Ep 150 | David Dozoretz - Pre-vis Pioneer, VFX Supervisor and Director

We are betting Way Media. Hello and welcome back to the Film your Mentor's Podcast. I'm Jamie Benning, host, Chief Jabbra, and the man who keeps this thing going. And every couple of weeks I have a conversation with one of the behind the scenes artists whose work you've probably been admiring for years without ever knowing their name. We're talking production designers, editors, composers, digital artists, puppeteers, model makers and everyone in between.

And for episode one fifty, I can't believe I've got that far, which feels like a bit of a milestone worth marking. I'm joined by David Dozaretz, a visual effects supervisor and one of the people who genuinely shaped what modern digital pre visualization looks like. David spent the early nineties in ILM at the Art Department, where he was known in his own words as the computer nerd in the art Department and the art nerd in the Computer Department, before going on to do the first major PREVIZ work on Mission Impossible, contributions to the Star Special Edition and ultimately the entire podres sequence, for instance in The Phantom Menace. He went on to found his own company, and has done previz supervision and second unit direction work on films like Titan Ae, Behind Enemy Lines, Mission Impossible, Iree, jj Abrams, Star Trek Reboot, and Journey to the Center of the Earth three D, among many others.

More recently, he's produced and directed Zafari, a fifty two episode animated children's series rendered almost entirely an unreal engine, one of the earliest large scale uses of real time rendering in mainstream animation. So in this conversation we get into all of that. I'm just going to be very quick here and throw it to the conversation because it's thirty three degrees here in London. It's about forty five degrees in my loft where I'm recording this. But it's a wonderful, generous conversation covering thirty plus years in just about an hour, where we have that intersection of new technology and traditional filmmaking with one of the people who actually built the bridge between them.

So sit back and enjoy the chat, and I'll be back at the end for a bit more jabbering on. David. Thanks for joining me. You've done so much in your career, But let's let's go all the way back. What was your childhood like it?

Was it a creative childhood you had? And you know, did you grow up interested in in films and storytelling? Where did it all begin for you? Well, thank you for having me. First of all, it's an honor.

My childhood was. I mean, it's it's I hate to say it. It's the cliche of I saw Star Wars as a kid. In fact, I have told people occasionally that I grew up in Phoenix and it was hot in the summer. It was hot the whole time, but it was especially hot in the summer, so movies were fantastic to go to because they were air conditioned.

But a movie came out called Star Wars, and obviously it just it just blew me away. What was extra interesting about it was when Empire Strikes Back came out. My sister was working in the movie theater and in Phoenix in the seventies, there was a lot of theaters, but one was amazing called Cinecapri and it had the best sound and the best projectors, and she was working there and she took me up to the projector room during Empire and I was able to sort of stand on the box at like an apple box right next to the projector. It's buzzing, whizzing next to my head. It's hot, there's dust particles in the air, and I was looking out through the window and could see the tops of people, the heads of the tops of people's heads in the audience, and I think it was the asteroid sequence.

I had seen the movie, but it was that was sort of my first behind the scenes this is how the magic has made moment, And of course, like probably ninety percent of the people that you've had on this podcast, I was sort of hooked and blown away. So that was my cinema paradiso. If you're familiar with the reference movement, where I, of course you are. It's a filmy mentor's podcast where I kind of just fell in love with cinemas and art form. And I always loved it and loved the behind the scenes idea of it, but I never really considered it a total, incomplete career until college.

And one thing that happened in college I was looking at university as I was traveling with my parents, and we were in a university bookstore and my mother offered to buy me the sweatshirt from the university do you want this sweatshirt? Well, I had just a moment before seen a book called The Art of Special Effects, which was that first coffee table book about industrial light and magic Lucas's company, and I said, no, no, sweatshirts are great, but look at this book and it had in it some of the how to stuff, like you know, behind the scenes of how they made the original Star Wars and a number of other of the films that ILM had worked on up to that point. And studied it and said, oh my god, this would just be fantastic if I could do something like this in my life.

So I ended up applying for and getting an internship at ILM during my early years in college, and I ended up working in the ILM Art department, which was I could not have imagined a more innovative, creative place with better people. The people in the ilm Art department, who I know you've talked to some of them, were just unbelievable mentors for me and so talented. So what you was this that was ninety I want to say ninety one or ninety two, was like, hey, that was a million years ago and. Interesting time though, iland because they're sort of getting into the digital era, and I mean I did. Were you leaning more towards the sort of technical side or the artistic side, or are you one of those lucky people that has kind of both.

Well, you know, that's a very interesting question. So yes, it was absolutely the era where digital was just starting, but they were still doing a lot of practical stuff too, so it was still great. But the first movie I ever really worked on was the first Jurassic So very very lucky in my career for that. To answer your question about artistic versus technical, I was known in the art department as a computer nerd, and I was probably known in the computer department as an art nerd. So I think what helped a little bit is I was able to bridge a little bit of the communication gap sometimes between those guys, just when the art directors needed some explaining about how something was being done, I was able to help with that to some extent.

I was obviously nowhere near as sophisticated as the people in the CG department. And then they started me, you know, the art department was Mac based at the time. They started me on you know, Photoshop projects, and then eventually I started doing a little bit of computer modeling of what the art directors designed. Not so sophisticated and perfect that it would be useful for final shots, but useful enough to start to start to realize their designs from a two D illustrated experience to something more three D. So I was able to.

But there was one fascinating moment, just as a quick aside, that I went to. I wanted to buy a three D modeler for or this work in the art department and a three modeling software package, and every expense over one thousand dollars at ILM at that time had to go through the general manager of the company to approve the expenditure, and this was like fourteen hundred dollars. So I went and applied, you know, filled up paperwork and applied to get this piece of software called form Z and Architectural Modeler from a long time ago. It still exists, I think. And the head of ILM at the time said, nope, that's a computer program for modeling that should be in the computer department, not in the art department.

So there was even a couple people there who didn't quite see just how big a deal digital technology was going to be in all aspects of filmmaking and the creative process. Now, I ended up finding a company that would sell it to me for two seven hundred dollars purchase orders, so I still got it anyway, But but I had to work around just a little bit. So the long way of saying, I was a little bit of both computer and a little bit of design. But you know, I was less sophisticated at the design work than the technology. But I had the best teachers in the world the ILM R department.

Who who was there at that time that you would regard as mentors then. In no particular order. Well, the head of the department was Harley Jessup, but I mean Ty Ellingson, Mark Moore, Doug Chang, of course, Claudia Malalley was there, Benton jew was there. John Bell had just left to work on Jurassic. Stephan Deckin had just left to work on Jurassic.

Those guys I respect so much. So let's see who else I know him forgetting one or two important ones. Steve Beck had just left the department still at ILM, So I mean it was it was just this core, amazing group of people, and we were so lucky because the filmmakers that came to ILM were obviously Lucas and then you know Spielberg and Kubrick and just the giants, the Absol, all the people that I respected. And when I was working in ILM and I got there first as an intern and later as an employee, I was meeting with and working for a lot of people that were in that book. So that was really I was just very right place at the right time.

I guess I was just very blessed to do that. Yeah, you have to have that intention, I guess you know, and you say you're blessed in the right place at the right time, but you also have to have that intention to sort of see it through. I mean, there's a lot of people who have opportunities that don't really recognize them. And it sounds as like you recognize that you needed an opportunity, but you also needed that kind of drive to get there as well. That's true.

