"The easier it is to send things back and forth, the better it is," says Santa Barbara Studios digital compositing supervisor John Carey, who just last week completed his company's final shots for Spawn's 1 August opening. Santa Barbara is one of a half-dozen effects houses on two continents contributing to the film, and since each has its own methods of production - some involving proprietary software and techniques - that ease of data transmission can be hard to come by.
"As the production kept adding effects shots, they had to add houses," Carey says. This is a common situation late in the production of many films, sometimes due to over-optimistic planning by producers, sometimes caused when those producers are so pleased with the results of scheduled effects shots that they add more. Some effects-driven films are planned as distributed efforts from the get-go. James Cameron's scheduled fall film, Titanic, for instance, now involves a dozen shops, and Batman & Robin used about 10.
Of the challenges in coordinating the image-data between all these team members, Carey says, "It's not a technology problem; it's a cultural thing." Despite the variety of digital equipment and methods, "there are certain de facto standards; you don't want to invent everything." There are a handful of off-the-shelf imaging tools that any effects house can buy and learn to use. Theoretically, therefore, it should be fairly simple to find a common format to work in.
The problem, says Carey, is that "most special-effects companies are little islands," more used to competing than collaborating. "A lot of your competitive edge is in your proprietary software," he adds. In the early days of digital effects, companies had to invent processes to achieve the effects they wanted. Though most of those effects can now be managed with commercial software, the houses that originated them feel the need to protect their capital investment.
Carey says, for instance, that some of the early files Santa Barbara received from Industrial Light and Magic were in a nonstandard SGI format unreadable on his viewer, and that he wasn't allowed to use ILM's viewers. Instead, he says, ILM supplied him with information allowing him to translate the image to a format he could display.
"It's almost like a loophole," Carey explains. "They gave me everything I needed to break the code, but they wouldn't give me the code-breaker." Ironically, he says, with the information he got, he now knows how to build both the image files and the viewer. Whereas, "if they had just sent the viewer, I wouldn't have either."
"You have to find a common ground," says Christophe Hery, ILM's associate visual effects supervisor on Spawn. He says the problem was that Santa Barbara's staff was unable to display the agreed-upon TIFF files on their monitors, so ILM re-sent the data in the SGI format along with gray-scale information that would allow Santa Barbara to "adjust their monitor and see what we were seeing." In the end it didn't matter that much how well Santa Barbara could read the images, he says, since they were the ones building the final composites and thus had to make the final color correction anyway.
Indeed, since Santa Barbara was constructing the digital environments in which much of Spawn's action takes place, most of the responsibility for making formats line up fell to them. "We became the de facto referee," Carey explains, doing things like converting uncompressed images sent in from a Japanese company into MPEG files to be transmitted to other effects houses.
In this capacity, Carey also indulged in a little tech protection of his own. When trading a Softimage database that would allow the lighting from Santa Barbara's environments to be used on CGI characters created by other houses, Santa Barbara stripped out data about its shaders and textures. "We didn't really feel like we needed to share that," he says. But, he asserts, streamlining the database was done as much to make it run faster as to protect any secrets.
One industry insider, however, says that even without problems of translation, it might be better for productions to count on an established, one-stop effects house to do all the work on a film, reducing the chances of cost overruns and quality inconsistencies.
In the case of Spawn, Carey stresses that all the artists involved were as cooperative as their legal protocols allowed and that the collaboration was a boon for each of the companies. Any snafus, he says, were just part of the systematic hurdles that cooperating companies have to work around in the industry's current state, not any stubbornness of the artists themselves.
Moreover, even these hurdles may be coming down. Digital Domain, for instance, is said to have provided one of its subcontractors with proprietary technology to use on the effects shots it is supplying for Titanic. And the successful completion of Spawn itself should go a long way toward changing attitudes, says Carey. All the companies ended up with all the information they needed, he says, and "there's been no compromise in their securities."
