Latest / All The Right Movies / A Life In Movies: Tim Webber

Transcript

A Life In Movies: Tim Webber · All The Right Movies

0:04
All the right movies. Hi there.
0:35
This is A Life in Movies, the interview show from All the
0:38
Right Movies, where we talk to people inside the industry about
0:41
films they've worked on and outside the industry about their
0:44
favorite films. Today on the show, we're talking
0:47
to an industry figure who's among the most successful names
0:49
in this field, A visual effects supervisor at Visual Effects
0:53
Studio Frame Store. Tim Webber has a career going
0:56
back to the late 1980s and has worked on some of the biggest
0:59
effects movies this century. Harry Potter, The Dark Knight,
1:02
Avatar, Gravity, among others. We're going to be talking about
1:06
all of that and more. So welcome to the show, Tim.
1:10
How's it going? Good.
1:12
Thank you. Very good.
1:14
Great. Thanks for joining me.
1:16
You're in London, I believe. That's right.
1:18
Yeah, yeah, I'm based in London and I've been travelling around
1:23
a bit recently, talk, doing talks and things, but yeah,
1:26
usually in London. So you never quite made the move
1:29
to Los Angeles then? No, there have been a couple of
1:32
times when that's nearly happened, but I'm I like living
1:38
in London. I've I've stuck it out.
1:41
So you have quite the filmography, looking at your
1:43
career, some huge titles that you've worked on.
1:47
Before we get into those though, Tim, I'd like to go back to the
1:49
early days of your career. Yeah.
1:52
So the earliest credits I've found for you, Tim, were in the
1:55
1990s on TV, Merlin in the late 90s and the 10th Kingdom.
2:00
Yes, that's right. I actually did one other TV show
2:05
before those, which was actually I thought a great project to
2:12
work on. It was Gulliver's Travels with
2:13
Ted Danson. It was, it was a mini series for
2:17
TV. It was it was the first time I
2:19
had been a visual effects supervisor on something long
2:22
form. Used to that I'd done
2:24
commercials and pop promos and worked on things like that.
2:28
So it was quite a big moment for me.
2:31
And it was, we did hundreds of shots.
2:34
I remember we, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves
2:37
in for. So, you know, we just took the
2:40
leap and said we'd do it. And, and I won an Emmy for it.
2:45
And, you know, I think the work was very good and, and the film
2:49
itself was great. It's still one of my favorite
2:51
ones. I think it was, it was a great
2:53
thing to work and obviously lots of cool people and small people.
2:57
And we had to develop new techniques for, for keying.
3:01
We, we did a lot of blue screen work on it to make people talk
3:05
and small. And we had to develop new
3:06
techniques so that we could get wisps of hair and shadows on the
3:11
floor because to make the people feel that they were in these
3:14
different environments to make sure they didn't look as though
3:17
they were cut out. Basically.
3:19
It was a great, great project. So how did you come to get
3:22
involved in those early projects?
3:24
How did you break into the industry in the first place?
3:27
Well, I broke into the industry. Well, broke in, I sort of crept
3:31
into the industry. I'd say I, I, I left, I left
3:34
university where I'd, well, I'd say I studied theoretical
3:37
physics because in theory I was supposed to be studying physics
3:41
and I didn't spend an awful lot of time doing that.
3:44
I think I spent more time in the art school than I did in physics
3:46
lab. So, so I'd, yeah, I studied
3:50
physics, but I was, I very much enjoyed visual art.
3:54
I almost went to art school. It was a toss up between physics
3:56
and art school. And you know, I carried on
3:59
drawing and stuff whilst I was at university.
4:01
So then when I left, I wanted to find something that combined the
4:04
two, you know, those two sort of interests and skills.
4:07
And at the time it was kind of the golden age of pop promos.
4:13
Lots of innovative work was going on in the world of pop
4:16
promos and they were doing some quite ever things and, you know,
4:21
they were visually interesting. And so I went around a few
4:24
companies that worked on pop promos and I got a job at frame
4:29
store making coffee. And that was kind of how I
4:32
started. And I wasn't very good at
4:34
making. Well, I wasn't very good at
4:35
making tea because I didn't drink it.
4:38
So they promoted me instead. Yeah, people are very particular
4:42
about the tea, are there? Yeah, exactly.
4:45
Yeah, I started to work on adverts and things like that.
4:50
It was all short form because the computers in those days, we
4:53
used a computer, it's called a Harry made by Quantel.
4:57
It could store a minute and a half of video and this is old
5:02
small resolution TV resolution video.
5:07
It could only store a minute and a half and everything you tried
5:09
to do and if you wanted to change the colour, it would take
5:11
3 seconds before you anything changed.
5:14
And you had to change the colour on a shot before you if you were
5:18
keying it over onto another shot.
5:19
So combining 2 images, you'd have to change the colour and
5:23
then combine the two images and then go, oh, the colour's not
5:25
quite right. You'd have to go back, separate
5:27
them again, change the colour. And it was incredibly clunky
5:30
compared to what you can do on a mobile phone these days.
5:33
But you know that it cost £1,000,000 I think back then to
5:36
buy a Harry that was proper cutting edge technology, but
5:41
basic. So yeah, one of the people who'd
5:44
worked with us before on ATV programme was Duncan Kenworthy,
5:48
who was a producer, who he produced for Weddings and a
5:52
Funeral was the big thing he'd produced at the time and he was
5:57
producing Gulliver's Travels with Charles Stubborn.
6:00
So they came and yeah, we slightly naively said, yeah,
6:04
let's do it. And you know, they believed we
6:07
could and in the end we, we made it.
6:11
But it was it was quite a challenge.
6:13
But looking at your filmography, Tim, it looks like one of the
6:16
first features you worked on was as a visual effects supervisor
6:20
on Love Actually. Was that kind of a link from 4
6:24
Weddings in the Funeral to that? It there was absolutely, yeah.
6:27
It was the same producer again, Duncan Kenworthy, young
6:31
Gulliver's Travels with him. They were making love.
6:33
Actually, you know, they were. It was the same team that had
6:35
made 4 weddings, you know, a lot of the same people, Richard
6:40
Curtis. And that yeah, that was the
6:43
very, very early days of digital film being able to work on, you
6:50
know, films which were much a higher resolution were going to
6:53
be shown on the big screen. So the quality had to be that
6:55
much better. So again, a huge technical
6:58
challenge actually back then. I'd love, actually, it's a
7:02
little while since I've seen the film, but there's nothing that
7:04
jumps out as needing visual effects supervision.
7:07
So what were you covering on that?
7:10
Yeah, there was a huge amount. Another project we did with them
7:14
had something a little bit more interesting in it with the same
7:17
team. So Duncan Cameron, the producing
7:19
again, Richard Curtis wrote. It was Notting Hill and that was
7:24
interesting because there's one shot in that which people spoke
7:27
about and they came and talked to us and asked us about it for
7:30
many, many years later. I mean, it still comes up in
7:33
conversations with our clients and things and that's, it was
7:35
called the Seasonal walk. It's in the middle of Notting
7:38
Hill and it's a time passing moment.
7:41
Hugh Grant's character is walking down Portobello Rd.
7:45
Market and it goes through all the seasons of the year in one
7:48
shot. 1 long continuous shot. And so we had to shoot that as
7:53
separate elements because, you know, we shot a snowy bit and a
7:57
rainy bit and, you know, we had to shoot them all totally
7:59
separately and then join them together into what appears to be
8:02
1 long seamless shot. And it's, it's such a clever use
8:06
of visual effects and an interesting way to tell the
8:10
story. And it's, you know, it's a
8:11
lovely emotional moment that gets the message across about
8:15
time passing and his his transition from one mood to
8:19
another. And it it's just one of my
8:21
favorite shots that I've worked on so.
8:23
Yeah, I know the shot. It is a great shot.
8:25
It's very visual, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.
8:28
And seems to be around this time then maybe the mid 2000s of
8:31
things really took off for Frame store and yourself you were
8:34
visual effects supervisor on, among other titles, Harry Potter
8:37
and the Goblet of Fire, Children of Men, and then a mega
8:41
production, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.
8:43
So how did you come to be involved working on that?
8:45
Did Frame still have to pitch for the work?
8:48
Yes, Friends Door, like you say, around all of those films it was
8:51
getting bigger and bigger. Harry Potter was a big part of
8:55
what grew the film industry in London, I'd say, because there
8:59
was a regular supply of films and on each film there would be
9:03
a larger and larger amount of work.
9:06
So by the time we did the Goblet of Fire, there was a significant
9:10
amount. There was creatures and huge
9:11
environments and we were doing quite a lot of work.
9:13
And then we had a lot more capability and we were ready,
9:18
you know, to do more complicated films like The Dark Knight.
9:21
And that was also a big challenge is sort of again, it
9:25
was a step up in resolution because Christopher Nolan for
9:28
one of the first times, I think he really pushed the shooting on
9:31
IMAX. The whole film wasn't on IMAX,
9:33
but there were some big sequences on IMAX and some of
9:35
our sequences are out and the resolution you have to deal with
9:38
for that was huge. And it was, that was incredibly
9:40
challenging because we, we couldn't, even when we had the
9:44
scenes in the computer, you couldn't play them back at full
9:48
resolution. So when you wanted to view it
9:50
and check there wasn't anything going wrong, you'd have to play
9:53
the bottom left hand corner and then the bottom.
9:55
Really. And and and you know what?
9:58
Look at your work in bits and see if it was all it was, all
10:02
looking good or not. Is that because the equipment
10:04
hadn't quite caught up with IMAX at that point?
10:07
Exactly that, yeah, yeah, I mean to keep the quality of IMAX you
10:11
had to have I think we had 7.5 K images.
10:15
So if you think these days sort of TV tends to be 2K and then,
10:18
you know, done a lot of Netflix and stuff like that, it's 4K
10:21
that's high resolution. We were working at 7.5 K and it
10:24
and the, the number of pixels you have is proportional to that
10:28
number squared because that's the length in One Direction.
10:31
But you're, you know, if you double it in One Direction,
10:32
you're also doubling in that the other direction.
10:34
So you have 4 times as many pixels.
10:36
So huge number of pixels for the computers to have to deal with
10:40
the storage, the playback, everything was, was very, very
10:43
challenging. And of course, you know,
10:45
Christopher Nolan, one of his big driving things is to keep
10:49
everything very, very grounded in reality.
10:51
You know, that's something that's very close to my heart.
10:53
I love doing very believable, real feeling, photo real work
10:58
and he likes to, you know, do as much for real as possible and
11:02
only rely on visual effects when you absolutely have to, which is
11:05
something I totally agree with. I think, you know, the more you
11:08
can do real, the better. And even when you are having
11:11
then to do some visual effects, it will be more grounded in
11:15
reality because you've got some real things to base it off.
11:18
So, you know, that was a big part of what we were trying to
11:21
do. And as he said himself, one of
11:23
the few exceptions to his rule about trying to keep everything
11:27
grounded in reality actually was one of the big challenges we had
11:31
was the character Harvey Dent, who becomes 2 faced.
11:34
Of course, one side of his face is all burnt and scarred.
11:38
And, you know, Christopher Nolan realized that if you did that
11:42
too real, if it looked genuinely like a real scarred, horrible,
11:47
burnt face, that would not take for a good movie.
11:50
You know, it would take people out to the movie, they wouldn't
11:52
want to watch it, etcetera. So he said, this is the one time
11:56
where I want to do something a little bit fantastical.
12:00
But getting that balance between fantastical and real was quite
12:03
tricky because it still had everything else in the movie he
12:06
was trying to make as real as possible.
12:07
I mean, you know, even down to Batman being able to fly, he
12:11
can't fly. He can glide on his caves and
12:13
the mechanics behind it is all thought through and it makes
12:15
sense. It's there's kind of physical
12:17
reality behind it, so we had to fit in with all of that and for
12:22
it to feel real. But it was designed so that you
12:26
could see through to the muscles moving and you could see through
12:30
his teeth, through holes in his face.
12:32
And it was still pretty shocking, but it was sort of
12:35
over the top enough that you knew it wasn't kind of real, if
12:39
you see what I mean. And it made it a much more
12:42
enjoyable and fascinating film to watch.
12:44
It wasn't sort of purely horrible, I suppose.
12:48
So the process of getting involved in a production like
12:50
that, will Warner Brothers sort of put the feelers out to all
12:53
the visual effects studios saying we're looking for this
12:55
kind of thing, come and do a pitch for it.
12:58
Yeah, yes. Normally there is some sort of a
13:00
pitch involved unless you have a very good relationship with
13:04
people. So typically we do little bits
13:07
of artwork or we show tests, or we put together a reel of
13:11
previous work that is relevant. And we also nearly always have
13:15
to estimate the cost. You can do a budget for, you
13:19
know, all the key scenes or, you know, or the whole movie.
13:23
And then a combination of Warner Brothers and the director and
13:26
the producer will choose sometimes one, how to do all the
13:31
work on the bigger movies, particularly back then.
13:33
It's less true now, but back then they were too big for a
13:36
single visual effects company to do because you had to deliver it
13:40
all at the same time. And if you were delivering too
13:42
much stuff all in one go, it would be really hard work.
13:44
So they would spread it out across a few companies and, and
13:48
in those days, you know, they were, as I said, London was
13:51
becoming a really big visual effects centre.
13:53
So there was quite a few companies all based in Soho and
13:56
we were all kind of quite close together and and that was very
14:00
effective then when people wanted to split it across
14:02
different companies. Yes.
14:04
Your role on The Dark Knight was credited as visual effects
14:07
supervisor, frame store, and looking at the credits like you
14:10
kind of alluded to there, there was also a visual effects
14:12
supervisor, BUF, Visual effects supervisor, Double Negative, New
14:16
Deal Studios, Synesite. So there was quite a few studios
14:20
all working on the film at the same time.
14:22
Do you have a lot of overlap between what you work go on?
14:24
Do you do you speak to those guys?
14:26
Well, a little bit, yeah. So the other main company that
14:29
was doing it was double negative with Paul Franklin was the their
14:32
supervisor. And then there's there was one
14:35
overall supervisor, Nick Davis, who, you know, coordinated all
14:39
of us kind of thing. So there was two big companies
14:41
and then some other companies doing other bits.
14:45
So most of the work sort of is, is going through the overall
14:49
supervisor who coordinates us, but we also, then we also have
14:52
to work together a little bit. Generally it, you know, having
14:56
to work together is avoided as much as possible.
14:58
So, you know, trying to keep all the shots, you know, that we're
15:03
doing separate from all the shots that another company is
15:05
doing makes everyone's life much easier because trying to
15:09
coordinate and you're waiting for them to finish what they've
15:12
got to do on a shot. And, you know, they're waiting
15:14
for us to finish what we've got to do is unbelievably
15:17
complicated, much more complicated for some reason than
15:20
you think it would be. So, you know, it's usually a
15:23
case of, well, we'll try and separate it.
15:25
But obviously, you know, if another company was doing all
15:29
the backgrounds for a certain scene and then Harvey Dent
15:32
appears in that scene, we would have to do Harvey Dent, they
15:35
would have to do the background. And there are times when you
15:38
have to work together. Yeah, you you just have to try
15:41
and make that as effective as possible.
15:42
Then it's not. It's not easy, but but we get
15:45
that. So will frame store tasked with
15:47
handling specifically the Harvey Dent face CGI?
15:50
Was anything else other than that or was it mainly Harvey
15:52
Dent? There was some other various
15:54
other bits. Harvey Dent I'd say was the sort
15:57
of most complex and interesting bit we did.
16:00
But we had the scene in Hong Kong that this was 1 scene that
16:04
was shot on IMAX where he escapes from a building.
16:08
He flies off 1 building. It's the second.
16:11
Well, it was at the time, the second tallest building in the
16:13
world. I think he jumps off that and
16:14
flies into another building. I got to go and stand on the
16:17
corner that he stands on and the second tallest building in the
16:20
world, which was fantastic. Yeah, lovely.
16:22
Very scary. Much more scary than I thought
16:24
it was. I didn't jump off, so we had to
16:29
create a computer generated building so that he could smash
16:33
through the windows. Obviously we had to create him
16:35
flying through the air and the stuntman did.
16:38
This is a classic example of how Christopher Nolan tried to keep
16:41
stuff real. So a stuntman did do a jump knot
16:45
off that building. He was filmed at one point
16:48
standing on that corner of that building and then separate there
16:51
was a jump of him. Shots of him jumping off on blue
16:54
screen in the studio onto a crash mat.
16:57
So we had the reference of how he looked on the building.
16:59
We could make sure it looked exactly like that.
17:02
We started the shots with him actually jumping and then we
17:06
took that over and you know, as he flew around, we did ACG
17:11
human, which was pretty tricky back then.
17:13
So it was a combination of of different elements and and
17:17
that's what makes it feel more grounded in reality is having as
17:20
many of those bits as real as possible.
17:22
Of course. Yeah, I know.
17:23
I know the exactly the shot that you mean now.
17:25
I've never ever noticed that was a CGI Christian Bale.
17:28
Great. So that's what we like to hear.
17:33
So in terms of Christopher Nolan then, we've mentioned him quite
17:35
a few times, of course. How closely did you work with
17:38
him? Did you see him on the set
17:39
regularly? Reasonably closely, yeah.
17:43
The closer you can be to the director, the better.
17:45
There are times, you know, and they're very busy, so there are
17:49
times when sometimes you don't see very much of them, and that
17:54
is always the biggest challenge. Luckily, I, you know, we did get
17:57
enough direct contact with him to be able to do that one
18:01
successfully, even though it was a pretty big movie, so it was
18:04
challenging to get his time. It makes a big difference being
18:07
able to hear their thoughts. It's it's how it's being able to
18:11
understand the why of why they want to do something.
18:14
I mean, Christopher Allen is a really good example of this.
18:16
You hear that he wants to do something in a shot and you
18:19
think, oh, it's a bit strange. Why on earth do you want to do
18:21
that? I don't understand that.
18:22
You know, we'll try and do it. And then you get to talk to him,
18:25
and he explains not just what he wants to do, but the philosophy
18:29
behind why he wants to do it. And you suddenly go, oh, I see.
18:32
Yeah, of course, that makes total sense.
18:34
I see what he wants to do. I mean, some, you know, now I
18:36
understand why he wants to do it.
18:37
I can do what he wants to do. I can get what it is he really
18:40
wants because I understand the why of it.
18:42
And that makes a big difference. So yeah, direct contact is is.
