More than 40 years after James Stewart saved Kim Novak from drowning in “Vertigo,” visual-effects wizard David Dozoretz sets up his digital camera at scenic Fort Point and follows a cargo ship as it steams toward the Golden Gate Bridge.
Moments later, the enthusiastic young filmmaker strolls back to his mobile editing unit, a silver Volkswagen convertible. He plugs the featherweight Sony into his Apple PowerBook and asks a companion what he’d like to do with the footage.
“Why not have some cops chase a stolen car to the middle of the bridge, surround the bad guy when it stops, and force them to stand by helplessly as he jumps onto the deck of the freighter,” suggests the would-be screenwriter. “Then, as the ship heads out to sea, have the guy wave back at the police, who can only shake their heads.”
No sweat.
By pulling down a couple of computer files and punching in some simple commands, Dozoretz is able to re-position the ship squarely between the Golden Gate’s two giant towers. He then adds a virtual villain and choreographs his daredevil dive.
Dozoretz wasn’t just showing off. He was demonstrating how directors now can quickly and inexpensively employ computer-generated animatics — or “moving story boards” — to determine in advance if a sequence will work, and how it will look.
Along with editor Paul Martin Smith, his partner in Persistence of Vision Digital Entertainment, Dozoretz had just completed work on “Titan A.E,” Fox’s ambitious new animated feature set in the year 3028. Their animatics work helped director-producers Don Bluth and Gary Goldman “pre-visualize” three important sequences in the sci-fi thriller, which artfully combines traditional 2-D animation with spectacular 3-D effects.
The two men worked together on the “Star Wars” prequel, bringing the pod race to life. After George Lucas got a sneak peek at how Dozoretz’s computer skills had enlivened the Brian DePalma’s “Mission: Impossible,” he immediately enlisted him for his new trilogy.
“I had just finished the `pre-vis’ on the scene in which a train pulls a helicopter into the English Chunnel,” Dozoretz said. “It was the first time animatics were used to such an extent. Pre-vis was usually used for one or two shots, here and there — really complex visual-effects shots, where you might have to shoot 10 different elements in 10 separate locations and times, and magically bring them all together.
“The `Mission: Impossible’ sequence was the first time, to my knowledge, that animatics was done for an entire sequence — a full five minutes.”
In “Titan A.E.,” which imagines a universe where Earth no longer exists and the last vestiges of mankind are threatened by an alien culture, the handiwork of Persistence is evident in three of the film’s most memorable scenes.
“We had finished our work on `Star Wars’ and had some time off,” Dozoretz said. “The studio came to us and said, `We have these action sequences but no action.’ They wanted something like the pod race.”
The Persistence team helped create a frantic sequence in which Drej ships chase some of the last surviving humans through a forest of explosive hydrogen trees. It also visualized a space vehicle’s balletic romp with dolphin-like creatures that play in the ship’s wake.
The scene Dozoretz is proudest of, though, comes near the end of the movie, when the young astronauts are called upon to protect the Titan mothership from the dreaded Drej. The Titan is a veritable Noah’s Ark, carrying DNA samples of all of Earth’s plant and animal life.
The final battle takes place among the Ice Rings of Tigrin, a field of giant ice crystals.
“The studio thought it would be kind of cool if a spaceship flew into one of the ice crystals, and the inside would look as if it was covered with mirrors,” Dozoretz said. “They didn’t know how to make it work, however.”
By forcing the spacecraft pilots to thread their way through a careening house of mirrors, the filmmakers turned “Titan A.E.” into a futuristic cat-and-mouse chase.
It took Persistence 3 weeks to come up with a 12-minute pre-visualization animatic of the ice-crystal sequence. For the team’s efforts, they were allowed to see it through to the final shots; the other two sequences were finalized elsewhere.
As Hollywood raises the bar on digital special effects, and budgets for summer blockbusters continue to soar, the efficacy of pre-visualization animatics will become apparent to a growing number of filmmakers.
“The purpose is to make your movie before you make your movie — in your computer and in very rough form, blocking shapes,” Dozoretz argued.
Instead of transporting a camera crew to a location, he added, “I now can send one guy with a digital camera and get the same shot. If I want to add an actor, all I have to do is photograph him in front of a blue screen and composite him in later.”
What Dozoretz wanted to demonstrate at the Golden Gate Bridge, he emphasized, was that “anyone can buy a camera at Circuit City, and a computer with a built-in editing system, and they’ll have the same tools that only Hollywood filmmakers once had access to. These Macs and digital cameras aren’t low-tech tools, just low-cost tools, and they’re being used to achieve high-end goals.”
