72 - Van Ling "DVD Extra" - Banned from the Ranch Entertainment

Welcome to this DVD extra type episode number seventy two. Here's my conversation with Van Ling, the guest on episode seventy one, talking about his time at the fabled Band from the Ranch Entertainment. I hope you enjoyed this little extra bonus episode, and for once, I won't be back at the end for a bit more jambering on. Have a good day. So Van, tell me about Banned from the Ranch Entertainment.

Where's the name from? What are the circumstances under which that company began? This is a really interesting story. Banned from the Ranch basically is the company of my partner, Casey Cannon, and it's not only tied up into ILM, but it's also tied into me through my relationship ship with ILM, which was initially as obviously as a fan, but primarily the fact that I was working at James Cameron's company, Light slight Storm Entertainment during this During this period and sometime around nineteen ninety, the name Van for the Ranch came up because of an incident that actually happened at Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas's Ranch, which I'm sure you've covered in in other things. In talking with the culprits Spaz Williams for one and Mark de Pay the other.

Mark de Pay was a friend of Casey's. Mark Depay introduced me to Casey Cannon over the nineteen ninety Christmas season because we were in the middle of a shooting Terminator two and I had gone up to visit relatives in the Bay Area and Mark invited me over to ILM to actually go and see, you know, see him and check out, check out what was going on. And Casey knew Mark because she used to work in the computer graphics division at ILM. She worked in the pits, so she was good friends with both Mark and Spats. And if I remember correctly, this incident had already happened.

The band from the Ranch incident where they trespassed them to George's office at the Ranch and were subsequently unable to be fired because they were key creatives on Terminator two, so they ended up being banned from attending any of the events or parties or picnics or anything on the Skywalker Ranch for a year. I never found this out until years later, because of course this was something that was not generally put out there. So I met Casey at ilm over Christmas and we kind of hit it off, but didn't didn't really start hanging out because she was up north and I was down South for a couple of at least a year or two. So we we ended up being introduced by Mark dupay and she asked me to work on a concert video she was working on at the time, because she had also had ties with Sony Music and some of the other music because she was she was into the music scene a bit.

What was interesting was she was at the famous band for the Ranch incident and had left before they had done the trespassing, but when she heard about what happened to them, she thought it was so funny to be banned the Ranch that she said, if I ever start a company, I'm going to call it Banned for the Ranch. And that's exactly what she did. She came down to Los Angeles, she moved down and we started working together, and she actually produced the Terminator to special edition LaserDisc for me, and so she would hang around the Lightstorm office and work with us and do various things. So that's kind of how that process started. And we were reaching this point in nineteen ninety two where the industry was changing.

And I had been at Lightstone for around seven or eight years at this point, working on several Gym's movies. And the thing about it is it's a fantastic experience, but he only does one every three or four years because they're so big. And we were watching the visual effects industry change and morph part in the expression overnight in terms of how things could be done and what can be done, and this is this is the big thing. Um. I was so fortunate, because of Jim to be able to basically be on the ground floor of the the rise of computer graphics and what they could do for the visual effects industry.

And that was an amazing process. I had served on the AFI Apple Committee in town to try to figure out the use of you know, promote the use of computer graphics and computers in general in the film industry, you know, as a kind of representative through you know, Jim's company and a number of things. So I really was seeing how things could be done and how in editing it took off, of course, with the Avid and the light works and so on, and so it was. It was very interesting to me, and obviously it would be fantastic to can keep working with Jim, but things were changing and growing and he was only doing a film every three years. And I had a meeting with him and talked to him about and he said to me, he gave me some advice.

He said, you know, if you if you want to get more into visual effects, you should, you know, maybe think about taking up residence over at Digital Domain, which you know, his company that he had started with Stan Winston and Scott Ross, and I knew all the players and everything, and he said, you know, you start and trying to work on doing visual effects or beato graphics, you know, instead of you know, just working as as my you know, head of production here. Um. And the other option is, if you want to get into directing, which I would completely understand, you need to get more on set experience. You need to be on more sets. And I'm really you know, not sets, you know, you know, very often when I'm working on since I'm working on my own projects.