18:47
I've seen quite a bit of behind the scenes footage on The Dark
18:50
Knight and some of that Christopher Nolan films as well,
18:52
and it always seems to be really, really relaxed.
18:55
I'm not sure if that's normal or if it's Christopher Nolan's
18:57
style or something like that, because I would think with his
19:00
kind of films being so precise, I would imagine him being quite
19:04
intense, but doesn't seem to be the case.
19:07
There's a sort of relaxed intensity.
19:09
I would say he's he is very precise.
19:11
He knows exactly what he wants and so there is an intensity
19:15
because he knows exactly what he wants.
19:17
But also because of that, everyone is focused on that one
19:21
thing. Everyone is working together.
19:22
I mean, for example, he tends not to shoot with multiple
19:25
cameras. So you're not sort of trying to
19:27
make something work from two different angles.
19:29
You know, everyone's focused on the one shot 1 camera.
19:32
He knows exactly what he wants and it's very, you know, he gets
19:37
what he wants much more. And here's a good example of his
19:39
philosophy. He's really thought through why
19:41
he wants to shoot on single cameras most of the time.
19:44
You know, he knows that you didn't get a much better view
19:48
through that camera, that he doesn't want to have endless
19:51
footage to look through in the edit.
19:52
He'd rather have the clarity of what you want.
19:54
You know, he, I mean, I'm, I'm probably mangling slightly his
19:58
philosophy for doing that from memory, but you know, he's
20:01
really thought through why he does that and it makes total
20:03
sense. There's a real, really strong
20:05
logic behind it. So he's a director who turns up
20:08
and everything's been thought through already.
20:10
He knows how we how they're going to do it, what we're going
20:11
to do. And I guess that's why it's so
20:13
relaxed, because there's no real stress of how we're going to do
20:16
this and that kind of thing. Yeah, well planned.
20:20
And to me that's a really critical part of making a movies
20:23
for it all to be well planned, everyone on the same page, but
20:27
planned in a way that allows for changes, fluidity, happy
20:32
accidents. But but if it's planned, you can
20:35
incorporate those. You know, the actor suddenly
20:37
goes I'd rather do this instead of that.
20:39
You know, that's what you want them to bring to it.
20:41
So you've got to make sure there is the room for that to happen.
20:45
And if it's well planned, it's actually easier for that to
20:48
happen because you know your parameters.
20:49
You can go, yeah, we can make that work.
20:51
Or if it's not well planned, you might think there's more
20:54
freedom. But I usually find there's just
20:57
more confusion, you know? So it's great to have the
21:00
planning, as long as you're planning to allow for the
21:03
fluidity, you know, the creative.
21:05
Fluidity well the year after the dark night you were visual
21:07
effects supervisor on where the wild things are and then a huge
21:11
visual effects movie in avatar groundbreaking digital effects
21:15
on avatar how did you come to be involved on that one we're.
21:20
Working on a few sequences in that there were the bits on the
21:24
alien planet where he's not in the land of the Navi, if I'm
21:27
pronouncing that correctly, where he's not in his avatar.
21:31
It's the more real looking stuff.
21:33
It's not the alien planet, blue creatures, which I slightly
21:37
jokingly said made our, made our work much harder because it had
21:41
to look absolutely real. It wasn't full of fancy colours
21:43
and blue alien creatures. I mean, what Wetter did, who did
21:47
all of that was, was phenomenal. That was amazing work and, and
21:50
was very, very complicated. There's a tiny bit of truth to
21:52
what I say, but not a huge amount.
21:55
But so yeah, we we were doing those sort of scenes.
21:58
So they they were often just we have one person on a blue screen
22:03
and everything else in the shot was created in the computer, but
22:07
had to look photo real because it was had to, you know, feel
22:10
like it was just a space station or, you know, a massive
22:14
warehouse of the robots, the neck suits or whatever.
22:18
And I came on to the show quite late because the supervisor who
22:22
had been doing it had to leave suddenly and wasn't well.
22:27
And so at that point it was in a tricky position.
22:31
But I'd say, you know, there was, there was not long to go
22:34
before delivery. And it was, there was an awful
22:36
lot of work to do. Things weren't going well at
22:38
that point. So it was a very, very
22:40
stressful. You know, Jamie Cameron is
22:42
someone else who knows exactly what he wants.
22:44
And there was a lot of pressure and we weren't in a good place
22:47
but, you know, to begin with. But we managed to sorted stuff
22:50
out and it was fascinating again to work with James Cameron
22:53
didn't get much contact with him because it was a huge, huge show
22:55
that one. But we, we did have some, we, we
22:58
did reviews with him and again, it was incredibly beneficial to
23:02
be hearing stuff directly from him as to what he wanted.
23:05
And we we managed to finish it off in the toughest few months
23:11
of of my life. Was that because of the
23:15
tightness of the deadlines? Yeah, absolutely.
23:18
It was. Yeah.
23:19
There was a lot to do in in a little in not much time left,
23:23
yeah. And James Cameron, another huge
23:26
directing name, has a reputation for being a bit intense on set.
23:31
Did you see much of that? Well, I didn't see him on set at
23:34
all because I only came on during post production and and I
23:38
had this, you know, fear. You know, when we sort of, when
23:41
we did calls with him of how intense he would be, he was, I'd
23:45
say it was intense, but it was great.
23:48
I thought it was really enjoyable working with him
23:51
because he does know what he wants.
23:54
He's very specific and precise and you can really get out of
23:58
him. You know, he's a good
23:59
communicator. And yeah, it was.
24:02
It was really enjoyable. So then another big visual
24:05
effects film came after Avatar, when in 2013 you were visual
24:10
effects supervisor on Gravity with director Alfonso Cuaron.
24:14
One of the jewels in Frame Store's crown, I think.
24:17
This one isn't it. I think so, yeah.
24:19
So how did you guys come to work on this film then?
24:23
No Frame Store had done a couple of films with Alfonso by this
24:27
point. 1 was a Harry Potter film.
24:30
The third one, I didn't work on that one, but then I worked with
24:34
him on Children of Men, which was another huge challenge.
24:38
Very, very tricky work in that we had to create a digital baby
24:42
and we had to do some very long shots, like the the birth of the
24:45
baby happens in a 4 1/2 minute continuous shot.
24:48
You know, had a good time working with him on that.