Even though as an intern I was only supposed to work like twelve hours a week in the Island Art department, I was there twelve hours a day, just NonStop. I was just trying to be a sponge and learn everything I can. I mean, it was really fun, even though I was you know, we were still mounting artwork on foam core at that point, so I was using the spray photo spray that's basically glue in the air that I inhaled, even though I was inhaling that every second, and my fingers were constantly full of marker and glue and it was probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but I just get enough of it. And then we would, you know, have dailies where we would go into Cee Theater or one of the other theaters on site, and I would just listen to people watch and watch the same shot over and over again and see what they could do to make it better.

Everybody had this uncompromising need for perfection. But it was a really I'm trying to think of like some other analogy. We knew we were there at a really special place, at a really special time. The early nineties. I mean, ILM by definition is always a little bit special and magical, but the early nineties I think really saw some amazing breakthroughs and some amazing projects that went through it, and just a general attitude of you know, throw the hardest thing you can throw at us, and we'll see what we can do.

Yeah, that can do. Attitude seems to be something that runs through all of the people that I've met at ILM, Skywalker Sound, and all the people I've interviewed that went through those different companies as well. When it sounds like you were sort of you know, like you said, you're there for twelve hours a day, if not more, I'm sure why wouldn't you be, you know, you've just been left free in the candy store. Really, but when. Did you sort of realize that you were transitioning from a sort of supportive role like mounting artwork to then being somebody that helped shape how those movies were made.

I think that the real point in time for me was when John Noall, who I'm sure you're, you know, the visual effects supervisor and currently chief creative officer and also a co author of Photoshop. He came to me in the old department and he said, there is a movie. Actually was even before that, I was going to talk about Mission Impossible, one where I didn't the first sequence of pre visualization. But actually before that I had done some previous on the special edition of New Hope. Or was that before all that would have been remembered the order, but there.

Was ninety five ninety six, wouldn't it the special edition? Yeah, and I think mission impossible. Well, the special edition work would have been ninety five, but I think we might have done the previous for it a little bit earlier. There was a scene with a do back and some couple of other things where George wanted to change it a little bit. So those were just one off shots that I did in UH as pre visualization.

What were those shots? To remember which ones they were? The one that I remember the most was a shot of there's a scene in Star Wars where the droids are looking in the sorry that the Stormtroopers are looking in the desert for the droids. Yeah, Georgie always Georgie always thought that it didn't look like they were looking that hard for the droids. Wanted to add a few more shots where it looked like it was a more extensive surge.

And I believe at the time he had the idea for what's called the do Bach, which is just like a large lizard that you could ride, but didn't have the technology to really make it sort of like you know how the what were the names of the the big furry things that were like elephants in that. The the the Banthas. Panthas, Thank you Bantha. The banthas were I think elephants with were actually made by elephants with like huge furs on them. Yeah, couldn't do that for the do backs, and by the way, that that was a really hard thing.

The elephants kept on throwing them off. But for the do backs it needed to be digital. So that was I think Georgie's first dip into the let's do a digital creature. So that was one sequence that we did pre visualization for, and we did some of some other ships that were leaving Most Eiley to try and make Most Eiley look a little bit more lively. And I'm trying to think if there's anything else.

John himself did a lot of the spaceship shots. It might have just been that I'll have to see if I can remember other ones. But in the case of Mission Impossible, John Nole came to me in the island our department and said, we want to pre visualize, pre visualize this entire sequence. Train pulling a helicopter through the English Chunnel with Tom Cruise's character on top of the bullet train. So that was the first time when when I went to I believe the head of our department at that point was Mark Moore and Doug were sort of co heads, and said, hey, I got to get off support for a little bit because John asked me to do this.

Is that okay? And they were very supportive of it. So I worked just on pre visualizing that sequence and it was, by today's standards, just an absolute mess. It was slow, it was clunky. But using what software that was using a piece.

Of software called electric Image, which was one of the few three D applications that existed on the Mac at that time. One of the reasons that I was able to do this work in the art department and not look like I was trying to pull work from the computer graphics department was by working on MAX with Mac software rather than working on Silicon graphics machines with ALIAS or soft demodil software that was the purview of the computer graphics department, So they didn't feel threatened, which is good. Interesting where those where those lines are drawn, isn't it? Yeah, it is a little bit. Later they were like, listen, the more that you can help us by figuring out dumb stuff ahead of time, the better will do.

So the computer graphics department started to really and I think this is industry wide, started to really embrace pre visualization because our job is to as opposed to them who will work on a shot for weeks or months, we should only work on a shot in previtalization for hours. And that's because if we're throwing stuff away, that's the process working. That's getting shots out of the film before you start spending big money on them. So they did. They were supportive of it completely, and John showed the sequence rough as it was to Tom Cruise, who showed it to Paramount, and I'm told that's one of the reasons the sequence got greenlit.

Obviously, when the computer graphics department did it and it had Tom and it, it was a lot more exciting. It was great. But the process worked. And was were you taking that from conversations with Brian de Palmer or was it from storyboards that had been drawn or how was that interaction between you and the sort of creative heads of the of the film. I was primarily working through John at that time.

He was the one who was interured, who was showing everything to Brian de Palma. I think Brian came in a couple of times. What frequently happens, you know, in my career, I've worked on doing pre visualization for films where we've had storyboards to work from, and sometimes where we weren't. Storyboards are still. You know, everybody was worried that storyboards would disappear when pre visualization came on the scene, but storyboards are.

It hasn't disappeared. Storyboards are still all the greatest way to get an idea from brain to a recorded format quickly. But what happens is you start getting a sense of the volume of work and what you need to do and the general ideas of the sequence. And then as you start editing together, you realize, oh, you know what, we could use this scene and maybe we could try to shoot it from this angle instead, And you know, this beat isn't quite landing with the audience. We need to expand it.

Let's get a couple more shots of it. So it becomes an organic process. Where the way that I find the process working at its best is when you start with storyboards, but you are not locked into only the storyboards. Sure, sure, and I guess the previous as well, not only gives you things in three dimensions, you can start looking at timing as well, which of course you can't do with the storyboard. That is correct.

Storyboards are inherently static, and the animation that is for pre visualization is a moving medium. And I'll tell you one little interesting aside by it. You know, one of the things that's tricky with pre visualization is knowing when to stop, especially today, as the visuals can get better and better with less and less work involved, you have to realize that your keep this is previous. You don't want to necessarily take it too far. And one of the reasons you don't want to take it too far.

One of the reasons is because you don't want people judging it for the wrong things. Oh that's the wrong color orange, or that's the wrong you know, so you intentionally in pre visualization keep it rough. Now that said, just as a quick aside, everybody wants their stuff to look good and they want to impress, so we always do try and there's a little bit of feature creep so to speak, and trying to make it look better. But one of the things that that I had established is a rule for myself on the mission Impossible sequence was no textures, no motion blur, and no shadows, because those are things that tried to make that were about making it look better or made it take longer to render. So those are my three rules.

