' searching for soul in the aliens

SCENE STEALER

 

The visual effects team at Canada's Image Engine had a challenge in making the "prawns" of director Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" look alien yet sympathetic. No easy trick for creatures modeled closely after the not-so-cute Goliath beetle. Actor Jason Cope, who played most of the alien roles, provided the movements on set to be digitally tracked and replaced by an animated alien body. But the creatures' faces  needed to emote more effectively than that process allows.  "The . . .  eyes were too insect-like," visual effects executive producer Shawn Walsh said. "They looked soulless." The solution was a series of digital interlocking plates that could shift on the alien's face to simulate emotion. "When they slid over each other they gave us an idealized form of the human face," Walsh said.

--  Patrick Kevin Day

HOW DO THEY DO THAT? READ MORE ABOUT WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD

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'Harry Potter' countdown: Scaring up the Inferi

Our countdown to the release of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" continues today with Denise Martin's feature on movie-magic specialist Tim Alexander and his Inferi hordes...  

You can't see them in the picture, but in this scene from "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," creepy, crawling Inferi surround Professor Dumbledore. Inferi, of course, are the reanimated corpses, puppets of Lord Voldemort, residing at the bottom of the lake, near which one of the dark wizard's horcruxes is hidden.

Tim Alexander, the visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic responsible for bringing the undead army to life, has worked on only the most haunting Potter creatures, from the fire-breathing Hungarian Horntail dragon in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," the skeletal horses called thestrals in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" and those soul-sucking dementors in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Phoenix."

Alexander said it took several months to complete the approximately seven-minute scene, from rendering millions of Inferi to whipping up Dumbledore's flame tornado (best for combating meddling dead folks.) He took a break from working on Gore Verbinski's upcoming animated adventure "Rango" to tell us why he thinks "Half-Blood Prince" will be the first Potter movie to give even grown-up fans nightmares:

DM: So how many Inferi lie in the lake?

TA: A couple million? Above water, you’d probably see about a hundred at a time. But when Harry gets dragged into the lake, there is a whole underwater environment…and it’s actually covered in bodies. It’s all just ... bodies crawling on top of each other, and that’s how you get into the millions.

DM: That sounds … disturbing. Certainly, more so than the previous “Potter” films.

TA: It’s certainly much bolder and scarier than we imagined that they’d ever go in a "Potter" movie. Director David Yates was really cautious of not making this into a zombie movie, so we were constantly trying to figure out how not to make these dead people coming up look like zombies. A lot of it came down to their movement – they don’t move fast, but they don’t move really slow or groan and moan. We ended up going with a very realistic style. They move like anyone coming up out of water.

DM: How so?

TA: When we go underwater with Harry, this female Inferi kind of comes up and grabs him and is pulling him down, but it’s more like a hug. Like an embrace. Like she’s trying to encourage him to join them. We were always trying to avoid turning the scene into one you’d see in a horror film.

DM: You’re going to scare a lot of little kids.

TA: Yeah, I think it will.

DM: Tell me about how the Inferi look. How did the design come about?

TA: The art department on the film gave us a lot of references, like Dante’s "Inferno," where they have all those bodies. The Inferi themselves are very skinny and emaciated people. Very humanoid, but way skinnier than humans could be. Waterlogged and gray. We used the old lady that comes out of the tub in ‘The Shining’ as a reference. Most of the Inferi are adult, but we did also build two children, too.

DM: Yikes. Parents, you've been warned...

-- Denise Martin

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Photo credit: (top to bottom) Warner Bros.; ILM; Warner Bros.

Edward Norton's brain, up close and personal

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: KEVIN MACK

Liesl Bradner has been interviewing the masters of Hollywood effects and asking a simple question: What's your proudest moment of achievement on screen? She's gotten answers that are sometimes surprising but always insightful. You can read the whole series in our Wizards of Hollywood section of Hero Complex. Today, Liesl turns her focus to Kevin Mack and his especially cerebral work in "Fight Club." 

Visual effects supervisor Kevin Mack inherited his film illusion skills the old-fashioned way -- through genetics. His father was Brice Mack, a background artist at Disney who worked on such classics as “Fantasia” and “Cinderella.” Kevin’s work can be seen in two dozen films including “Speed Racer,” “Ghost Rider” and “The Fifth Element.”  He won an Academy Award in visual effects for creating a heavenly paradise for Robin Williams in “What Dreams May Come.” He is currently working on the Chris Columbus-directed adpatation of the Rick Riordan fantasy novel “Percy Jackson and the LightningThief,” which is due in 2010.