24:51
And so when he was writing Gravity, he came to us and we
24:58
sat with him. I'm still clearly remember
25:00
sitting with him in this small office, sitting on a couple of
25:03
sofas and and he spent 45 minutes just chatting through
25:07
what the story of the film was going to be about this woman in
25:10
space. And you know, a lot of it, she's
25:12
on her own in space. And it was fascinating just just
25:15
hearing him tell the story back then was left me breathless.
25:19
You know, I, I remember at the end of it just feeling kind of
25:23
exhausted as he, it was quite, quite intense.
25:27
And he at the time, kind of thought it was going to be quite
25:30
a quick and easy film to make. It was quite a short film.
25:35
He, he just, you know, envisioned we could just hang
25:39
astronauts in space suits from wires.
25:42
So it looked as though they were floating around, build little
25:45
bits of the space shuttle or the ISS.
25:48
And in visual effects, we would extend those, you know, to be
25:52
bigger. But the the thing about that
25:56
film is he took the film language did using children of
26:00
men of the long shot and he really lent into that.
26:04
So Gravity has a huge number of very, very long shots.
26:06
The opening shot is 12 1/2 minutes long.
26:09
The second shot is not much shorter.
26:11
At one stage they were all one shot actually.
26:14
So it's going to be 20 something minutes long.
26:17
Those two are huge. And I think 70% of the movie is
26:22
made-up of just 17 shots, though, you know, the 17 shots
26:26
all over a minute long. And if you just string those
26:28
together, that's 70% of the running time of the movie.
26:31
And that creating a long shot is complicated in so many reasons,
26:37
for so many reasons. It multiplies the complexity of
26:42
everything else you're doing. And making something feel
26:46
genuinely weightless is very challenging.
26:49
And you know, they've done it for Apollo 13.
26:51
But in Apollo 13 they'd, they had normal length shots so they
26:54
could shoot a little moment up in the vomit comet where someone
26:57
was genuinely floating and they'd cut the few seconds.
27:00
You can get the fat in with someone you know on a wire and
27:05
you wouldn't notice they were on a wire because it was just a
27:07
short shot or they were doing something while simple so you
27:10
didn't feel that they were on a wire.
27:12
Haven't you had the real weightless moment to go with
27:14
this? And you know, if it was a close
27:16
up, you could, you can do all sorts of easy things.
27:19
But we had to start with a massive, beautiful, wide Vista.
27:23
And then we had to come in very slowly and see George's
27:28
character flying around in a on a jet pack and Sandra's
27:31
character working on the Hubble, on the electronics of the
27:35
Hubble. And we had to come slowly put in
27:37
right up to an intense close up, more continuous performance and
27:41
then two shots of them working together and bolt photo and
27:45
camera continually choreographed beautifully because again,
27:49
without the ability to edit, you have to sort of edit your shots
27:53
in the camera move. So it has to be choreographed
27:55
perfectly and you can't make changes later.
27:58
You can't only say, oh, look, what happens if we make this a
28:00
bit quicker by cutting some stuff off.
28:02
You can't. You've just, you've got to move
28:03
the camera from there to there. This stuff's got to happen.
28:06
So that has to be planned incredibly well.
28:08
And then there's, you know, action, there's destruction,
28:11
there's everything kicks off and it's all mayhem.
28:14
You know, see, we've got to get all of those moments.
28:16
We've got to find a technique to make all of those moments work
28:19
in one continuous shot. And but you cannot do that by
28:23
hang hanging people on wires in space suits and moving the
28:26
camera around for, you know, it just that that wouldn't work.
28:29
And because of the continuous shock, the the audience is
28:32
examining what's going on much more intently, frankly, and
28:36
that, you know, anything that doesn't feel right, they will
28:38
notice much more. So in the end we decided to make
28:43
it largely CG basically to make the whole environment and the
28:49
astronauts, all of it in CG apart from their faces because
28:54
CG faces incredibly challenging. They still are incredibly
28:57
challenging. Very hard to not fall into the
28:59
uncanny valley. So that was the decision and and
29:03
that kind of led to a whole load of other challenges.
29:07
Well, yeah, I know that from speaking to you before Tim, and
29:10
from doing research myself, that there were loads of technical
29:12
challenges on gravity. I know there was a device
29:15
created called the Light Box to help with the anti gravity
29:19
scenes and shooting faces and that kind of thing.
29:21
You tell us a bit about that, how that came about.
29:24
Absolutely, yeah. So we tried to think of a number
29:27
of ways to film the faces because the tricky thing when
29:31
you're making everything in CG, or pretty much everything in CG
29:35
really is when you then film the face.
29:38
You need to make sure the actor can feel as if they've got the
29:42
right stuff around them. So they know what they're
29:44
performing. You know, they know what's
29:45
around them where they're, you know, you also need to make sure
29:48
that the lighting around them is correct.
29:50
So we had to have the sun. That's straightforward.
29:54
You just get a traditional light, you pointed at them
29:56
that's like the sunlight. But then you also have this
29:59
very, very large banks light coming off the Earth because the
30:03
Earth fills half of the horizon almost when you're in low Earth
30:07
orbit. And it has lots of different
30:09
colours all over it. It has white clouds and blue sea
30:11
and stuff. So that has a lot of complexity
30:15
to it, and it's huge. And then you add to that that
30:18
these lights have to move around the actor because as the actor
30:23
is in theory, rotating, spinning around, flying around, whatever
30:27
they're doing in space, we can't necessarily spin the actor
30:31
around. We can't dangle them upside
30:33
down. It will be uncomfortable, it'll
30:35
look uncomfortable, it won't look like they're being
30:36
weightless. So we had to keep the actor
30:38
relatively still and move the camera around them and the
30:41
lights around them. And kind of the first solution
30:44
we had to that which we did use was to move the camera.
30:48
We put the camera on a car assembly robot.
30:51
There was a small company in San Francisco who were doing their
30:54
own little pieces called Auto Fuss.
30:56
They were doing their own little pieces where they put the camera
30:59
on a car assembly robot so that they could move it in
31:02
interesting ways. And Christopheria, the studio
31:05
executive had come across them and, you know, we all got in
31:08
contact and we work with them to increase the capabilities of
31:13
that, A, to be able to move the camera in ways that we needed
31:17
to, which was slightly different to what they needed, but B, to
31:19
be able to move the lights as well.
