In the wake of so many lucrative CG films it’s easy to see that early blockbusters like Toy Story (1995) and Shrek (2002) were the frontrunners for traditional animation’s demise. Now 12 years after the first theatrical release of a CGI feature, Hollywood has long since caught on to the new medium’s profitability. Yet for all the success and sequels, computer-generated animation is still in its formative youth and aside from a few hiccups the majority of the market still hasn’t branched out from the pure-bred family comedy.
Ever since he started dabbling in computer graphics back at film school, Aristomenis Tsirbas (Meni for short) has had an altogether different vision of a CG movie. His 2003 animated short, Terra, not only offered a great twist on the conventional alien invasion premise but also garnered a few awards in the festival circuit including the Director’s Choice Award at the 2004 Black Maria Film and Video Festival and the Audience Award for Favorite Animation in 2003’s Palm Springs Int’l Short Film Festival.
Several years of running the industry gauntlet has left Meni, original producing partner Dane Allan Smith, and most importantly Terra itself unscathed during their quest to adapt the short into a full-length feature. All three found a home at the newly established Snoot Entertainment, a production company founded in 2004 by Keith Calder that independently develops, finances, and produces both genre-oriented live-action films and CG animated features with broad audience appeal. Now under the reins of Meni and Smith, along producing head Keith Calder, exec Jessica Wu and Ryan Colucci, the project is finally on a roll.
Armed with a wholly original and undiluted concept, a darker tone, and a positively stacked cast (including Brian Cox, Dennis Quaid, Amanda Peet, Chris Evans, Luke Wilson, Danny Glover, Ron Perlman, David Cross, etc), Terra is poised to take Meni Tsirbas and Snoot Entertainment to the center stage in 2008. But before we get ahead of ourselves lets talk with the director Meni himself to learn a little about himself, the Terra project, and how he frontloaded the production process to create a streamlined CG film.
Mania: So Meni first of all what motivated you to get into film?
Meni: Way back when? Well ever since I was a kid I saw this little film released in the 70s, I think it was called Star Wars. It was actually one of the first films I saw and of course for a young kid to watch a film like that as one my first theatrical experiences it left a really strong impression on me. It showed me how powerful cinema really is. I wanted to participate in that experience.
What kind of formal education or training have you had to prepare you for your career?
Meni: I got into film school in Montreal, Canada at Concordia University and while I was there I discovered a computer called the Amiga and they had a media lab there with a program called Lightwave. This was back in 1990 and I was immediately taken with it. While still at school I started immediately doing 3D and did small jobs for music videos and got employment while still in university. The idea of computer graphics freed me up to make my own films and actually in many ways was more cost-effective than shooting live action.
Live action is still my original and kind of ultimate goal, so when I started designing Terra I tried to bring back a lot of live action sensibilities to CGI, which I think is appropriate because it’s a film of a darker tone than what we’re used to seeing in today’s more family-oriented CG comedies. Terra itself embodies a lot more live action sensibility in terms of its lighting, its cinematography, and its more realistic character animation. It’s not performance-captured so it’s not like Final Fantasy or Polar Express or anything like that. It’s still key frame animation and it still takes advantage of the capabilities and talents of an animator as opposed to the talents of an actor in a performance-capture suit. It’s really a blend of CG, classical animation, and also live-action sensibilities because it’s a dramatic piece more than a talking critter comedy.
Then I got into computers and started doing visual effects, which was my other interest aside from film and that lead to a career in VFX. VFX has allowed me to do short film projects and those have led me to doing feature projects again. My tastes have matured over the years and the type of films I’m interested in is now diversified but it’s interesting that now 30 years later I get to make a science fiction film wherein I can reproduce the same kind of feelings I experienced with Star Wars. It’s a completely different film from Star Wars of course, it’s a lot more political, but at the same time it is science fiction; it does have to do with the clash of two very different sensibilities.
How did you and your long-time producing partner Dane Allan Smith meet?
Dane: We met through a mutual friend in California at a party and I was in no way involved in the film business then, though I was a huge fan of film and animation. It was suggested that I manage Meni and at the time I dismissed it as a ridiculous notion but looking back that person was actually very intuitive! They were right and things worked out perfect almost immediately.
Meni: Yep he’s my business partner and the other half of MeniThings Productions. We’ve been in business together for about 7 years now. We pretty much split our responsibilities down the middle where I handle the creative aspects and Dane handles everything else including the business side of things. Obviously there’s a lot of collaboration in between.
Okay so what exactly is Terra and where did this idea come from? I know the concept originated as a 7 minute animated short you and Dane created in 2003.
Meni: Yeah the concept originated several years before the short film. I was watching an alien invasion film and the aliens come to Earth as the bad guys and we’re the good guys, you know we’ve seen a lot of those ever since the 50s. Because of my fascination with the potential for alien life in the universe, I think perhaps there is an abundance of life out there, but because its just so incredibly large in space and time that gets in the way of us being able to observe or experience that other life.
With that kind of concept in mind I watched these alien films and found it extremely simplistic that these aliens are just out to get us. In many cases they’re allegories for the Red Threat and so on, but I always thought you could add a layer or two to that and then I thought how interesting it would be if you could give the aliens as much of a character and as much sympathy and complexity as we do for the humans. And then I thought I’d want to do an alien invasion film, but completely turn it on its head. I found that a lot of the aliens in these other films exhibit behavior which humans exhibit in history, particularly humanity’s tendency to dominate and occupy. In light of recent events too and tendencies in several First World nations, not just the United States, it feels as though we are the ones who are following the patterns of the ‘invading aliens.’ So I figured lets turn it around and make the point of view through the aliens and make the invaders us. Through that we’ve opened up a lot of interesting ideas. From the very beginning I thought it would be a lot more interesting as a dramatic piece instead of a comedic piece.
The film is really about choices, about options. Characters on both sides feel like their backs are against the wall and think that their only choice is war. Several scenes in the film echo the idea that there are options to war, it’s not just kill or be killed. And the film does culminate in a war between the humans and the aliens, but it also posits that the war could have been avoided if there would have been some communication and a compromise made where both races could get what they want. On the human side they feel they have no choice because the humans have destroyed Earth and they’ve been looking for another blue planet and found one which they named Terra. The conflict is brought up when the air composition on this new alien planet is poisonous for the humans. The humans need to change the air composition on the planet so they can inhabit it, but at the same time they’re killing everything on it. To them it’s kill or be killed, they feel their species can only survive if they kill another species.
How did Terra transform from a relatively unknown short to this big, major motion feature?
Meni: Well when I made the short film I specifically wrote a story which would represent the concept of the feature film but would also work as a short so it would get some plays and some notoriety in the festival circuit. We didn’t want to make the short film a trailer so it has a simplified ending that made it more playable as a stand-alone short than as a calling card for a feature. Because of this it got programmed and through the programming there was one production company, Snoot Entertainment, which took notice of the film. They decided to try and see if this could work as a feature film and so I drafted a 33 page treatment for the entire movie. The story was then given to screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos and he, myself, and the producers fleshed that treatment out to a 100 page script. In the meantime it was my responsibility to also design the entire film because it is a lower budget CGI film and we started with almost nothing. It was up to me to come up not only with the initial story but also the look and feel of the film. So that took several more months (laughs). Once that was all approved and the producers loved where it was going, we then switched for a year into animatic mode and generated models and lighting and so on. I created the models in their basic form from my sketches and created the film in a very low-quality animatic version.
We went in stages and started really small. I just had to basically commit a lot of my time, resources, energy, and even my health to a certain degree just to get this film into its first stage. By bringing in a few artists and taking a 3 minute section of the film and actually producing it to near final quality we were able to then show this to investors and present them the formula of how a CGI movie is done well and is almost guaranteed to make money. We were then given the funds to make a lower budget CGI film.
From that point on we were armed with the script and the very advanced animatic which not only had all the models done but also 80% of the geometry. The textures weren’t done but that was okay. All the shots and lighting of the film were done on the first pass and so we were able to hire a team and go into the space. I also edited the first pass of the film ahead of production and therefore really frontloaded the process to get all the creative aspects nailed down. So the creative decisions were all made ahead of time with a really small team: myself, the producers, etc. Now that we’re in production we’re dealing with a locked edit and a framework animatic so the artist doesn’t have to start from scratch. That’s our little secret, our little trick to make this movie at a lower budget while still making it an epic film: to really do as much as we can with a very small team ahead of bringing in the full animation team.
So you weren’t ever worried that you would lose any creative control when trying to adapt Terra into a major project?
Meni: No not really. Where we got the money, they weren’t interested in participating creatively and our co-producers offer plenty of notes but are mainly interested in just trying to catch all the little things that I miss. Right now I’m moving at such a breakneck pace that they’re able to be more objective and catch the things I miss the first time around, so it’s a pretty good arrangement between the producers and I. We’re keeping the studio out of the loop in this case because we feel we have something very strong. We had a previous project which is still in development hell at a studio and we don’t want to make the same mistake.
Hah, yeah I can imagine that development hell is just about every filmmaker’s worst nightmare. Just trying to get all that studio feedback and incorporate it into a picture that’s already well on its way can completely bog down the entire process.
Meni: Right especially if you want to keep the production lean because we can’t have any waste here. So we have a very flat kind of hierarchy as far as approvals go.
What kind of specific computer software are you using to bring the alien world of Terra to life?
Meni: As far as 3D software goes we use two packages: for character animation we use Maya and for rendering, modeling, and texturing we use Lightwave. We use these packages for several reasons. We feel that Maya has the best character animation feature set and also it has the largest base of character animators and support infrastructure in terms of users all over the world. Pragmatically it’s easier to find a Maya animator than any other kind of animator. Now as far as Lightwave goes that’s kind of our secret weapon because where Maya does have a decent renderer, it’s extremely slow. Most other renderers are also very slow and if you want to get a real high quality result it would require an unaffordable amount of computing power in our case to make the film look as good as we want it to look. We want the visuals to be near photo-real.