When I started working on Phantom Menace at Skywalker Ranch, my main responsibility was the pod race, and it is this scene where there's these basically aircraft engines that are pulling pods across the desert like Ben hur And how do you communicate how fast these pods are going and how do you communicate how they're floating? Well, speed is communicated by detail, going by so textures and how much something has blurred, so motion blur and it's floating is communicated by it not touching its shadow. So now I'm instantly doing textures, motion blur, and shadow, the three things that I said don't ever do for previs. So will you becoming at this point the kind of pre eminent previsualization guy at ILM?

As much as were people coming to you, did they know you to be that guy? You'd had experience between Mission Impossible and yes, yeah, the scope of it has kind of grown and people's understanding of how it contributed a grown. I guess absolutely. Previsualization at ILM was I mean, there were people that were doing you know, pre visualization is a generic term that may mean let's take storyboards and put them under a camera and do little, you know, stop motion of it. Obviously, everybody knows that Dennis Muiran did pre visualization in Return of the Jedi with action figures of the speeder break chase.

So previsualation is a general term. But as far as digital pre visualization, I was. I was sort of the guy, and I did it little bits here and there for lots and lots of projects. One day, the head of ILM came into the art department and said, George has decided to make new Star Wars films. You but it's not going to be an art department here at ILM.

He's going to have his own art department up at Skywalker Ranch. You are all welcome to apply for a position there. You will not be penalized just because we heard you apply. And and everybody in the room we were all playing it real cool. We were like, eh, you know, no big deal.

And I don't think anybody left before midnight that night because we were all working on our portfolios and you may have heard that. Obviously, Doug Chang was the first concept artist to be hired, and he brought with him Terrell Whitlack, this amazing character designer animals, specifically, she studied biology in a different in addition to illustration. And that was it for like nine months. And I looked around and all of these people in the ilm art department had these amazing portfolios. George holand Scott Liebrick had come in and their stuff was phenomenal.

Mark Tye had done all the stuff for George already on a bunch of projects. Everybody had these amazing, amazing portfolios. And I had a videotape because my work was all video of some sort. So it was it took a while, but George was explaining to Doug Chang and the producer Rick McCallum about this idea he had for the pod race that been her chariot race kind of thing, and I think Doug showed my work to Rick, and Rick showed it to George and they said, this is what we need in order to figure out how to do the pod Race and Phantom Menace. We need animatics, we need pre visualization.

Storyboards are great, but they won't go all the way, especially because it's just such a dynamic sequence. So that's what I was really hired for first, was to go up to Skywalker Range and work in the main house in the art department and start doing shots for the pod race. So I guess one could say I did the first shot in the Star Wars prequels. It was a really fun experience. At one time I worked on that specific seasons, I worked on the entire film and it turned.

It started with just me, but it became a department of like a dozen people at some later. But I worked on Phantom Menace for probably four years and even was a co supervisor on some final visual effect shots at the end too, but did pre visualization for a lot of sequences in it and the pod race itself. We actually had the pod race in the final movie is about nine and a half minutes long. At one point we had a twenty five minute version of it that's. Slightly longer cut somewhere, isn't there.

I think I've seen a slightly longer cut of. The Well, if it would have, they would either have to have gone back and final shots that we did previs of and and never shot live action elements for or you're going to see it with previs in it, because the only that twenty five minute version of the pod race was only pre viz and I think only nine and a half minutes of it about got handed off to ILM for make this look real. But it was so much fun working on it that the editor's Ben Burden, Martin Smith, and George just were like, let's do this, let's do this, and let's have another lap. And it was a lot of fun working on it. And I think it was also really fun working on it because up until that point, visual effects was a really slow process, and even after it became digital, it was a pretty slow process.

Pre Visualization is a really fast process if done right. So it was really rewarding to be able to see these things which you couldn't see outside of your imagination come to fruition a lot faster, even though not photo perfectly photo real yet. And how did the v effects artists themselves kind of adapt to this emerging technology because they're used to getting, you know, a bunch of storyboards, some guidance from the director, maybe some concept drawings, but here you've got this scene. This podcast scene he's completely planned out by you and George and the editors as well. I mean, do you think it took them some time to kind of to adapt to this idea that maybe they're not getting as much artistic.

Input in a sequence anymore. Well, I think when it works, it works great, and when it doesn't, it doesn't. Not to oversimplify it, but you know, you're you're making decisions in previs that made break reality a little bit when they get to actually doing the thing for real. So you need to be a little bit conscious of that. And they all the you know, film is a collaborative art form, they should still have all of these they should still have creative input, and I believe they really did.

You know, a great example is it was really difficult for me, in my little software technology to be able to do one of the pod racers exploding in a fun way. So Habib Zardiboor did. He just got the first version of Maya, or he might have even been a beta of the first version of Maya, which had some hard dynamics, hard surface dynamics technology, so he was able to really make that look great, something that I just couldn't do. So sometimes it was like explosion happens here, not text on the screen, but a crappy version of it in my world. So they still have creative output.

And another thing that you need to keep in mind is when doing previous is in somewhat conflict with what I just said, you don't always need to do what is completely realistic. There are shots in the pod race where, if you actually calculated the distance and how long it takes to travel that distance, the pod racer is going about five hundred miles an hour, which is what it was supposed to be going. There's other shots where's going two thousand miles an hour. And in the case of this film, it didn't need to be right, it needed to look right. So there was times when we needed to break the rules in order to get the storytelling the way we wanted it to.

I think that overall, the people doing the final visual effects work appreciate PREVIZ because we allow them. We're not trying to take away their skill or their contributions. But what I'd like to do is allow them to focus on the specific things they need to focus on. I don't want anybody working on a shot that is going to get cut out of the film. So that's where the value is.

Yeah, Yeah, the biggest the biggest value that pre visualization is is the shot in the movie. And then, as you said, it adds motion into it, so you have the ability to know, now how long it is approximately, what's the composition in it. You get to add sound, you get to add music ahead of the time, so that you got the energy that you wanted to have. So pre visualization became like the gorilla version of the movie before you Winter Set. I bet that was something that George actually enjoyed and relished in a way, because that's that's the sort of it's a very simple kind of hands on filmmaking, him being an editor really by you know, by by trade, you know, by training.

He's an editor very much. And you know, you talk about things having to look right, not necessarily correct, and you know, you've got X wings skidding around corners in the in the first movie. Everybody then went and copied that. But what were some of George's reactions to the to the work you were able to do in the speed in which you were able to do it. I think you nailed it.

He loved the process it was. I don't think it's any secret that George is really good at creating worlds and really good in post production editing, sound visual effects. He can do the live action stuff, the principal photography, but I don't think it's his favorite part of it. So he really loved being able to build the film and see his vision start to come alive when we were doing pre visualization. Obviously, as the department got bigger, we ended up being able to do even more work and being able to do better work.

There was a couple of times on Phantom Menace where we actually started doing some motion capture for previs. So was it beautiful work, No, but it started to really give him a lot more of the tools that he was wanting. You know. The AVID and all non linear digital editing systems kind of came out of something that he created called the edit Droid. Yeah, and that was being able to take shots without having to cut film and do it really nonlinearly.

The next version of the edit Droid was the AVID, and now he was able to cut out a piece of the frame and move it someplace else in the frame, and then we were able to do previos where we were able to very quickly bring up shots that didn't even exist in any other format. Then we started doing some fun stuff for him on As I mentioned when I supervised some of the final visual effects for Phantom Menace under John Nole, we took some live action photography, some shots and made shots out of it that were never were filmed. There were some moments where George wanted, you know, a cut to be a little bit different, so he wanted somebody to do a head turn in order to motivate the cut. But he never shot that head turn.