And that was only happened every few years. And so I kind of took his advice and combined the best of both worlds and I found a niche where I could do computer graphics work on set, and that was partially through Casey as well, and she started banned from the Ranch Entertainment and the first things we were doing was computer graphics design and creation for use on set for on set playback. So the first film that that she worked on in this capacity was doing graphics and stuff in Michael Kuta's department for Star Trek Generations, and I did some design work and stuff as well, and that seemed to be an interesting, interesting way to go. So we next got on a movie called Congo, which was Frank Marshall's version adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel.

And so we were working with Kennedy Marshall, and they wanted to do real computer graphics on the screen as opposed to what the traditional method of showing computer screens in movies at that point was to use televisions and just you know, playback canned graphics that were created, and that works only to a certain point, because, of course it's only a low television resolution, which here in the States is seven twenty by four eighty and computers or a course at least double that resolution. And they wanted to do it right. And since Kennedy Marshall had just done Jurassic Park, with Spielberg, and they had a product placement deal with Silicon Graphics, which was the company that made pretty much all the graphics computer workstations and systems that were used to do all of the computer graphics, the heavy duty computer graphics in the industry from you know Abyss and Terminator two in Jurassic and so on.

They decided they wanted to do that same kind of product placement, but this time instead of it just there, instead of just running the Unix operating system on the screens, you know, as they famously did in Jurassic Park, they wanted custom graphics created for you know, monitoring screens and all sorts of things to kind of reflect the way that things are going in the real world. And so they hired us to do all the graphic screens. And one of the guys who worked with them and Silicon Graphics on Jurassic Park, Mike Backus, whom I had known from earlier. We had we had done a few things back in the Abyss days, brought us on, suggested us and Kathy and Frank said great, and so we ended up working on Congo and the challenge with Congo, because of course it had the infamous big computer center with all the monitoring and satellite companies and all that kind of stuff, apart from the dozens of screens that had to have graphics on them.

The DP on the film Congo was Alan Davio, who et and amazing, amazing cinematographer, but he had a very specific idea of how to shoot computer monitors because he would say, I don't want to have to re light and change the color temperature of my entire scene just to accommodate the fact that the computer monitors always come out blue because of the color temperatures of the monitors. I want them to be able to I want to be able to shoot normally as and light the people the way I would normally light the people, and just have the computer screens match up to the rest of the scene as opposed to the other way around. And so we had to figure out a way to get the computer screens to actually come in really, really orange so that they could match up.

And that was a big technical issue because computer monitors they never looked at that kind of thing, and so all monitors come out very, very blue because that's the way you get the brightest image. And so everything had a blue cast to it, and we had to figure out a way to work with the folks at Silicon Graphics to come up with a method of being able to control the color temperature of the screens. And so there's a lot of testing and we had to have special little utilities written and all sorts of things to be able to do this. But it was great because we were able to work very very closely with the folks at Silicon Graphics, and to that end, we ended up doing four or five films with Silicon Graphics as the vendor that they wanted if they were going to be product placed in a show where they wanted to see graphics on the screen.

We had this thing where they would always suggest and recommend us because we're the ones who knew how to make their screens look good and quite difficult. I would imagine that that challenge of kind of not only having to do with the requirements of the DP, but also making something that's interesting visually interesting on a screen that doesn't kind of take people out of the picture, because that that often happens, doesn't it in a movie when they've got the simple playback method where you think they're not clearly not interacting with that, and that's not what a computer looks like, and why is it making all these noises and things that are added on in post production. So quite a challenge to kind of come up with a user interface and a design that isn't out of place.

