creative cow by yusuf ulufer

own, but I want my reel to be as interesting at least as a music video. I have always enjoyed editing, especially to music. Normally, if I am cutting something, I will put a music track to it, even if the final product will not have music, as I like to work within a rhythm. I also like to have something new and fresh in my reel, so I create a little intro sequence. With this reel, I really wanted to get some of my non-CG work from the 1980s into it, so I structured the intro around them floating in a time/space void. Plus, it was a great opportunity to try out the latest version of Trapcode Particular. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AI When pre-production began on AI in 2000, I was one of the first at ILM to begin work on it, and was in charge of creation and animation setup of all Character and Hard Surface elements. I first was working with Dennis Muren on using the then-new technique of image-based modeling. We wanted to see if we could save some time and effort by photographing the New York miniatures used for “Baby’s Day Out” and creating CG models from them. That did not work out the way we hoped, but it was an interesting experience. I then spent a great deal of time working out the design of the “Specialist” Robots featured at the end of the film. The UK-based artist Chris “Fangorn” Baker had developed the Specialist as pen and ink concepts when he was working with director Stanley Kubrick in the years before Kubrick passed away, but there was a lot of work to be done to finish the design. I was tasked with figuring out how to represent the volumetric interior of the Robot, as if you could see through the skin to the circuits and wires inside. After that, I supervised all of the modeling for the film, including Rouge City, New York underwater and in ice, “Teddy,” “Dr. Know,” and the Blue Fairy. I also

designed what was called the “Cube Ship,” the little vehicle the Specialists travel in. It had to disassemble itself in an interesting way, but make sense as a whole as well. I had fun working on that film. MEN IN BLACK I designed, match-moved, modeled and animated the Jeebs transformation effect. This is my favorite shot ever, and the shot I have gotten the most attention for. (Perhaps there is a connection there.) I had just finished my work on “Mars Attacks” in the fall of 1996 when I was asked to create this effect. I had the pleasure of coming up with the technique and animating it all myself, using Softimage and ILM’s Caricature software. Basically, it was a series of blend shapes atop an animated rig, with the final blend sculpted to match the first frame of Tony Shalhoub’s action. It was originally to be a very short transition from CG to Tony Shalhoub, but the director, Barry Sonnenfeld, enjoyed it so much that he kept lengthening the shot. Five years later, I was asked by Sonnenfeld to make a special guest appearance (I was working on “Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets” at the time) and re-create Jeebs for the second film.

tic job on the modelling. I served as Digital Character Supervisor, and was in charge of creation and animation setup of all Character and Hard Surface elements for Dobby the house elf, and the Quidditch match. For the Quidditch sequence, I had a brainstorm that saved us much cloth simulation time. I created a cloth sim of a cape blowing in a breeze, made the sequence into a loop, and then baked the sim into blend shapes. Cary Phillips wrote this incredibly complicated expression that would loop the shapes and animate the strength of the wind. We then created a rig that would allow us to swing the cape around behind the Quidditch player, and we were able to do all of the wide shots without any subsequent sim work.

MAGNOLIA As Digital Character Supervisor, I was in charge of the creation of frogs. “Magnolia” was the best movie I ever worked on. At the time I did not know that this would be the case, as I was not familiar with director Paul Thomas Anderson or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, ©2002 Warner Bros. Entertainment “Boogie Nights,” and I could not figure out Inc. why we were dropping frogs from the sky. cloth to any extent. We did not have a cloth sim sysThis was actually quite common. We often worked tem at the time, so I spent most of the second half of on specific shots in films, and did not know WHY we the show hand-animating cloth using blend shapes in were doing the work. Caricature. MY PEOPLES HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS I left ILM in 2002 to go to Florida and help convert DisThis was my last film for ILM. I was very aware at the ney Animation/Florida to CG production. They were time of the coming CG challenge from Weta Digital finishing “Brother Bear” while I was there, and it was with Gollum, so we worked very hard to make Dobby wonderful to see all of the hand-animated work in proas realistic as possible. He was the first ILM character to duction. use sub-surface scattering. Frank Gravatt did a fantas“My Peoples” was to be a combination of hand-

MARS ATTACKS I supervised all Character and Hard Surface modeling; designed, built and animated the “Martian Thing-Maker;” and animated the head-popping shot This was my first big CG show. I created the Martian model based on sculptures created by, I believe, the Chiodo brothers, back when it was to be a stop-motion film. This was also the first film ILM did that featured 26

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue