Digital Compositing Quotes

If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.

'Phantom Menace' was a huge project. It was the biggest visual effects production ever done at that point, and it was a little scary how big it was and how many unknown technologies had to be developed to do that work.

We're always striving to make Avatar look like a cinematic, live-action movie.

Unless you're making Marvel movies, I think CGI usually suffers, especially in mid-budget-range horror movies where you see CGI.

You've seen how they make movies like Star Wars and stuff. They're never really there. They're in front of a green screen just pretending to be jumping around.

I think you should be prepared for a green-screen CGI at all times.

The thing with computer-generated imagery is that it's an incredibly powerful tool for making better visual effects. But I believe in an absolute difference between animation and photography.

Something we often struggle with on pictures is the right way to shoot live-action elements that are for an environment that's very complicated from a lighting standpoint. An example is a starship flying through an environment that's constantly changing.

Technically, the green screen acting can be difficult because there's something worse than a tennis ball on the end of a stick; it's an Australian visual effects assistant running around a field with a cardboard dinosaur head on the end of a stick while wearing sandals.

[I was filmed] against a blue screen [in the Star Wars]. All the rest came later, in Lucasland. They did have me take gun lessons, though. I went to the same guys who taught Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver.

There's things that you just couldn't do with an optical printer. Now, with digital compositing, most of the energy that goes into a shot goes into the aesthetic issues of, 'Is it a good shot or not?'

Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color.

ILM was the first company that I had worked at that had a computer-graphics division.

'Green Screen' was a total experiment. I'm glad we did it, but it was just tough on that network to get it going.

Green screen's not my favourite thing to do.

I've always been excited by rotoscoping, the technique used in films like 'Waking Life,' which fuses animation with real-life emotion. It seemed like it was a process ripe for innovation.

I don't have anything against CGI.

In 3-D filmmaking, I can take images and manipulate them infinitely, as opposed to taking still photographs and laying them one after the other. I move things in all directions. It's such a liberating experience.

I think CGI is interesting, but it's too expensive and limiting in terms of what you can do shot-by-shot.

I used to animate. I started in animation, and you'd end every day with at least one substantive contribution.

A lot of filmmakers understand that the work is done digitally, and it's technically possible to change it late in the game.

I'm of a generation of director that came up understanding special effects.

I wouldn't want to do a whole movie with effects.

I made tons of films. I did animation for my friends' films. I animated scenes just for the fun of it. Most of my stuff was bad, but I had fun, and I tried everything I knew to get better.

My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn't change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit scan or miniatures.