It's really it is really a challenge because obviously, you know, you're you're trying to do more than just put pretty moving things on a screen, if you're trying to help the story. And one of the things I learned, you know, through my career was it all comes down to story. You either have to be telling the story or at least not distracting from the story. And so it became really important for me as a as a graphic designer in those in that capacity to really go through the script and try to figure out what it is and more importantly, find out what it would be like for real and kind of maybe make it a little more sexy to look at while while still you know, being being logical as opposed to just a bunch of stuff moving around.

And so coming from a coming from a research interested research background and science stuff, I loved diving into each of those shows, the shows that we had worked on in this capacity were Congo, Twister, the Relic Dante's Peak, and so it was fantastic for me because on Twister, I was able to go to the National Severe Storms Laboratory and see what their graphics were, and more importantly asked them, Okay, if you had the ability, what do would you really want to be able to see on these screens? You know, because a lot of cases the computing power wasn't that great, and so they had to you know, okay, we have one program that just looks at precipitation and one that just looks at you know, wind speed and wind direction and saw on.

And so I would kind of get a wish list from the meteorologists on that show or the vulcanologists on the next show and try to figure out, okay, what would your dream screen be, and then have to balance that with what will the audience understand? And so it was a it was a really fun time for us at Banned for the Ranch, and it wasn't just a matter of creating the graphics because they wanted us to do the playback on set, and for Congo it was mostly on a sound stage, so you know, setting up a lot of computers making it look like, you know, here's a communications company that has all sorts of different tech things going on. It wasn't really about that. We had to do a couple of video playback kind of things that were done through the computer, which was a challenge in itself because SGI prides itself on its high resolution, which means they don't blow things up, and so they could not fill a screen with a video image without special software.

Because their whole thing was we do really high resolution and video befo, we're going to show video, We're going to show it at its native resolution, which means it's only a quarter of the screen. It was. It was some interesting kind of backward challenges that were we needing to do. And then when we got to Twister. What was fascinating about Twisters that we shot on location and they wanted computers, uh, you know the infamous SGI laptop we created because the product placement deal said all computers need to be SGI computers.

But you've got two different teams. One that's supposed to be super high tech and one that is like really uh, you know, home home grown, And so it was like, Okay, how are we going to do this? So that SGI gets their product placement, but it doesn't look ridiculous that the that the uh, the low budget team has sgis. So we had to actually design laptops because they actually didn't have laptops, and the high end ones had SGI logos on them and the low end ones were kind of generic cases, but they were all run with SGI computers. So you know, we had to not only do the creative stuff, we had to get into the technical and work with the fantastic people at SGI at the time to try to come up with solutions to all of this, and they were they were all into it.

So we would have to take these computers then, and if you saw a twister, you'll know how much rain, hail, hot, sun wind, everything that you can imagine. And they basically said, well, you're gonna have to put your computers through those because the way the laptops were, because they weren't real laptops, they were basically what were called SGI Indie Corona flat screens that were designed to be able to put on an overhead projector. We built those with a backlight and made it look like with a fake keyboard that they were laptops, but they had to have a ninety foot scuzzy cable running from the back of them off the set, which became particularly challenging when you are either in the middle of a hail storm out on top of a hill, or you're in a car.

And because they they had laptops in the cars that they were looking at, and they wanted to have shots where you know, you're you're sitting in the passenger seat and looking at the laptop and be able to see out the windshield, you know, when you're driving down the road. So we had to come up with all the ways to do that. It was a really hot summer. The computers, which were in a trailer being towed behind and being operated by me from the computer behind, were shutting down from the heat. They had to pull an electric generator trailer behind in picture car, you know, and to be able to run these things, and it was crazy.

They also had to put a ridiculous amount of neutral density filters on the windshield to darken it so that the exposure would balance enough that you could actually still see the computer screen without the the v out the windshield from being blow out. So there's all of these these crazy things. In addition to all the actual science, the attempts at least to pay homage to the science of meteorology and try to show things correctly. And I would work on meteorologist to get all sorts of you know, here's what we see, here's what we want to learn from these things. So if you had one that had multiple screens that could show you know, both the precipitation and the wind speed and the direction, and then the Doppler radar and things like that, that would be fantastic.

So I would try to design for that and hopefully somebody would be able to look at it and say, as a meteorologist, go wow, I wish we had that. Maybe we should try to create something like that as the computer power gets greater. So so we tried to We tried to be as realistic as possible and to help tell the story. That was the most important thing, and it was how can we realistically show something that isn't only understandable to meteorologists, but that the audience could look at. And so, you know, creating the the the Dorothy cyclone spin up at the end where all the sensors finally get into it, and when we see the spiral and all of that, trying to create those things that are simplistic but actually actually you know, give the audience what they want without all the people or hopefully most of the people in the meteorology business going well.

The heck was that. And we had to do the same with Dante's Peak for volcanoes. And we would always work with the consultants on the shows because they would bring in, you know, for accuracy or close to accuracy as they can within the story, the bounds of the story, plot and realism. And that was one of my favorite parts of working on these shows because I got to learn about meteorology in ways that you know, wouldn't narrowally do if you were just making stuff up. Um on Dante's Peak, I got to go walk the lava flows in Hawaii with the vulcanologists Jack Lockwood, UM and UH and then he and two other geologists from the USGS drove us on a tour through the Pacific Northwest to kind of show us what all the different rock styles are like and where the where the peaks are and things like that, because we were you know, that's where the show took place.

And and so it was It was a fascinating learning experience for me um because I love that kind of stuff, you know, and to be able to say legitimately, you know, we we tried to do this as accurate as possible and if nothing else, maybe inspire the folks in the in those fields to say, hey, you know, maybe we can do more with the computer graphics that that we get our data from. And so that was that was a lot of fun, and at that same time, we were building a name for ourselves at Banned from the Ranch as the company. You know, this is the company you go to if you want to do real computer graphics playback. But because I had the visual effects background, as did Casey, we would sometimes get these requests of oh, you know what, I know, we're done with the show, but is there a way to do this or this?

And we were just getting into that point in visual effects where using computers for visual effects work was starting to get democratized, meaning that it wasn't just the most expensive thing for morphing or the most expensive thing for doing these things that you can do any other way. It became this tool that could be used on the other end of visual effects, which is the non glamorous stuff. There's a there's a grip standing in the background a shot, can you paint him out? Or there's a wire you can see the wires holding up something that's supposed to be floating. Can we paint those out?

Or there was a scratch on the film that's distracting, is there a way you can cover that up? And those little things became the kind of way that people started finally realizing that computer graphics wasn't about morphing and doing all these really high end things. They could be used as a paintbrush to fix things that were a lot smaller, more mundane, and more understandable. And as a result, it opened up the use of computers and visual effects because people started being able to see it as something that was a tool, not just this expensive thing that's going to cost us half our budget to get people to see it because it's cool. And I feel like we were really honored to be on the ground floor of some of that, to see some of those things that were happening.

I mean, the first wire removal was done, and Howard the Duck by I LM. By the way, and there were three fixed shots in Terminator two that were done using the computer, and it was done by specific data images. One was a one was a wire removal, another one was a scratch removal, and another one was to flip a sign that was backwards because we flopped the shot in post. So those kind of things were massively expensive at the time, for for for the process, but it showed that it was possible and really kind of you know, open the eyes of a lot of people in the industry that hold, you know, this isn't just about spaceships. People used to say, oh, if you're using computer graphics and film, oh, you're doing a science fiction film, aren't ship.

And now it became possible to do every kind of film, you know, including period films, because you know, science fiction films a period film too, it's just in the other direction. So so this process started and we started getting work and doing visual effects in addition to screen graphics, and that was kind of a breakthrough for us because you know, we had come from a visual effects background to some extent, and we got to kind of go back into it harnessing the power of the things, the tools that we were using. And one of the one of the other things was we were doing them on Macintosh is because it's really too expensive to be doing them with a silicon graphics machine, and we were able to do a lot of graphics work and a lot of visual effects work on the Macintosh.