But Lightwave came from television and it’s optimized to look good and to render quickly. Lightwave artists in the industry are known as generalists who can work very fast. In fact a few large studios have Lightwave departments and they are their secret weapons and tend to do things faster, better, and quicker than the departments using Maya and other renderers. What we did is create a pipeline between LightWave and Maya by hiring Christian Aubert, who created a program called Beaver Project, which communicates between LightWave and Maya. So the short of the long in our production pipeline is we take the Lightwave animatics and convert them into Maya. The Maya animators animate the characters and then we spit out the deformation of the characters back into Lightwave and do almost everything else in Lightwave: all the vehicle animation, all the lighting, texturing, and rendering. The rendering ends up being full quality and despite the film having a very warm, photorealistic look we’re able to get render times of more often than not an hour or less per frame using a 300 processor render farm.
How does producing Terra as a CG film differ from shooting it live-action? Aside from the obvious differences, are there any areas you have more or less freedom with?
Meni: Clearly in CGI you have far more freedom than a live-action, but you’re also restricted because you’re dealing with very daunting technical challenges. On animation’s creatively liberating side you can change things at any time so if a shot doesn’t work or the continuity doesn’t work you don’t have to hide it in the edit, you can just go in and fix it. Also in many cases you’re not limited in scale. What’s really interesting with CGI is that the economies of scale are different than in feature films and sometimes even reversed.
For example in a feature film it might be extremely expensive to all of a sudden build a city and have all these vehicles populating it. In CGI that’s not such a difficult thing to do. However in a live-action feature if you want to get a really subtle, nuanced performance from an actor you can hire a good actor and get that. In CGI that may be extremely difficult. In a live-action film if the actor takes their hand and runs it through their hair, no big deal you can tell the actor to do that. In CGI if I have to do that the team is going to faint because it would require weeks and weeks of work.
But overall because we can make changes after we animate and view it in the edit we can go back and instead of having to edit things out / in or cheat things within the edit we can just go back in and make the changes. That does of course tamper with our schedule and our budget. Because this is a lower budget CGI film we can’t be frivolous with all the changes we want, we have to prioritize them. Right now for example we have a wish list that has a few hundred entries in it of stuff that we’d like to change but if we do them now we’ll go off schedule and off budget. So we’re reserving that for the end of production so we can see just where we are and then we can go back to make those changes with whatever resources we have left. What’s cool is that we have that ability to make those changes.
When I first heard about this project I couldn’t believe how many big name actors you had attached to the picture. What’s it like working with such name-recognizable talent?
Meni: It’s a real pleasure and I feel privileged to do so. The actors don’t have to be available for such a long period of time as they do for a live-action film and just have to report in for floor sessions, so therefore it takes less time for them. Because of this we were able to get actors of a higher caliber than we would have if this was a live-action film of the same budget.
The reason why some of the actors like Dennis Quaid and Brian Cox signed onto this project is because they were given an animatic of their character and a near-final sample of the film. They really took to it and wanted to sign up based on the CGI and the story alone. So I’ve been able to work with really great actors. I’ve worked with actors before but never on this level. It’s just a joy to work with them and we had a lot of fun. I learned a lot and enjoyed the entire process.
Okay last question: It’s easy to see that CGI films have replaced the traditional animated feature and as they’ve become increasingly popular the market has gotten more and more competitive. How will Terra stand apart from other CGI fare?
Meni: That’s a good question. Terra isn’t just a bunch of animals talking and running around in a comedy situation, it’s a dramatic science fiction adventure. So by nature of what it is it’ll stand out because it’s a very different film from the family comedies we’re used to seeing. It also separates itself from previous CGI sci-fi adventures because we feel that this story has a soul informed by politics, informed by human nature, and informed by things I think are relevant for our time.
In many ways this is a very provocative film in light of recent world events and I feel because of its relevancy it may stick out as not just light entertainment. Terra is a film that people can go in and not just children but also adults and older adults will get something to chew on and carry away from it.
Dane: In many ways I think Terra harkens back to the great sci-fi films of the 70s like THX 1138 and Silent Running which took very important environmental and political issues and captured them in science fiction. What we’re doing with Terra is elaborating that kind of message but doing it in a new medium. I think that the politics and the message won’t be lost on people and that’s why it’s quite a bit different from what people commonly associate with CGI.
On behalf of myself and Mania.com I’d like to thank both of you for taking the time out of your uber-busy schedules to talk with us. It’s been a pleasure.
Meni: Thanks Pat.
Dane: Likewise.
There you have it folks; it sounds like Terra is shaping up into a CG film I can really sink my teeth into. To find out more check back with mania.com in the coming months.
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