31:21
So we, you'd put the sunlight on one robot, a massive bounce for
31:26
the earth on another robot, and the camera on another.
31:28
We had these three robots, you know, moving around the actors
31:33
as the shot progressed. But that's quite cumbersome
31:36
having three car assembly robots moving around with, you know,
31:38
with the huge lights on them and everything.
31:40
It, you know, they bumped into each other if you wanted to do
31:42
certain things and stuff. So it didn't work for
31:44
everything. So then the next concept was the
31:48
idea was to create the light box, as you say.
31:50
So that was basically it was a cube big enough for Sandra or
31:56
George to get in. And we could, we had a device
31:59
that allowed us to move them in certain ways.
32:02
We still had the camera on the car assembly robot so it could
32:05
move around in certain ways. But on the inside of this box
32:09
was LED screens like you have, well, in those days, you have a
32:14
lot of them at the back of pop concerts, you know, giant
32:18
screens. But we made, you know, all of
32:20
the screens pointing in on the box.
32:23
They were quite low resolution back then.
32:25
They had sort of, you know, separate individual dots for LE
32:29
DS. These days they're much higher
32:31
resolution, but it enabled us to put an image on these LE DS and
32:36
they were just bright enough to be able to light the character
32:41
with all of the bounce light from the Earth or the bounce
32:44
light. For example, you know, if if
32:47
Sandra was flying towards the ISS and about to grab onto it,
32:51
we could put an image of the ISS on the screen and make it get
32:54
bigger and bigger and closer and closer to higher.
32:56
And it would give us give you the like pouncing off the ISS on
33:00
her face and and she could also see it coming towards her.
33:04
So she understood what was happening and how she had to
33:07
perform. We still had to do a traditional
33:10
light for the sunlight because the LEDs weren't bright enough
33:13
for that. So we had the traditional light
33:14
in there being moved around by hand and these images playing
33:18
back, you know, complex images playing back on the on the
33:22
screens, moving around them to get the environment so that
33:26
their faces would fit into the CG that that we were creating
33:32
later. We designed the lighting we
33:35
previoused, which is like a low res animation of that.
33:38
We did that for the whole movie so that we could plan it and
33:42
design it. And then we did a pre light with
33:44
Chilo, the cinematographer of of the movie so that the lighting
33:48
was planned before we even got on stage.
33:51
So that the lighting, then you'd, you'd know how the
33:56
lighting for the whole shot was going to look, even though
33:58
you're just filming a face, you know, you were doing it in a way
34:01
that would work for the whole shot.
34:03
And that was much better than what people often do.
34:08
Or certainly back then is they'd go and they'd light the face and
34:10
then they'd try and make everything else fit that and you
34:13
can't do it. It's a real struggle.
34:14
But so we did it that way around which was more effective and
34:18
their faces would just fit very naturally into the CG.
34:22
And we still had to do some work to make it all balanced
34:24
etcetera. But it was much, much easier to
34:26
fit them into the CG and create these long, continuous shots.
34:31
Well, that sounds like a genius invention.
34:33
A genius idea. The light box.
34:35
Is that something that's now become a bit of an industry
34:37
standard if other people adopted that as well?
34:40
Well, the box and you know, using in exactly the way we did
34:45
was has been done since, but is only really worth it for certain
34:51
shows, often shows set in space, you know, certain shots.
34:55
But people have taken the basic idea and as the technology of
34:59
the screens has developed, you can get much higher resolution
35:03
screens now. So now people build a whole and
35:06
they're much cheaper than they were back then.
35:08
People build a whole stage and we've done this as well out of
35:12
LED screens and you know, you can have people acting wandering
35:15
around on a stage surrounded by the LED screens.
35:19
Again, you've got the lighting environment you need, but the
35:22
resolutions to the screens is good enough.
35:24
Now that what you film, you can actually, if you put the correct
35:28
image on the screen behind the actor, you can film the whole
35:31
shot in camera. It's called in camera visual
35:33
effects. So you're generating live the
35:36
image that goes behind the actor and you film the actor with that
35:40
behind them and you get the shot in camera.
35:42
They're a problems and limitations to doing that.
35:46
But yeah, it's, you know, as the technology has moved on, you you
35:50
can do a lot of it. We we sort of almost did some in
35:53
camera, an in camera shot on gravity.
35:56
In the end, there sort of is 1 where the camera goes right,
35:59
right close into Sandra's eye and you can see the Earth as
36:05
she's spinning around at this point rotating and you can see
36:08
the earth reflected in her eye. And that is purely off the light
36:12
box. And because of the reflection,
36:15
the resolution is fine. You know, we get away with it.
36:17
So in ways that was the first in camera visual effects shot, I
36:20
suppose. But yeah, but on the whole,
36:24
yeah, the the screens were too were too low resolution to make
36:27
that work back then. For talking about Alfonso
36:30
Cuaron, you said before Tim that he came in with certain
36:33
expectations how he might make the film.
36:35
And then obviously they were blown apart pretty quickly, I
36:37
would imagine. So how was he to work with?
36:39
That must have been a very collaborative relationship I
36:41
would imagine then between him and everybody.
36:44
It was, it was, it was very collaborative.
36:47
You know, as as I was saying earlier, it's great the closer
36:49
you work with the director. We work very, very closely with
36:51
him. He he had his office enough on
36:54
our floor that we were on in our building so that he could be
36:58
close to what we were doing because no one had ever made a
37:02
film that way before. It involved a lot closer
37:05
collaboration between me and Chivo particularly.
37:09
It was fantastic working with Chivo Emmanuel Lubetzky to give
37:13
him his full name. He, he is a genius
37:16
cinematographer and I learnt so much of working with him.
37:20
And you know, all the departments, production design,
37:23
costume were designing things that were never physically made.
37:27
We were just creating them in the computer.
37:29
So it was a different relationship to normal.
37:31
And because it was different, everyone had to work much more
37:33
closely together because you don't just have the normal
37:36
established lines of communication that people have
37:39
worked out for 10s of years and they know how it goes, etcetera,
37:43
etcetera. It was different.