So we went and made a shot of the head turn, and that was like, oh my gosh, Now I don't know, go back. I don't need to go back and do a reshoot for this shot. Did you achieve that? Then? How do you make a head time whether it wasn't a headtime.

I took a shot where there was it was a shot of the kid, Jake Lloyd. I had a shot of him looking sort of just off the camera lens towards camera, and I had a separate shot of him looking almost in profile sideways and did morphs between those two and had to get the eye flick right to see that. When he sat at the table with jo Jo and yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So I don't know that it was perfect, but he was thrilled to be able to get a shot there. That and the editor Martin Smith, was also really helpful in that he only find all the pieces for it.

He may have even had the idea for it now to think about it. But thinking outside of the box is amazing though, Like you know, it's seeing the tools in front of you and thinking there's another way around this. You know, we can find another solution to this, which is always what amazes me about people with those sort of visual brains like yourself, that you're able to kind of, you know, join the dots, not necessarily in a straight line. There's like a weavy line between them. And I also think it's really interesting at how Previs at that time must have influenced and pushed the envelope in terms of what could be achieved in VFX, because you can do things in previs that maybe weren't achievable in VFX at the time, but you become wedded to a shot, the speed of a shot, the dynamic movement of a shot, or whatever it is that then forces the VFX departments to kind of go, well, now we have to do this, we have to up our game, which is of course, you know it should be Ireland tagline.

Never say no. But do you feel that you had that influence, that you were kind of pushing those VFX designers and artists did it. It was generally the director's vision, but our job was to push things for them a little bit. And yes, I'm sure that my name was mentioned under during cussing in a lot of times when visual effects were being planned out, and certainly the visual effects producers were like, oh, we don't have the budget to do the previous But also then occasionally in addition to pushing them to do work that was just at the moment beyond their reach. Sometimes, you know, I believe the constraints in filmmaking are a good thing too.

So sometimes we'd hear, oh, we can't do that, or we can't do that with the budget, and then we would have to figure out a way to tell the story without those specific shots. And what that does is it gets you to cut out the fat and cut out any extraneous, extraneous pieces that you didn't really need. It gets you to hone in on the idea in a sharper way. So I'm of the belief that the constraints are not necessarily a bad thing. Yeah, I can really see how previs creates a kind of economy.

You know. I think of George shooting American Graffiti, where you know, apparently just shot everything at multiple angles and just was falling asleep at the will almost and then did it all in the editing room, and you can see, you know, his artistry really lies in putting those kind of elements together. Like you said, but did that process then on the Phantom Menace become more structured. When you went into Attack. Of the Clones, had previs and the effects kind of begin to dovetail a little bit.

Yeah, it had previous had grown up quite a bit. There were other people in the industry who were doing some previs, but we ended up for Phantom Menace and then again even more so for Attack of the Clones expanding the department, and we really sort of became you know, respected and known as a valid part of the filmmaking pipeline. And we had proven at that point that at some level ILM and other visual effects companies can use previous. It's a useful part of the process and it doesn't necessarily replace anything, but it does add a lot to the experience of getting the film right, getting the shots right. And what you have to remember is that it's It was a little bit difficult, especially outside of I mean, George obviously and Rick McCollums knew without a doubt that it was useful, but outside of ILM and Lucas World, pre visualization was a little bit harder to sell because a producer would look at it and say, wait a minute, there's a line item in the budget for something that I didn't need on my last film.

Storyboards can do this, or and they would say, why am I spending this money if this is a brand new department. I don't get it. And you have to sell them on the idea that you will save money in visual effects or other parts of the filmmaking process, but you can't really quantify it like sometimes you can, but sometimes it's really hard to say, Oh, I saved a million dollars because I prevised the sequence and. Yeah, you diffuse the bomb and everybody goes, well, there was no damage, you know, yes. So definitely, you know.

I started Phantom Menace with just me and then hired a number of people and it became like six or seven by the end, and then there was about a nine month gap before we were starting on episode two, and I sort of did a post mortem of like what can I do to make it better? And for one thing, talking to ILM, we switched from doing our work in this Mac based Electric image to Maya on at that time PCs. So now we were using the same tool. Now it was not there was no political reason not to. We were using the same software that ILM was standardizing on a lot so that a lot more assets could be transferred and shared.

We obviously expanded the department we put in, you know, I we put in a database for keeping track of every revision of every shot that we had done. I looked at the end of Phantom Menace. I looked in the corner of my office at Skywalker Ranch, and there was a stack probably two feet high of yellow legal pads of just me scribbling notes as fast as George could talk. So that ended up becoming a completely digital experience, which really helped with our efficiency. We hired one or two experts and Particle effects because we needed a little bit of that one or two experts in rigging.

We needed a little bit of that, so we started to specialize a little bit. Pre visualization artists are generally are generally better as generalists. We want them to be a little good at everything, if possible. But we expanded the department a lot, and we got a lot more resources and a lot more I don't want to say respect from the rest of the visual effects community, because they already respected us. We just became, you know, welcomed.

And you're part of the pipeline now. And you talk about, you know, the efficiency of that pipeline and using the same software, how do you then kind of ramp back what you have to do? I mean, there must have been a temptation to make things more textured and have more particles and make a shot look more finished. But given that the tools were there, was that purely based on time constraints or did you really find yourself having to kind of rain yourself in on some of that? You know, it's this constant internal battle that a creative person has with wanting spend more time on something to make it look better and better and better.

But yeah, you basically had you know, these artists had had me saying where's the shot? Because I had George saying where's the shot to me? So we needed to produce things quickly, but we needed them to be as good as possible. I think the solution was working late. Yeah, I can imagine what that famously.

It wasn't taclic claims, wasn't it Where the Droid Factory sequence is quite late on. That didn't evolve and change quite late on. So how do you keep up with, you know, clarity when things are changing so quickly. That was an interesting sequence. The Droid Factory was meant to be this really chaotic sequence with humans running around wall.

These droids are being made in chaos ensues. It was really, in George's mind, meant to be influenced by Buster Keaton and Charlie Taplan stuff, so really wacky stuff would happen in it. We were very busy when he originally conceived it, so he had storyboards done of that sequence. We were still really busy on other things, and I didn't quite have the ability, for some reason to ramp up with more in order to do previs for that. So they were already doing reshoots in England, and they built a little bit of the droid structure, the factory structure, and they had a conveyor belt and they shot it in front of a blue screen before we had done any previos.

So then George actually came into the previous department and said, David, I shot this. Can we make it work? So we did what we call post visualization, which is using the same technology as the previous the really low cost quick computer graphics. But we were doing some rough match moves to get it to match what the camera did on set, and we were replacing the blue so we were doing comps with live action footage and here's a little bit of roto and here's some garbage mats. So we did post visualization of that sequence, and I remember very specifically one day the art department manager Faye David and I were I needed to look at something how the shots were working together in the edit before we were going to present it to George, just to make sure the latest versions of all the shots were there and the cuts were as good as they could be so that the presentation to George would go well.

And he so I had to. I had to. All the avids were busy except for the one in his son room right off of his office in the main house, so I was able to go and sit down at George's avid with Faye, the art department manager, and you can ask her this, I'll tell you it's the story is true. But George popped in and said, oh, show me a little bit of what you're working on. And I showed him a couple of the shots that the team had done post visualization on and he's like, honestly, I was a little worried about that one.

That looks like it's gonna work. And he leaves the room and I look at Fay, and Faye looks at me and we both smile, and I'm like, where is the making of Star Wars documentary crew when you need them? So that was that was a very rewarding moment that we were able to help with that. Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. Very publicly before.

George is not the most demonstrative person. I mean, that is as good as it gets from George, Isn't it that kind of Okay, You've achieved something here that I didn't expect because his expectations are very high. You know, he's already imagined. All of this in his head to such a great extent that, you know, I always feel that anything is produced that anything that is produced for him visually is always a slight disappointment in a way, because he's up to a certain point of you know, in the film history of filmmaking. You know, I've seen some of those little I'll push back on that a little huge sometimes, would you know?

What I was about to say was that it depends on where you're how you're presenting it. Right, if you're presenting it in a theater with all of everybody there and there's two hundred people in the theater that work for George, you'll get one level of feedback if you're presenting it as just you and him, you and him, or you and the editor and him. He'll tell you when something doesn't work, and he'll tell you when something is great and it surprises him. But I actually even thought to edit that myself and say, it's been a while since I've worked with him, but I have seen him say wow, that turned out even better than I thought, and do that publicly. So He's what's fascinating about George is he knows how hard something can be technically.

He doesn't quite understand how to fix it, how to make it work. He doesn't need to, but he can see that it's really really tricky. So I've had a great experience with him where he was very complimentary of things once in a while, too complimentary where you're like, I know this is marrid, but I'll make it better and he's like, nope, that works. Interesting because alway, think of that clip of like Rob Coleman sitting there animating Yoda and he's taken that sequence from The Empire Strikes Back, I think, and he's trying to kind of reproduce it digitally and George is like, come on, you know, you must be had to do better than this kind of thing. And I always felt like there was always that push.

I mean, maybe in the digital era George was able to sort of realize that the ceiling was always beyond where he could imagine. But I think in the physical filmmaking period, you know, when there were guys moving models around and building sets and making alien masks. You know, a lot of those interviews you hear from back in the day, there is that sort of level of disappointment that you know, Jabber's Palace was a reaction to not being able to do the Canteen scene properly at the time, and you know, having digital backgrounds was a savior in his mind because he didn't have to go to Chinisia and have the set blown over and. The worst weather in fifty years and all of those things. But maybe you're right.

I think, well, it happened again. It happened again on the on the prequels. Yeah, that's true. I mean, obviously you've had these conversations with George. It's interesting to have that sort of recalibration in my head with regards to how he feels about stuff like that.

I think that it depends on what picture is in George's head when he envisions it, because again, film is a collaborative art form, so all of these artists that touch a shot adds something to it, and I do believe that sometimes it ends up better than he imagines it. But in the case of you know, Yoda, Rob obviously did nail Yoda. But in the case of some Yoda stuff in the prequels, there was one or two times when I think that, yeah, we could have pushed things a little bit better, certainly. So you know, George is always looking at things from the eye of the film goer, and we sometimes forget that because we get into our we get into our little you know, workflow and our little rut of Jesus. I know that this thing over here has to be better and better and better, and George will be like, Nope, the audience isn't going to see that.

You've only got two seconds. Let's worry about what the audience sees so or what the audience will register. Really like an editor's understanding of sleight of hand, isn't it in a way that you know that needs to be this length to convey this message? Yeah, very much so. Yeah.

So, I think my experience with George and with many directors has been that it's both you impress the hell out of them sometimes and sometimes. Now there's also the the you know, famous stories about the filmmakers who are you know, yellers and always angry and nothing's ever good enough. You hear their stories all the time, But George was not that way in my expect Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So you've got this kind of persistence of vision in a way, I guess, so you've taken previs into the mainstream.

Now you know that's the use of my company, right. I do, And that was just a nod to it. But I really like, I really like that idea that you you know, you were driven. You realize the value in this technology is a proven technology. By this point, you've done the Star Wars movies.

How do you then kind of go about convincing mainstream Hollywood about the sort of validity of and the value of that technology. Well that that opportunity kind of landed in my lap as well. As I said before, other people were doing some versions of this in the industry. I was the only one. But there was an executive, a very good friend at twentieth Century Fox.

There is an executive named Ted Galliano who's the president of post production, and he was kind of the main contact at Fox with the Lucasfilm World because he was the one that was going to distribute the film that we were making. And Ted was working on a number of other projects, and one of them was an animated movie called titan Ae, a Don Belue Jerry Goldman movie, and they were having some trouble with the action sequences in it. They weren't quite working. So he mentioned to I think Rick McCallum, the producer of Star Wars, you know, what we really need in this scene is something like the pod Race, and I think Rick said, well, why don't you get the guys that did the pod race. So we got hired by Ted in twentieth Century Fox to go and do three sequences for the movie Titan Ae, and we kind of had free rein on it.

It was myself and Martin Smith, the editor from Phantom Menace, and we took a crew down to Phoenix, Arizona, were at the time they had an animation studio. For reasons beyond understanding no dig on Phoenix. It was just a very unusual place to do it, and we did three sequences completely. It still had to be within the context of the film and use those characters and use those assets, but we were able to come up with a story ourselves and it was very well received by the studio and by test audiences. So that's when pre visualization, in my experience, became something that was done outside of Lucasland.

Then they had another film called Behind Enemy Lines with a movie where a scene where an airplane fighter plane gets shot down, and Wilson revivialization on all of that. So then it started. Okay, previz was was starting, More people were doing it, and it started to become something that that that the industry really wanted to uh use as much as possible. And were the directors that were still pushing back on this? So were there others that kind of accepted it with open arms.

There were a few directors that were pushing back on it. There were a few, there were a few other department heads that were pushing back on it. I can think of one cinematographer specifically who very vocally said everything to do with previz is shit. Because he felt threatened, presumably because. Was partially I think he felt threatened, but also partially because he didn't like how it looked.

And I think what's important to realize, or maybe that he didn't quite understand, was are we were not making previs for the view you were in the theater. We were making previs for the director so that he could see what he is going to like and is not going to like. For the set designers, so they know how much to build for the producer or the studio executive, so they know what sequence to green to budget for. So the audience seeing the movie, they're not they're. Not the.

Customer of pre visualization, and I think that's something that sort of got lost. So it's just a part of the process. I mean, that would be like saying I don't like storyboarding because I don't like how this person drew this character. Yeah. So it's a cultural sort of switch that needs to be flipped here, a change in the culture of how movies were made to how they are going to be made.

Yeah. Right, And you know, a few people in studio executives told this cinematographer, you can dislike it all you want, but it's not going away. We're going to do more of it. So it just needed to be understood for what it was, which was a useful tool. Other directors really accepted it, especially if it was you know, usually previous was for visual effects, heavy sequences or very complicated sequences, or anytime you needed to know here's how much we need to build of a set or something.

But generally other directors really respond well to pre visualization, And when I've done it in my own projects, I love it because, as I said, you just want to know is the sequence working, is this shot in the movie? And by the way, just because you previous something doesn't mean you need to stick to it. So what I like, it's kind of like doing coverage when you're shooting live action wide shot, medium shot, close ups. Let's get it in the camp so that we know when we get back to the ending room we have the pieces we need in order to make a sequence that works. Pre visualization is can be the same thing, and then you can, once you've got the shot you like, or even before, move the camera and shoot it from a different angle.

But you now walk into that situation knowing what you need in order to make the sequence work. So generally, filmmakers, all filmmakers of all in all the departments, respond well to pre visualization, just as long as they know that this is supposed to be supposed to be a tool that helps inform their work, not replace their work. And presumably there was a time as well where sorry. We even had pre visualization inform the costumes designers work at certain points. Yeah, well, this is what I was going to say, Like, surely there was a point where it went beyond just visual effects shots but also influenced composition of you know, a conversational shot or you know, like you say, a costume or set design.

I mean, there's the lines begin to blur a bit, I guess they do. It's it's less prevalent, and as a reason, it's less helpful and therefore less prevalent to do previsualization for just people sitting at a table talking. It's fairly easy to know how to shoot that relatively. Certainly, there's sometimes when you want to do other stuff with it, but generally it's fairly straightforward. But is there not a temptation for some sorry to interrupt with this, Is there not an a temptation for some directors to try and have the movie completed in pre vis because the technology allows them to do that, Because the tools have got to a stage now where you don't need to be necessarily, you know, a technical person to be.

Able to do that. Yeah, it doesn't happen that much because pre visualization is never going to give you the creative You don't get that on set magic as much. And you know, if you're paying Tom Cruise millions of dollars to be in front of the camera, do that, so pre visualization and you just don't necessarily have the budget of it. We could previsit the entire movie. That's been done once or twice, but just how helpful is it?

Again? Remember it as the tool you could do it, but it's not It's not as useful for two people sitting at a table talking as it is for complicated sequences like action sequences or visual effects sequences. The costume change reference I was gonna mention was working on the first Star Trek reboot for jj Abrams. There is a scene where the characters are basically skydiving from a ship all the way down to the planet Vulcan, or they stop at a platform on the way down to the planet Vulcan. And the original idea was that their costumes would look like the cool sixties and seventies NASA costumes that were orange, and that orange just screamed NASA from that time, right, So that was the original imagery for the costumes.

We started doing the previs and instantly realized that unlike Earth, which is generally white and blue and green, this planet Vulcan is orange and red. So you can't read the orange character, orange suited character against the orange suited planet, orange colored planet that well, and so the costume changed. That was one example of it, and that was a great thing, Like, let's we found that out earlier. We should have thought about it, but we found it out earlier, and I think that helped with the costume department really helped with that. Michael really appreciated that.

I bet JJ as well was somebody who embraced the pre visual technology. Wasn't he JJ definitely embraced pre visual viition technology. I started doing previous for him, or the first time he did previous was Mission Impossible three. So my company, Persistence A Vision, was hired to do all the previous for that. Oh, there was actually somebody else who did one sequence, Laurent Bozo, who did a great job.

But we did the previous for Mission Impossible three, and that was great because we were able to We did it for a couple scenes. There was helicopters flying through a windmill farm. There was a scene where they were Tom Cruise's character Ethan was swinging from one building to another on the top of skyscrapers at night in Shanghai, and we were able just to help help figure out these scenes ahead of time, so they knew what to shot. And if you watch those scenes, man, they're shot for shot and some in some cases frame for frame, meaning the shot length was the shot length that we did just because it worked out. Obviously, the editors and the visual effects of artists add in everything that they add in just to make it.

We actually even had a point I remember on George JJ was doing post production on that movie and he was on he was on the scoring stage and his assistant called me. I had been off of the film at that point, but his assistant called me and said, what was that piece of music that you used for the sequence in the previous JJ wants to know because he wants to give it to the composer as reference. So we even had previous music help influence a little bit the music for the final film. Was that common to have me music in previs. It started to be very common to have music because it adds so much energy, music and special effects.

It depends on what kind of previous if you're doing it with. If you're doing pre visualization and you're doing a sequence, I add in music. I haven't done prevision a long time, but I add in music because it helps with the energy and it helps with the emotional experience. Yeah, if you're doing technical viz and you're just trying to figure out how high techno crane needs to go, you don't need it. If you're doing post viz, it'll get added by the editor, because you're working for the editor, just feeding in shots so that the editor has a cut that can be screened.

So it depends on the circumstance, but generally I like it because it helps with the storytelling. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's amazing this because I've never really considered all of these different aspects of is. But you've been present at a period of time where the industry changed from analog to digital, three D arrived. Now we have real time with unreal engine. How did those shifts sort of compare, do you think in terms of their impact on the industry.

Oh, that's a good question. The shifts of the technology, Well, I would say that there are some similarities. When digital showed up, everybody was worried for the analog guys. Jobs happily didn't happen. We still needed the John Duncan and the John Goodsons of the world, the great model makers.

When three D showed up, and this is and I'm saying this having work done three D stereoscopic films, one for Eric Brevig of Ile and Visual Fection Provisor. When three D showed up, everybody was worried about two D film didn't happen. We still have great twod films. When Real Time showed up, everybody was like, oh, does that get rid of you know, the traditional digital way? Isn't that funny to say traditional digital way of making visual effects and post productions?

And it is. You know, they all become new tools in the toolkit. They all become new pencils or new markers. But what matters what we're selling is the artwork. So the thing that has stayed consistent is that it's the storytelling that matters.

New tools are great, but it's really no different from a lot of other technological advancements. That said, AI has the ability, of course to change things in ways that things haven't been changed before. And I think it's because it can have such a massive impact on the economics of what we do. So I don't have any great insight beyond what other people have about what's going to happen, but I do believe that that there will be changes. That said, great storytelling is great storytelling, and that still needs to that still needs to happen.

M Yeah, the economy of it all, and all the economical side of it always ultimately what drives and makes successes of certain techno technologies anyways. I mean with previous it was about, you know, saving the pennies, and with three D was about trying to save cinema, and with real time it's about sort of flipping that pipeline around so that you're not languishing in post production hell and all of that stuff. But AI is one of those things which it's so unimaginable what could be achieved with it. I think I've seen just some consumer level stuff recently where I've just on Adobe Premiere or Adobe Fivefly, and I've just taken a shot of something and I've told it the story I want to tell, and thirty seconds later, there's a good couple of seconds within the five or six seconds it offers me.

But another six months, I mean, who knows where we're going to be with this technology. It's kind of mind boggling where. It could go. Yeah, and I agree that there's ethical issues about job displacement and you know what the material is that it's being trained on. Those are all totally completely valid and they affect me.

But it is really you just can't deny how big a change it is. I saw something I think yesterday that I showed my wife of a Star Wars character coming into a store needing to return, or it was a pawn shop and it was one of the villains in Star Wars and he was trying to sell some old lightsabers, and it was this cute, little funny thing, and it was fine. And you could argue that, well, you don't argue it is it is copyright infringement and everything. But from a technical point and an artistic point, it looked great. And I looked at my wife and I said, see that right there, that's two hundred thousand dollars worth of visual effects.

