We started by discussing an often-held misconception about 3D conversions, then pretty quickly hopped over to Hickel's area of expertise: the animation of digital characters.
And finally, there's a nice, simple anecdote about how a little narrative hole in the film was sewn shut.
So, here we go. Here's some of what Hal had to tell me:
I think there's still a perception that native 3D yields a better result. That said, everyone who has spent any time doing a converted film knows that if you spend the time and have the taste you can get an excellent result that way as well. It's still just seen as "If you can do it for real, do it as real" and there's a lot of subjective calls you have to make when converting but if it's done for real you know that what you're getting, even if you want to fudge it for a different visual result, you know that what you're starting out with is what the real scene would look like. People do think, generally, that the best result is gotten natively so where they could on this film, they went that way. I don't think we've had a show here yet where the animators worked viewing the monitors in 3D. The only exception might be some ride filmwork, such as the Transformers ride. On Pacific Rim, no, the animators worked on a normal 2D monitor and artists didn't see anything in 3D until... well, to be honest, the decision to go 3D was made after we were well into post production. A 3D supervisor was brought on and they went through the camerawork retroactively, did new camera layouts and reviewed the work that way. I would occasionally peek in to see what they were doing. [Our visual FX supervior] John Knoll had been involved over the previous year or two on the 3D conversion work on [Star Wars] Episode One and Episode Two, and I know that he had steeped himself in 3D and was really into it. He and Guillermo had a lot of conversations about how to do this film in 3D. The big risk was that people might say "I'm not seeing enough depth, push the depth more" but the problem with a film like Pacific Rim is, if you can imagine, we have these great big wide shots of Kaiju and Jaegers, essentially buildings fighting one another, and it shouldn't look depthy unless somebody wanted to push the depth and that would end up miniaturising them. The results were, at the end, good for both native and converted work. As the animation supervisor I looked at any character work in the film as well as machines - CG helicopters and things like that. All of the Kaiju stuff and Jaeger stuff fell in my department - at least, the performances of those characters.There were three big challenges with the Jaegers. The first one, obviously, is the scale. To make them feel huge, the first you'd do is slow them down but with these guys, most of the sequences they're in are action sequences. It was a matter of how fast we can go but still have them feel huge, and we needed to use some editing tricks. Scale was challenge one. Then the second thing was differentiating the Jaegers from the Kaiju. The Kaiju had to feel organic and the Jaegers had to feel mechanical. Ordinarily you'd think of a robot and how you'd make it feel robotic, maybe, would be with a lurching start-stop, start-stop kind of feel to it but the problem with that here is that you'd need these guys to get up to speed and stay at speed not start and stop at every step. We had to look at smaller ways, the ways the arms swing or the way the torso rotates, a mechanical feel with hard stops and recoils. We ruled out motion capture for this very reason early one. Even though they're controlled by humans on the inside we realised.The third thing was differentiating the Jaegers from one another, giving them different personalities. Gipsy is kind of the gun slinger, Eureka is the captain of the football team, Crimson Typhoon is a nimble martial arts expert, Cherno is the big brawler. The designs helped differentiate them but it was also how they carry themselves and act. And we tied it in to the crews inside them too. Raleigh has a kind of swagger and we put a little bit of that in Gipsy, then the Australian crew, Chuck and Herc, have bravado and ego and all of that is apparent in Striker Eureka. There was a lot of though upfront about tying the humans and Jaegers together. Raleigh had a couple of fight scenes in the original plans for the film - it's down to one now because the film was whittled down. He used to have another fight, with his foreman at the construction site, and between that one and the one you can still see, with Chuck, there were some moves that he does, kind of signature fights. Guillermo intended to echo these when Gipsy is fighting later. That went, a little bit, by the wayside for editorial reasons and story reasons, some of that got pared down. We thought a lot about how we'd carry the way the actors moved inside the Conn Pods to the movements we see outside, syncing them up, but when it came down to it, it really got down to making things slow not "We have to have the same walk, the same cadence, the same gait." We thought about it a lot up front but we were able to strip things away until we got to the things that we needed to tie them together. It wasn't about "Here's a really particular pose that Chuck keeps hitting so we're going to echo that with Striker" it was more about an attitude. One exception is that there's a signature move when the Australian guys open the chest where they step back and throw their arms out and that we match very closely. There's just a few places where we had to echo exactly what an actor had done. We didn't build every Kaiju all the way from the inside out, with organs and bones. Sometimes we do - it depends on the creature - so, for instance, the baby Kaiju had really translucent skin so we had to build a lot of internal stuff there. Then Leatherback, the one who's like a Gorilla, he gets blown apart rather gruesomely so we had to build quite a bit of his skeleton and some organs inside. That said, even with the characters that don't have their insides built specifically, we do think a lot about it. The modelling lead for the Kaiju, Paul Giacoppo, he was OCD about anatomy. He can transpose real human anatomy onto a creature and say "The tricep needs to go here, these quadraceps aren't quite right" and he'll think a lot about what the skeleton is doing underneath and what will make it look like it's moving correctly. It comes down to the visual, and the artist using their eye to see what looks right. But we do occasionally have a creature where it's important to show flesh sliding over bone - the Thestrals in Harry Potter, for example - in which case we'd definitely build all of the layers. Pacific Rim didn't require all of this. We did do a lot of flesh simulation on them after the animation, to jiggle the flesh and jiggle the muscle groups. One neat thing was that the animators had some shapes they could dial in to make, for instance, the forearm muscles flex, let's say. They might be dialling those in and out as, for instance, Leatherback is running forwards. The fist might land on the ground and the animator would dial in this flexing shape, and then when the flesh simulation artists go in to take over after the animation is final, to do all of the jiggle, the trouble they have is that it might override the shapes and just make all of the skin look jiggly. We did something pretty neat here where it would know where the shapes were activating and it would tighten up the skin around those areas. The flesh sim and the shapes worked well together to give this really great sense of the skin being lose where it was meant to be lose and then tightening up around these muscles as they flex. There's a bit at the end of the film, after the nuke has gone off, where Gipsy Danger is still heading towards the breach. We though there were originally some issues of clarity there with the audience as we'd already been told that they'd have to take a Kaiju through the breach with them or they won't be able to pass through. But now we're at a moment where we believe that all of the Kaiju have been killed and Gipsy is heading towards the breach anyways. I remember having quite a few conversations with Guillermo about "How do we make sense of that to the audience?" This was one of the great examples of Guillermo being really open. We weren't speaking to him specifically about visual effects, we were saying to him, "Hey, this story point isn't as clear as maybe it can be. Is there any way we can help with that?" And that's how we ended up contributing the idea of Gipsy grabbing hold of a half of a Kaiju and dragging that to the breach. It's a nice example that goes to showing how collaborative he is and how open he is to conversations of that kind. And in the end, we did provide a kind of visual effects solution to this one thing.
Thanks again to Hal for speaking to me. Pacific Rim is out on DVD, Blu-ray and digital download in the UK next Monday, November 11th. I love it.
In the meantime, you can explore more of the Pacific Rim world with this specially built archive of interesting materials.
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