37:44
We had to be much more tightly involved and much more
37:47
collaborative, and that's one of the reasons Gravity was
37:51
unbelievably challenging, but the most satisfying film to work
37:54
on because I was at the heart of the film making process in every
37:57
way. And it took us three years, but,
38:00
you know, three years of being very, very involved in
38:02
everything about the film, and that was really very satisfying.
38:07
Two huge movie stars in this one as well in George Clooney and
38:10
mainly Sandra Bullock in the lead.
38:12
How were they to work with on the film?
38:14
They were both great. We were very lucky, I'd say, to
38:17
have those because we had to get our cast to do some, you know,
38:21
unusual things and to work in unusual circumstances.
38:25
George was very relaxed and very entertaining on set.
38:29
And you know, that that made life much easier than if he'd
38:35
been a different personality. And Sandra was incredibly
38:39
willing to, you know, I mean, she had to, she had to spend
38:42
half her time in the light box as or Sandra's cage as it got
38:46
dubbed at one point. And she actually said in some
38:50
ways it was quite good because she was isolated in this box
38:52
from everyone on this through and you know, it's a bit like
38:56
being isolated in space. So she, she used it to help her
38:59
get performance, but she had to do that and put her on this
39:01
thing called the 12 wire rig, which was like we were puppeting
39:05
her. We, we could move a little sort
39:06
of minute, the model of Sandra around, sort of tilt it, swing
39:11
it, slide it along. And that the computer would then
39:14
control the wires that she was suspended from and replicate the
39:18
movement we were doing on her. And she was dangling from this
39:22
rig and this was mainly for the shots inside the ISS where she's
39:26
sort of floating down the corridor and, you know, she had
39:29
to act as if she was pushing herself that it was that that
39:31
was moving her along. But actually we were.
39:34
But so all of that had to be coordinated.
39:36
Incredibly complex marks for her to hit in three-dimensional
39:41
space, not just a mark on the floor like normal actors have to
39:44
deal with, you know, 3 dimensional space, different
39:45
angles, etcetera, mining certain things.
39:48
And she did that. I still can't believe how
39:52
incredibly well she did all of that.
39:54
And then on top of that, gave a great performance.
39:57
Very, very impressed by how she managed to do that.
40:00
She is fantastic in the film. One bit of trivia that I heard,
40:03
Tim, which kind of blew my mind if it's true, was that the
40:06
effects work that you guys did was so complex that the whole
40:09
film, if they'd been rendered by one machine, would have taken
40:12
7000 years to render. That that's, I can't remember
40:17
the exact number, but it was it was it was the beginning of when
40:20
they started to build the pyramid.
40:21
So that probably. Isn't that?
40:23
That sounds about right though. Yeah, it's certainly a few
40:25
thousand. Yeah, Yeah, it, it was, it was a
40:29
lot of rendering. And actually, you know, we
40:31
talked about sort of the innovations we had to create to
40:34
be able to shoot it, but we also had to use a whole different
40:37
rendering technology that had been not used barely at all up
40:43
to this point, you know, and we had to make a big change at
40:45
Frame store. And I kind of knew at the
40:47
beginning that it was not physically accurate rendering.
40:51
And you could make stuff look photo real, but you had to do a
40:55
lot of human work to balance things to get the feeling of
40:58
bounce light, the subtle little bit.
41:00
It wasn't very good at creating. And those make a huge
41:03
difference. So you don't notice them,
41:05
obviously, but it just feels wrong if they're not there or
41:08
not correct. So I, I knew that was going to
41:11
be a problem. And the technology team at
41:13
Framestore worked very, very hard to find this new renderer
41:17
and to re engineer the whole set of the systems at Framestore so
41:21
that we could use this new renderer and render it using
41:24
that. But it then took a lot of
41:26
rendering, a lot of computers to get through it.
41:29
And you were nominated for and won an Oscar for Best Visual
41:32
Effects for Gravity. What accolade?
41:34
So how are the Oscars? And they were great.
41:38
It was the second time I'd been first, first time I'd won.
41:41
I'd been for The Dark Knight, which was fascinating.
41:45
It's more fun if you win, but it's fun either way.
41:49
It was such a big night for Gravity because Gravity won a
41:53
lot of Oscars that evening. So it was lovely for the whole
41:57
team to be having such a great time, you know, very enjoyable.
42:02
And, and the Oscars, it's interesting to see the occasion,
42:06
you know, I, I, I've been to the Baftas a lot and, and that's
42:09
grand and I love the Baftas, it's great.
42:12
But the Oscars is so much bigger And it's like, you know, you
42:16
don't realise how much bigger it is until you're there.
42:19
And it's just huge as an event. The thing that sums up for me is
42:23
when you're walking down the red carpet and there's one side is
42:26
decorated all lovely because that's the side the cameras are
42:29
on the other side looking at the one side that's all nice and
42:32
you're walking down the red carpet.
42:34
The other side is just all the cameras and it's a mess and you
42:37
know, it's all done for the cameras.
42:40
It's quite funny like that. And actually because the visual
42:44
effects was such an integral part of Gravity to get a lot of
42:47
the attention. Normally visual effects is
42:49
slightly ignored at events like the Oscars, frankly, you know,
42:52
it's just sort of not not of any interest.
42:54
This was, I think it was one of the rare occasions where we got
42:58
a lot of the attention and that was, that's great.
43:01
Well, leading off from that little bit, something I've
43:03
always found a little bit strange is how a lot of visual
43:06
effects studios don't become really well known.
43:09
I mean, you've got like say ILM, maybe that's about it.
43:11
You mentioned Weta before, but like, great, some of them are
43:14
greatest and most ground breaking effects films of recent
43:16
years. And I think even most movie fans
43:18
probably wouldn't know who they are necessarily.
43:20
And why is that, do you think? Why do effects teams become
43:23
unsung heroes? I, I think there's a few
43:26
reasons, but it's a really good point.
43:28
I mean, one is the work is done by a lot of people.
43:32
It's very much teamwork and you know, it's a company doing the
43:36
work and people latch onto individuals more easily.
43:40
That makes it less personal and therefore there's less interest
43:43
from the audience. I'd say we come along in
43:46
people's minds, we come along at the end and and it's computers
43:49
that do everything. Actually, we're involved from
43:52
the very beginning, from the very initial bit of planning.