The fact that he put this cloth bag on the counter, that's one hundred thousand dollars worth of visual effects, everything, And it just added up to the point where it looked like a five million dollar, thirty second little spot. So there's no doubt that the change is coming. Change is always extremely painful. I will just continue to hold on to the part that won't change, which is we need great storytelling all the time. It's how humans communicate and relate to each other.

Talk to me about some of the three D work you've done as well, and the real time stuff you've done as well, Because they were the next kind of big leaps in terms of storytelling tools. What paths were you led down by that technology? Well, three D can mean a couple of different things. In the case of stereoscopic three D films, uh, we were asked. My company was hired by Eric Brevic, the director of Journey to the Center of the Earth three D, to do the pre visualization for it, and then I was brought on to be the second unit director.

So I was able to work on what, at the time was the first digital stereoscopic film. There had been obviously three D movies before, but there were the red and blue glasses. This was the first one that was using different technology. And we were actually using a lot of the cameras that Jim Cameron was designing getting ready for Avatar, and so in one respect we were kind of like beta testing those cameras for him. So that was really great because I was able to work on a stereoscopic film, and that's a whole new set of rules and tools that you need to use when it comes to real time three D animation.

A project that I had developed, a kid's animated show called Zafari. I had hired a company in Montreal to do the animation with me. We did fifty two to eleven minute episodes, so that's about nine and a half hours total animation. And they proposed to me pretty early on in the process, hey, we think we can use Unreal Engine for the renders. And you know, for a decade everybody had been talking about trying to use game technology in final visual effects, or more likely pre visualization, because it didn't need to look pert and it never really materialized because it is hard in a lot of respects, and you need to do a lot of planning ahead of time, and sometimes you don't have the ability to spend a month before you can start showing people shots.

But in the case of Zafari, they came to me and they said, we think that we want to try using Unreal Engine to do the rendering. And it was another kismet, right place at the right time thing because I had in my show no Humans, no for no, you know, not really sophisticated particle effects, so there was not no cloth, so there weren't these things that game engines were not really able to do super well at the time. So I said, I'm going to ask you to do a test. Here's the ten things that I need the render to be able to do. It needs to be able to do global ammunition and some ratres and all these other things, some form of it, and it needs to look like this.

And they did the test and I was sold, and we believe that we sold. We saved maybe thirty percent on the entire production budget because we used unreal to render every shot in the nine and a half hour animation. Our joke was that if somebody and it was able to render on a single video card, right, So our joke was that we were able to render shots on somebody's computer when they got up and went to the bathroom, And actually, depending what we were doing, we could even potentially render the whole episode. So now we weren't quite real time. We were generally about three seconds per frame, not twenty four frames a second, but it was still just such a big jump that it mattered a lot, and that three seconds was mostly because of disc iyoh.

It was trying to read and write from the disc that was the right disc. That was the bottleneck. We actually did do a version of a real time episode two, so we have a it needs a decent video card, but we've got an executable file that you double click and you watch this episode. It was afari, but you're able to move the camera around and watch it from any angle, and that's kind of an interesting an interesting thing. Is it the right thing to do for the future of storytelling.

I don't necessarily think so, because the job of the director is to say, look here right now. But it certainly was an interesting experiment to be able to have a real time rendered in real time episode of TV. So I've always been very lucky in my career that I've been able to be at the intersection of new technology and filmmaking. And that's really the because I was the ilm art nerd and computer nerd at the same time. That's really where I've been most comfortable.

Certainly, the thirty years of digital filmmaking that I've been involved with has been really fun to experience and to have a hand. But I'm just so lucky that I got to start off on such a great foot. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I'm just going to say, in terms of the AI stuff, maybe we can do another. Little insight here.

It feels like with the AI tools at the moment that they don't quite have the sort of language of cinema baked in yet you know, yes, I can say, you know, tilt down and push in and all of those things, but it doesn't seem to translate those into exactly what you ask for. Yeah, I'm wondering if the next big leaf leap in terms of AI in filmmaking is the ability to have that kind of cinema language kind of hard baked into the system so that you can ask for specific things and you can make iterative changes simply because at the moment, it takes a very long time to make these things right from what I hear, I've spoken to a few people that have made AI shorts and they're experimenting. They're hopping between different AI models and different companies models.

Ultimately, where do you see it in terms of where the sort of the key is to the AI filmmaking idea. Well, I think what you said is completely correct. My experience with AI tools is that you are currently and this will change within the next ten minutes because of the technology that fast, but you're currently not really able to control the AI to it in the right way. It makes some gorgeous looking stuff, but you're a little bit throwing darts at a board and then with the shots that you have, this is where it is right now, and this is one of the reasons why it looks a little bit more for advertising than it does for traditional narrative storytelling. Not necessarily those are exclusive, but you're kind of left with here's the shots I can get.

Let me see if I can build something out of it. And that's a valid way to work, but it's not really controllable. So that's one thing that I do believe a lot of people working on and is going to be one of the next frontiers of AI filmmaking is the ability to truly control how the camera works and being able to iterate and have only the thing that you've asked for change to be changed, yes, actually be the thing that changed. All of these are being worked on, and of course the big part of the equation is the economics of it. It's still funished per shot basis kind of expensive to do, not just as far as money, but as far as computing power, and the economics probably need to change a little bit.

What I'm so, I'm expecting quite frankly, massive change in this. Will it be for the best is what is on the tip of everybody's mind. I don't know. The one thing that AI can't do in my experience yet or hopefully ever is judgment and taste. And I do think that that people's viewing habits were changing anyway even before AI, because of streaming so and the pressure on the theaters and the consolidation that's had happening in the studio system.

There's so many changes that are happening at once. But I think that a lot of stuff was changing anyway, and AI is just a big piece of the puzzle, but another piece of the puzzle what I believe. You know, there's a line in Blade Runner where the dancer with the snake, Harrison Ford's character comes up to her and says, is that a real snake? Right? I think it was Harrison's character.

Somebody says to her, is that a real snake? She says, you think I would be doing this if this was a real snake? And that's what I keep on thinking about with AI. Did Did I say that? Right?

She said? If I could afford a real snake, do you think I'd be doing this? And I think that's what I go to a lot when I think about AI. That whether the film is made with AI or whether it's made with pencils and it's a stop motion. There needs to be a human element to it, and there needs to be authenticity in it, and I think people will pay more for human authenticity.

So I don't know if seeing AI actors is gonna It will be great for some things and it won't be great for other things. But I think that we'll pay a premium for human authenticity. That's what I'm holding on to. I have the same view. I won't leave this bit in the podcast, but I have.

The same view. I'd say to friend the other day, it's like, you know when supermarkets made all the bakries shut down. You know, yes, you can get bread at the supermarket. It's okay, it does the job, but really, you want to go to somebody who's making a really good loaf, who's passionate about it. Yeah, you know, who's put the right ingredients in there.

You reminded me of something I remember being at the Jurassic Park rap party for the visual effects. It was like a peer, one of the peers on San Francisco's Peninsula, and I remember I had not had very many conversations with Dennis Muhren at that point because I was just an intern. But I remember asking Dennis Gee, now that we can do digital dinosaurs, how do you know anything is real anymore? And he said, well, how do you know that when you have a telephone conversation you're really talking to the other person. So his, at least at the time, his belief was we will still use all sorts of context clues and other ways of knowing if something is authentic or not.