My most memorable scene? I have to say I’m still proudest of the stuff I did on “Fight Club,” mainly the opening title sequence.

It’s a 95-second pullback through the brain. It starts inside a synapse inside the amygdala, the fear center of the brain. It goes through various structures, a forest of neurons and dendrites, passing through various outer layers, the surface of the brain, layers of skull, then skin and a hair follicle and out to the barrel of a gun, essentially following Ed Norton’s character’s thoughts.

I had been doing brain research for years. I was really interested in neuroscience mostly for creating artificial intelligence. David Fincher was an old friend, so when he approached me I saw it as an opportunity to explore the brain in a spatial and visual way. David only gave me a sentence of direction, which was, “Make it dark and scary, like a night dive.”

I approached it from a computation standpoint. I had to employ a method of artificial life in the brain and essentially build a map through a real brain and keep it as accurate and as realistic as possible.

I got data from various people and consulted with Dr. John Mazziota, professor of nuclear medicine and imaging at UCLA's Geffen School of Medicine and director of their Brain Mapping Center, to find out what they really looked like and how to grow the brain instead of using scanned models.

We were fighting against the limitations of technology because computers were really slow back then [in 1999]. It's all computer-generated and mapped using an L-system and ray tracing graphics.I’ve been told it’s the most anatomically correct and realistic visualization of the brain. It was a breakthrough shot that had never been done before.

-- Liesl Bradner

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"Fight Club" images courtesy of 20th Century Fox/Digital Domain. John Dykstra photo courtesy of John Dykstra.

Scene Stealer: 'Terminator Salvation'

'Extremely complicated' is an understatement for a two-minute scene that took two weeks to film.

Early in "Terminator Salvation," Christian Bale as future resistance leader John Connor leads a raid on a Skynet facility, escapes in a helicopter, gets walloped by the force of a nuclear explosion, crash-lands and crawls from the wreckage, only to get attacked by a crawling Terminator. Did we mention this is all in one shot? To achieve this, visual effects supervisor Charles Gibson coordinated two film crews working over multiple locations to compile all the elements of the scene. "This sequence was extremely complicated," Gibson says.

The shot begins on a back lot in Albuquerque, with Bale crawling out of a hole. A whip-pan shot blurs the transition to the helicopter suspended from a construction crane in front of a blue screen. As Bale runs to the helicopter and grabs the control stick to take off, the background shows a miniature of the facility. The model was then blown up, switching the view to that of a computer-generated helicopter buffeted by the force of a nuclear explosion. As the camera pushes back into the cockpit, the scene seamlessly transitions to a hand-held camera take of Bale struggling with the controls. The helicopter, meanwhile, is on a rig that's spinning it around.  When the helicopter crashes, we're shown a new helicopter already arranged in crash position, with a stunt man in Bale's seat. After he unhooks himself and falls to the roof of the cockpit, Bale picks up the action, crawling out of the helicopter in time to see a mushroom cloud and be grabbed  by the Terminator lying in wait.

"It was one of the most-planned sequences of the movie," Gibson says of the two-week shoot (for two minutes of screen time). "We try to leave a little bit of breathing room. You get a much more fluid execution and you don't feel the phases of the shot as you move through them."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

CHECK OUT INTERVIEWS WITH EFFECTS MASTERS: WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD

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The Science Channel goes Hollywood tonight

Tonight you can get your geek on with "Science of the Movies," a new series on the Science Channel that delves into the digital domains of Hollywood effects wizards. Here's a preview of the show, which is hosted by Nar Williams (not be confused with Dar Williams). Looks like fun. 

-- Geoff Boucher

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'Pirates of the Caribbean' set sail with a very special squid

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: JOHN KNOLL

Liesl Bradner has been interviewing the masters of Hollywood effects and asking a simple question: What's your proudest moment of achievement on screen? She's gotten answers that are sometimes surprising but always insightful. You can read the whole series in our Wizards of Hollywood section of Hero Complex. Today, Liesl's subject is John Knoll, who  found glory aboard the Black Pearl. 

John Knoll is a visual effects supervisior at Industrial Light & Magic who took audiences back to a galaxy far, far away in the most recent trilogy of “Star Wars" and also, with his brother, co-created a somewhat successful bit of software called Photoshop. Knoll won an Academy Award for bringing the squid-like Davy Jones to life in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest” and is now working again with "Pirates" director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp on the animated film "Rango," which is due in 2011.

My most memorable moment on film is when Davy Jones comes together as a moving, breathing creature in “Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest.” The scene when he comes down the stairs to the dice game was the first one that we rendered. That was a magic moment.