43:55
We're involved in the shoot. And it's not computers that do
43:59
it. It's artists that do it who use
44:00
computers as as a tool, you know, where it's teams and teams
44:04
of incredibly talented craftspeople and artists working
44:08
on it. So, you know, recently there's
44:10
been quite a lot of people talking about, oh, there's no
44:13
visual effects in this. We've tried to avoid visual
44:16
effects and, you know, tried to do it for real.
44:18
And which as I said before, you know, I fully into that
44:22
philosophy up to a point, but it's almost become like visual
44:25
effects is a bad thing. And I think that's a shame
44:29
because it's a lot of work. It's not true that there's no
44:32
visual effects in a lot of these films where people are talking
44:35
like that and we did 1500 shots on them.
44:37
And you know that the work that goes into it, the love and the
44:40
care and the artistry that goes into it from a big team of
44:43
people working very, very hard is is huge.
44:47
What do you think as well, Tim? Because with visual effects,
44:49
say, unlike say music, say, John Williams, a big name, the better
44:53
the work he does, the more you notice them in the film.
44:56
Visual effects. The better your work is, the
44:59
less you notice you in the film. That that's a very good point,
45:02
yes And yeah, a lot of work is 100% like that.
45:07
You know, when, when you're doing in what we call invisible
45:11
effects, you know, so we might be working in a romantic comedy
45:14
or a, you know, period drama. And if you see our work at all,
45:19
we, we've done a really bad job, you know, so you should not know
45:22
there's any visual effects in it.
45:23
But even when we're doing, say, a creature like Rocket Raccoon
45:27
or Paddington, if you're thinking about the visual
45:30
effects, it's not a good job. People know it's, you know,
45:33
there's no bear talking in the shots.
45:35
They know there's visual effects in there, but hopefully they're
45:38
just engaging with him as a character and, you know, being
45:41
carried along. And I think that's a good point.
45:44
Yeah. The better job we do, the less
45:45
people notice us. Yeah.
45:47
And to finish it off, Tim, I have some more general quick
45:50
fire style questions, if that's all right.
45:53
So of all the directors you've worked with, mentioned some
45:56
really big names, who was your favorite to work with?
46:00
Oh, that would be, that would be unfair to say, but I, I would
46:03
have to say I think I'd actually Alfonso, because, you know, he,
46:07
he is a real genius, as many of them are, I'd say, but he is a
46:13
real genius. He's you know, he does, he
46:15
pushes things forwards. I get to work very closely with
46:19
him. You know, the level of
46:21
expectations of the quality he wants is incredibly high.
46:25
He's not satisfied just to go the easy way and he, you know,
46:29
he's always looking to do something different and he makes
46:32
great films, you know, so. I think you may have answered
46:36
this one already, but of the films you've worked on, which
46:39
film are you most proud of the effects on?
46:42
Well, that kind of has to be gravity.
46:44
I mean, I think for obvious reasons, you know, it would.
46:47
Yeah, it would be that. I mean the other one I still
46:50
look back on and really enjoy is and you know, what we achieved
46:58
with what we had back then is actually phenomenal I'd say.
47:01
And that's a nice little 2 films.
47:04
Very satisfying too. Great, and finally, if there's
47:07
any aspiring visual effects artists listening to us, what
47:11
would your top tip be on getting into the industry?
47:14
It's really hard and it's a very different industry to when I got
47:17
into it, you know, when I got in, started making coffee and
47:20
you know, but then I, I got in and I just, I, I, I had to do
47:24
everything. I was a one man band on anything
47:27
I was working on pretty much. I mean, when, when on all the
47:29
adverts. So I learned about being on set,
47:32
I learned about compositing, I learned about CGI, learned about
47:35
stop frame animation because I, you know, I'd be involved with
47:38
stuff, you know, all sorts of things.
47:40
And even when we did Gulliver's Travels, that was pretty much
47:42
just a team of two. We did hundreds of shots and it
47:45
was me and another visual effect supervisor.
47:47
But he is another visual effect supervisor now, William
47:49
Bartlett. And it was just the two of us.
47:51
So you really learnt a lot. These days it's very
47:54
specialised. People come in and they're a
47:56
modular or a texture artist or a matte painter or a animator, you
48:02
know, so and they're coming out from university having trained
48:06
in that specialism. And you know, we have 20 or so
48:10
different departments of friends to all of them specialized in
48:12
what they do. So understanding the bigger
48:14
picture, which is what enables you to do great work and move on
48:19
is hard when you go in in with that speciality.
48:21
And, and it's hard when you're going into the industry to know
48:26
which speciality is right for you.
48:29
You know, my advice is just get in, I would say and look around
48:33
and don't get into the specialization too soon until
48:36
you've looked at the range of options that are there and in
48:40
your early days particularly, but this is true all the way
48:41
through. Try and understand the big
48:44
picture. Try and understand what the
48:45
departments around you are doing and why.
48:47
It will make what you do better and more suitable.
48:50
Try and understand film making, try and understand art and music
48:56
and things because they all affect what you do.
48:59
You know, you know, so focused on the bigger picture, you need
49:02
to be good at the specific expertise you have, but it's
49:06
also important to understand the bigger picture.
49:09
Great advice. Well, Tim Webber, thank you very
49:12
much for joining me. Thank you.
49:14
That's been a pleasure. And that's our chat with Tim
49:18
Webber. Some fascinating insights there
49:19
into the visual effects that make some of our favorite films.
49:22
So hopefully you've enjoyed it. If you did enjoy it, you may
49:26
already be aware that we have a regular podcast show, ATRM
49:29
Classic, where three of us do deep dives into classic and hit
49:33
films with some big opinions and laughs as we go.
49:37
You can also support what we do by becoming In All the Right
49:39
Movies Patron. As a Patron, you'll get access
49:42
to our full archive of ATRM Classic episodes and access to
49:45
our Patron Only episodes. You can sign up for all of that
49:49
by visiting patreon.com/all the Right Movies.
49:53
Or if you're an Apple Podcast listener, you can access the
49:56
archive by subscribing directly on Apple Podcasts.
49:59
Just look for the Subscribe button.
50:01
We also have social media accounts across Twitter or X
50:05
TikTok, YouTube, Instagram threads, and the Facebook group.
50:08
So search for all the right movies across all of those
50:11
platforms and visit alltherightmovies.com for more
50:14
ATR movie content. That's about it for now though.
50:17
Thanks for listening and please come back next time.