I don't know if that still applies, but I do know that we're going to be asking the question is this real? Is this authentic? And hopefully that will guide us a little bit. It doesn't mean that the you should never do a film on the digital dinosaurs because you can't shoot it for real right now, But it does mean that you should not, you know, run out and sell all your possessions because you're worried that a dinosaur is going to come down your street. You need to know that you're seeing a magic show a little bit.

Yeah, So that's my That's again another thing that I hold on to in this time I had. I was at NAB last week in Vegas. There's a company that is all right, is what it is? I was there demonstrating for one of my clients because they make live production servers for sport and TV and they've started to use AI tools and AI tools into it. So one of the things it does is it turns a standard single phase camera into a super slow motion, high frame rate camera by interpolating the frames, and then it adds de blur as well, so it then really starts to look like a proper, you know, multi phase camera.

The question that of course always comes up is can this be used to say whether the ball was in or out in tennis or whether the drive across the line and was on track limits on a Formula one? And I was having to do some quite interesting conversations similar to what you just said in a way that you know, do you really think a camera of video camera is showing you reality to begin with? You know, Secondly, you know, if Lewis Hamilton does cross the line of track limits, it's only interpolating the frames between him being off the track and being on the track, So there isn't really an additional frame beyond that. I guess he went off the track, but the original photography didn't catch that. Yeah, then you're in tribrillating between frames that aren't the extremes of motion.

Right yeah, yeah, but because it's a it's based on frames that have to exist. It's only it's only doing it so you can slow down the footage to a speed where there's a smoothness to it. So it's not going to. Yeah, it's not gonna it's not gonna hallucinate a frame beyond the extremities of where. You was up with.

This is frame one, yeah, and this is frame two. It didn't move it, yeah yeah, right, yeah, it's in. Trouble between this one and this one. Yeah, yeah, so you might have moved it all. Yeah, but you know, I was also saying about like Hawkeye as a company that have do that sort of digital representation of where tennis ball is on the line, but we've been relying on that technology for so many years.

The problem being, of course, is in sport those decisions. I mean, you can't even quantify how much values on a decision like that. So it is an interesting argument. But yeah, it's well, just with everything at the moment questioning reality every day, you know, you see a clip and you go, is that that doesn't look quite right to me? Or you know, you have the art of ass you know, team going up and immediately people going wow, that's clearly AI, and it's like, oh, you know, it's it's just kind of baffling at the moment.

That what amazes me as well, as you talked about like that Star Wars short film, is you'll see comments saying this five minutes is better than the twelve hours they've made since the original trilogy, and you go, you think this is better filmmaking, Like, yes, it's shinier and glossier and maybe funnier because it's just just this short little thing you can scroll by as you're doing scrolling, But is it really better filmmaking? Course it's not. But that's what amazes me is people's people just aren't as discerning as people like you and people like me and people in the industry that you know, kind of scrutinize this stuff. People are just so willing to kind of accept things these days, which kind of I mean find.

Really it's true that audiences do dictate what gets made a lot, because ye, film is an economic endeavor. But I have young people come up to me all the time and they say, what should I study if I want to go into filmmaking, do I, you know, should I study this software or should I study this computer? And I generally respond with study the art and history of cinema because the technology will continue to change, And what should refer back to analogy I used already? You should study the drawing, not just the pencil. You still need to use the technology, you still need.

To know it. You are not going to tell Hitchcock that his way of putting together a sequence was wrong and should be and should be rejected. Eisenstein figured out a lot of new stuff in editing. Stagecoach figured out stage direction, you know, in the under needed group. There's certain rules of filmmaking based on how a viewer interprets what they see that I don't think will change significantly.

So it doesn't mean that there isn't a place for a vant garde film that breaks those rules. But I always find it a better experience to break rules that you know, rather than break them because you're ignorant of them. Yes, true, but I also think people are far more accepting of like stage directions that make no sense between a cut now or. Like or way more accepting of it. But I'm not You're totally right.

I see that thing all the time now where you know, instead of putting a character on the rule of thirds line where he's got a lot more room in front of his head than behind him, now they've moved it to the other side, so it looks like he's noses being cut off. And I assume that the idea behind that is, let's intentionally make the audience feel uncomfortable subtextually. But it doesn't white work for me to do that stuff. I always I always love the traditional compositions too. Maybe maybe I'm old that way, but yeah, but.

You know, as you say, there's just there's a lineage there, there's a history there that that I have sort of I find sort of comfort in in a way. Yeah, I don't mind if rules are broken totally. You know, the shaky cam for making television shows that are you know, single camera television shows, sitcoms look like look like their reality shows. Okay, do a little bit, but sometimes it's just so much every shot is so shaky all the time that it actually pulls me out. So I think there's a time and a place for everything, and you know, more tools is always better, but it for me, it's traditional filmmaking is it is still something that talks to me the most.

I mean, shaky cam is part of the tool set, it's part of the art. It's just that when it becomes about that. Yeah, well, it's beyond pastiche is when it drives me crazy. Because the Office did that. They made it look like a documentary in you know, the British Office before the American Show.

And now if you do that, you're nodding to things like the Office, which was subverting that job. You know, it's becoming sort of full circle again. It kind of Yeah, it doesn't sit right for me. Yeah, I feel like we could talk for a very long time. David.

Yeah, Well, I didn't study film production in college. I studied film theory and criticism, and I actually think that really served me well because even though I made short films, I had those classes. I used you know, bullles and eight mil, minter sixteen million, I did it cut film that technology was about to change. What didn't change that served me really well was understanding mis en song and lighting and editing, because I mean I remember very specifically one of my first meetings with George about the pod race. He was talking about he was talking about what the environment looked like this, this these big rock formations out in the desert.

And he said, and it should look a little bit like uh, and he trailed off right there. He was trying to think of what he was talking about, and I said, john Ford movie, Yes, exactly. So I think at that moment George went, oh, this is a you know, twenty one year old kid, but he knows a little bit about film history. And I think that that helped a little bit in my working with him. But as I said before, the tool are great, they're going to change, and the cinema history and language is something that we need to keep focusing on.

Huge tanks to David Dosarettes for being so generous with his time and his stories. From a kid standing on an apple box in a Phoenix projection booth during the asteroid sequence of the Empire to building the first digital pre visualization of the pod Race to rendering a fifty two episode animated series in real time. What a career and what a thoughtful person to spend a couple of hours with. I just want to take a moment as well, since this is episode one hundred and fifty, which is at least one hundred and forty more than I thought I would get to, just to say thank you to everyone who's stuck with the show long enough to make a number like that feel meaningful. Six years ago, I had no idea this would still be running, let alone with the level of guests that I've somehow ended up with.

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If you do that, you get early access to episodes, bonus content, and the warm glow of known You directly help me keeping tracking down these stories before they're lost. I was thinking the other day that I've kind of quietly been creating an archive of over fifty visual effects people's stories, and I like that idea. I like that idea that people can dip into this and dip into the transcripts and use them as a kind of oral history of that part of the industry. You lovely patrons are genuinely the reason this show still exists, So thank you, sincerely to everyone who already supports it. If Patroon isn't your thing, the next best thing you can do is to hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening, leave a quick review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share the episode with a fellow film nerd.

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