How did we achieve it? The execution of technology occurs before we ever see an image. Sometimes it can be one to two years of discussion before we see it realized. There was a great deal of dialogue on how Davy Jones would work and would he be good enough in close-up without having to resort to some sort of makeup split in close-ups. The challenge was that he was part human and part squid, with a beard full of wiggly tentacles, and crab-like claws.

We didn’t have any proof-of-concept to show anybody during the shooting, so the actors had to take our word for it that it would look good and we wouldn’t make them look like idiots.

They had to wear these unsettling computer pajamas -- gray suits with motion-racking marks all over them. But the actors really got into it and took it very seriously.

The tentacle-beard control system was totally new for us. Combining the live-action performance with computer animation was complicated. It had to look alive and respond to external forces such as gravity and move in believable way as a physical simulation. We were always looking for opportunities for more gross-out factors. [Creature concept designer] "Crash" McCreery came up with the design allowing various levels of movements, what parts were alive and not too distracting. We made the tentacles’ movement vary in a way to help convey his emotions.

Our biggest challenge was really faithfully doing justice to actor Bill Nighy’s performance and to never let people suspect they were looking at computer graphics.

--Liesl Bradner

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CREDIT: John Dykstra photo courtesy of John Dykstra.

'Knowing' crew lets you in on the secrets of that subway crash

The visual effects team behind the Nicolas Cage disaster-fest "Knowing" wanted to make as much of the chaos of the horrifying subway crash as real as it could. So rather than going full CG, it created the scene on-set.

"We were firing smoke and particles and dust and debris at the extras as they were running around," said visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson. "You get genuine fear and them reacting to the actual things happening around them."

Off-camera cannons blew chunks of polyurethane foam sculpted to look like rock and concrete into the air, along with fake glass made from a rubbery, clear silicone. But since the set was constructed around real train cars in a rail yard in Melbourne, Australia, no actual damage could be done to the subway. So, for the shot inside the tumbling subway car, a basic interior was re-created on a green-screen stage where the set could be rotated on a gimbal, bouncing around the actors like tennis shoes in a clothes dryer.

"That one had to be done differently, the nature of what we needed the actors to be able to do," Jackson explained. "You couldn't fake that sort of tumbling."

-- Patrick Kevin Day

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Ken Ralston's favorite enterprise? It wasn't 'Star Trek'

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: KEN RALSTON

This is the fifth installment in our series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or just a special human soul who ages in reverse. Today, guest contributor Liesl Bradner interviews Ken Ralston.

Ken Ralston, the senior visual effects supervisor at Sony Imageworks, is currently the senior visual effects supervisor on Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland," and he has extensive Starfleet experience (he worked on "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home"). He has also won four Oscars (for "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," "Death Becomes Her," "Cocoon" and "Forrest Gump") and took home a special achievement Oscar for "Star Wars: Episode VI -- Return of the Jedi."  Surprisingly, he says his favorite screen accomplishment involved neither spaceships nor the supernatural.

My most memorable moment on film is in "Forrest Gump," the Washington, D.C., crowd scene at the National Mall and Lincoln Memorial by the reflecting pool, when Forrest gives his speech and finds Jenny in the crowd.

We only had two days for this scene. There was lots to do with not a lot of time. We had four or five camera systems shooting at different angles. We used live action motion control that can be repeated over and over locked in to one central computer.

It was 1993, before the technology existed to duplicate crowds. Without a lot of extras to work with, we put as many as we could in period costume.

We shot Tom’s element first, the scene where he's giving his speech. We put the extras in foreground and close to camera as possible. We'd get a take we like then we'd back the camera up. When Tom’s part is done he goes into his trailer and we keep repeating the exact same movement over and over while physically moving the crowd back further and further. There were various shots within that scene, so each time we'd shoot separate elements of crowd.

The army of Narnia: Bill Westenhofer reveals the magic behind the beasties

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: BILL WESTENHOFER

This is the fourth installment in our series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or just a special human soul who ages in reverse. Today, guest contributor Liesl Bradner interviews Oscar-winner Bill Westenhofer.

Bill Westenhofer of Rhythm & Hues Studios in Los Angeles has worked on "Spawn," "Men in Black II," "Stuart Little," "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and last year he won an Academy Award for his labors on "The Golden Compass." Right now he's working on "Land of the Lost," the Will Ferrell special-effects comedy based on the old Krofft Brothers television show.

My most memorable scene on film is the opening scene of the Battle for Narnia (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”). It’s still my favorite.

It starts with a gryphon flying in over the fields, sweeping over a completely computer-generated army of 60 unique creature types from centaurs to fawns to various exotic cats and rhinos, all moving in different ways.