Just been my system of choice since literally the day I met Jim I got my first Macintosh, the first day I met James Cameron so and I became his computer consultant for the mac That was one of the first things I did as a as a researcher and things for him. So we were able to you know, leverage the power of the personal computer to have a liveligood and visual effects and it was it was a really interesting period because we get all sorts of films, a lot of a lot of big films, but a lot of small films as well to do things. And we ended up doing the next really big picture we did was Starship Troopers, and they had and they had asked us to do the screen graphics for it, but then we also ended up doing you know, at least a dozen or more visual effect shots to help, you know, the fact that they had so many visual effects that they had you know, half a dozen houses, big houses working on it, from ILM to the lost Sony, and you know, there was some smaller work for us as well, So most of it to do with the Fednet because we had designed and created all the fednet graphics for the Would you like to know more and all of that.

So it was it was a really great time. How long did the company last for you were there from what ninety four to ninety nine, ninety four or about two thousand, two thousand and two thousand and one. Yeah, it was. It was an interesting process because what ultimately happened because we were considered a boutique shop, you know, we weren't a big shop that you go and do all your effects for a show, unless it's a small show. But what started happening was that we would start getting asked to bid on bigger shows that we knew we really couldn't bulk up to make to do.

But at the same time we kind of knew that, we kind of realized that we were being given these bids to try to scare down the larger facilities that they actually wanted to get the jobs, which kind of sucks because that happens with any any company to certain extent, But it was it was kind of tough because we would go through the process of taking it seriously and doing the full bid and trying to figure out, okay, well, if we actually got this job, what would we have to do to be able to do it? Would how many people we have to hire, what kind of more in estment and computers where we have to get um And then we wouldn't get the job because they would take our bids and go to the big house and say, oh, you know you wanted to charge four million dollars.

Well, these guys say, you know, it won't cost that much, and you know, maybe we'll go with them, and then they would scare the big house into lowering their prices, and that sucked because then those big houses, of whom we were friends with a lot of would then hate us. So so it was a it was a bit of a challenge and and ultimately we we kind of closed down in at the at the turn of the century after having done dozens dozens of films that were really really proud of. And it was fine for me because I had actually found a niche that I was starting to get more interested in. And while we still I still kept doing visual effects on smaller projects here there, or on bigger projects in a very small capacity.

I started really getting into what we could do from an educational standpoint with the laser disc and DVD formats, and DVD was one of the things that was coming out in the late nineties, and we had gotten involved in doing some laser disc special editions as we had done for Jim back at a light Storm with the Abyss and Terminator two, and I really wanted to start exploring a little bit of some of the things we could do on that because I really wanted to try doing film school on a disc. And so Lightstorm brought me back to do the DVD versions of the Abyss and Terminator two for Fox and for a lions Gate, respectively, and so I really got to dive into those projects straight out of the gate. So even as Banford Ranch was kind of finishing its run, you know, in Case, he was moving on to other projects, and I was moving into these things, and it was just it was just at a really interesting transition and change of pace.

And that's why sometimes I have the most eclectic career in this business of going through all of these different areas. And as I said, even while I was doing these DVDs that became you know, well known or appreciated for you know, the amount of information they had, but also creating menu systems and graphics for for them to kind of create a whole new paradigm for how you could enjoy DVDs, not just the movies, with all the other stuff with it. It was a really it was a really fun and exciting time. So the band from the Ranch era was something that I'm very proud of in terms of what we were to put out there. But there was this whole coloring of smaller companies that kind of happened where it was kind of you either have to go big or you have to you know, go home.

And it was something where I don't think we were going to be able to sustain the kind of things and the kind of attention that that we wanted to do as a you know, as a big company that we would do as a as a smaller kind of boutique. And so we felt it was, you know, for various reasons, it was better if we kind of changed up, you know, what we did