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Dutra was involved in designing how the long legs would join the war machine's body at the hip and how it would walk. 'There was a real good connection between him and the art department,' Alzmann says. 'What does that look like when pavement gets broken up on that scale?'Īlzmann kind of switches teams from the graphic artists to the CG artists: 'Since we designed it, who better to make sure that the design gets followed through?'ĭesign approval means you must next get down to more real-world functional issues like 'how is this thing going to move?' and 'that joint needs to look like it really works.' Randy Dutra was the animation supervisor on War. 'When this 150-foot-tall machine comes up out of the ground, we had to do a lot of design for that,' he says. After a few weeks the artists got their approval and Alzmann could then nail down the look of the war machines and storyboard how they would behave in various action sequences to minimize any wasted effort on the CG side. To create these art prints, Alzmann's team would scan drawings into the computer for Photoshop retouching and Corel Painter. In conference calls, the director would tell the team which designs were working for him.īoth iView and CineSync were used for remote approvals. Initially, artists were shown only small sections of Spielberg's closely guarded script, but 'we were real excited because it was such a great story,' Alzmann says, 'and we started designing these big machines, everybody taking stabs at some of the looks of the machines.' Alzmann says that he, Church, Tiemens, Carlos Huante and Sang Jun Lee worked up numerous sketches and sent 'really thick packets' of paper downstate to Spielberg and company. 'That was the real big trick this time, to get that speed,' Alzmann says. And the duration was relatively short â€“- Spielberg himself eventually expressed wonderment that they completed the effects-heavy extravaganza in less than a year.

ILM's award-winning VFX team, led by senior visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren and visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, worked with Alzmann throughout the project's duration. The war machines look a little beaten-up and oxidized, Alzmann says, because they were buried in place eons ago, before modern man paved over the United States, waiting to be activated by their implacable alien masters.

But one new tripod feature is unexpected: rust. The war machines have 'big, bright, buggy eye-lights,' lethal, articulate tentacles and weapons too. The 'tripods' are alien war machines perched atop sets of three impossibly tall legs. War of the Worlds' tripods were created in Softimage and Maya. Then ILM's visual effects art director, Christian Alzmann, started drawing on paper, as did ILM designer/concept artists Ryan Church and Eric Tiemens, until they had lots and lots of versions for review. (Except for the 18-inch posable model built for reference by ILM's John Goodson.)įirst Spielberg's people gave George Lucas's art department written descriptions - no pictures or drawings to go by. But there's no argument about size at 150 feet tall these are the largest. The ones stalking his new War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise, are arguably the most artistically realized.

#Cinesync tutorial movie

SAN RAFAEL - With all the different versions of War of the Worlds over the past 107 years, there are a lot of reasons for director Steven Spielberg to want to visualize the most terrifying war machines ever to stride across a movie screen.