To create that army itself was an eight-month-plus endeavor of motion capture, creature development with a year and a half of prep work, taking character designs, figuring out how to implement them, working with the props department to realize what the practical versions of those would be, then flowing that into the CGI characters themselves.

John Dykstra on his favorite scene -- the opening shot in 'Star Wars'

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: JOHN DYKSTRA

This is the third installment in our series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or just a special human soul who ages in reverse. Today, guest contributor Liesl Bradner interviews John Dykstra.

Two-time Oscar winner John Dykstra is considered one of the true forefathers of visual effects. His credits include "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," "Batman Forever" and "Hancock" and was a producer at the launch of the original "Battlestar Galactica" television franchise. He won his first Oscar for the original "Star Wars," for which he was special photographic-effects supervisor, and his second for "Spider-Man 2" and is now immersed in the challenges presented by period combat as the visual effects designer on the Quentin Tarantino film "Inglourious Basterds." He was on the set in Berlin when he spoke to Bradner by phone.

My most memorable scene was the opening shot in the first "Star Wars." It was one of the first shots we finished and it proved that at least a large part of the new technology we were applying to the visual effects for the film was going to work.

[Director] George Lucas, [producer] Gary Kurtz and the studio were all making a large wager when they financed the creation of the original Industrial Light & Magic facility. Wise or not, we weren't doing things in a traditional way.

'Independence Day,' a model effort

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: VOLKER ENGEL

This is the second installment in our series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or a special human soul who ages in reverse. Today, guest contributor Liesl Bradner talks to Engel, a visual effects supervisor who won an Oscar the 1996 film "Independence Day."

Volker Engel, a 43-year-old native of Bremerhaven, Germany, is now working on "2012," the eco-disaster film due this November from director Roland Emmerich. Emmerich was also the director of "Independence Day," and Volker has a favorite scene from that movie that invoved a key symbol of the U.S. presidency...but it's not the one you think.

My most memorable scene was from "Independence Day." Everyone talks to me about the "blowing-up-the-White-House" scene and how much fun that must have been. Personally, the one that is most rewarding and memorable is the Air Force One shot because it was all done "in camera."   

It was a small, five-second establishing shot of the plane in the air with the sunset in the background before we cut into the next scene. Nowadays, everyone expects that it was a computer-generated airplane and somebody went up and shot footage of the sky for the background. It was actually a blown-up archive photo with a small model 747 airplane hanging with super-thin fishing wire.

Brad Pitt becomes 'Button': Steve Preeg explains the magic

WIZARDS OF HOLLYWOOD: STEVE PREEG

This is the first installment in our new series "Wizards of Hollywood," where we shine a spotlight on the masters of movie magic, the effects specialists who can dazzle us with screen images of liquid robots, giants and goblins, ferocious dinosaurs or a special human soul who ages in reverse. Guest contributor Liesl Bradner begins the series today by talking to Steve Preeg, who is nominated for his first Oscar this year for his work as character supervisor on "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Steve Preeg is an animation supervisor at Digital Domain.  He has worked on "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,"  "King Kong" and "I, Robot" and was key in the creation of Gollum for "The Lord of the Rings" franchise. Right now he's working on the revival of "Tron." His take on "Benjamin Button":

My most memorable scene is from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the one we referred to as "Benjamin’s Secret," where he is under the table with Daisy when they first meet. He's explaining to her how he’s different. A sort of revelation to himself, that he’s hearing people talk that he’s going to die soon but he doesn't know anything about it.

This series of shots is very close up and dialogue driven. It looks to the viewer that it's a 70-year-old man with a 9-year-old girl late at night under a table, and that's rather disturbing. But we had to make it innocent enough that it feels like a 15-year-old that is confused about things and still has to be Brad. We were trying to make a dirty old man feel innocent and do it in computer.

When Benjamin appears in his 80s, 70s and 60s, as in this scene, he is completely computer generated from the neck up.  His head is entirely synthetic. They shot the scene on set with a 5-foot-2 body double during principal photography in New Orleans. with a blue hoodie with tracing markers covering his head. Meanwhile we had taken a very realistic-looking cast of Brad’s head that Rick Baker Studios did, a version of what they think he would look like at age 70. It was painted and hair was put in. We took lots of pictures of it and put them in the computer.

We also brought Brad into the studio and used a new "volumetric capture" technology that digitally photographs the entire surface of the face and enables a highly detailed reconstruction in the computer. We used that to capture his expressions while he moved his face in a lot of different positions, which gave us accurate geometry for the way his skin and muscles moved over his bones. That process gave us a digital library of everything Brad's face could do....