ILM, Industrial Light and Magic, was quite the place to be in the mid-eighties. During the decade starting with Star Wars it had provided the visual effects for a vast majority of the top ten grossing films of all time. One of the key players behind all of that, of course, was Dennis Muren. We were fortunate to be able to work with him on Young Sherlock Holmes because working for Dennis is fun, professionally satisfying, and very educational.

Of course Dennis is also a great student. He learned about the promise of computer graphics from the Lucasfilm Computer Division's so-called "Graphics Group", the core team that would eventually form Pixar. With CGI now commonplace it's hard to realize that in 1984 it was still mostly a laboratory curiosity. Only a few CG shots, starting with Ed Catmull's own digitized hand in Futureworld, had been used in features up to that point.

Even Tron only had fifteen or twenty minutes of CG. Don't forget that none of the Star Wars films had any CG at all beyond Larry Cuba's Death Star briefing display in the first film and the "hologram" of the later Death Star that the Computer Division did for Return of the Jedi.

While we were working on YSH Dennis wanted to study the CG in The Last Starfighter, so he got a print and had it loaded on the rock-and-roll projector at ILM. It was an impressive effort. While there were some shots that had obviously been done at lower complexity than others, a few of the hero shots were so good that Dennis said, "I'd completely buy that as real".

One of my biggest lessons came when a scene rolled by that was a master shot of a large hangar bay full of starfighters. Dennis suddenly called, "Wait!" The projectionist paused the film on a frame. Dennis was already using his pointer to trace rapid circles all over the screen, and I was squinting to see what was wrong with the shot. His eye for detail was legendary (though he also knew when to say, "Forget it, nobody will see that").

"Where am I supposed to be looking?"

The lightbulb was going off in my head. Dennis went on to explain that a shot had to be designed in a way that directed the viewer's eye. There was no contrast, just a frame full of busy details, all about the same value. Suddenly I saw that there was nothing specific to see, no one thing to draw my attention. In a later post I'll write about the obsessive degree to which Pixar directs the viewer's eye. That lesson from Dennis was probably where it began.

Years later I flashed back to that day when I saw the first space battle scenes in The Phantom Menace. But I digress.

I think Starfighter gave Dennis some hope that these Computer Division guys were going to be able to deliver a usable Stained Glass Knight. There was more than a little trepidation about going that route since that kind of character, integrated into live action, had never really been done before that. In fact, it almost wasn't done this time.

Our first attempt was completely rejected by director Barry Levinson. The script called for a knight in a stained-glass window to come alive, alight in the church, and frighten the poor priest so badly that he would panic, dash outside, and promptly be trampled by the horse drawn wagon that someone just knew would be passing by at that moment. The perfect murder!

The first design had the window break into colored shards, floating blades of rippled shower-door glass that gathered in the air to form a three-dimensional Roman centurion. It had all been modeled, animated, lit, and roughly composited into the scene, and we were all pretty happy with it. It seemed quite menacing. But it didn't work for Levinson, so very late in the game our keen-edged Roman was scrapped and a whole new design had to be executed.