The Fountain
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Mania talks with VFX firm Intelligent Creatures

With The Number 23 just hitting theatres, postproduction work ongoing with Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, and Babel up for a Best Picture nod (with the Oscar’s right around the corner), life is pretty busy right now for IC President Raymond Gieringer and CEO Lon Molnar. 

Founded a scant four years ago, Intelligent Creatures has already made waves in the VFX community with work on such films as Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Silent Hill, and The Fountain. Raymond and Lon, along with co-founders Wendy Lanning and Michael Hatton, are all established artists with backgrounds in every aspect of visual effects production. Their collaborative efforts have yielded one of the most progressive VFX companies out there with fully integrated 2D and 3D compositing and animation pipelines. 

Intelligent Creatures’ ability to handle any cinematic challenge thrown their way has propelled the young firm toward the name-recognizable ranks of ILM and WETA Digital. Now let’s find out what Raymond and Lon have to say about their work on Babel, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Fountain as well as what motivated the company’s creation and what’s in store for them in the future. 
 

Mania: First of all could both of you tell us a little bit about yourselves and how you got involved in visual effects? 

Lon Molnar: I’ve been in the VFX industry for 10 years, with a BG in Graphic Design before that. Between owning a business in Visual Effects and being a father of 6 children, life is indeed busy... I had an interest in visual effects since working with the still image in the Graphic Design Industry. Inspired by the mind-blowing visuals of Toy Story, I was so stunned at the moving image, that I set out to get re-trained at the Vancouver Film School and locked myself to a computer until I figured out how to make a ball bounce (in 3D of course!). I worked insane hours and gained an addiction that I haven't been able to brush off since. 

Raymond Gieringer: I have a BFA in Fine Art and once upon a time I was heading towards a Masters in Art Conservation.  A chance meeting with a lifelong friend, Jonathan French, who had been an animator in the early days at ILM, changed things.  Jon suggested that I try animation, mentored me to get the training, and as they say, the rest is history. 
 

Given your long history working in animation, at what point did you two realize you wanted to start your own company and be your own boss?  

LM: I've always known that I wanted to be my own boss. I've been extremely alert and aware along the way watching what others were doing right and wrong—learning equally from both.  Finding people with synergy was the toughest challenge. Once I found myself at Toybox in Toronto, I noticed the commonalities I had with other key management, namely Raymond Gieringer, Michael Hatton, Wendy Lanning and myself were all effectively managing Panic Room and Chicago, so taking the leap with Intelligent Creatures seemed like a natural evolution. 

RG: I realized early on that too much credit was given to the equipment we use to create the effects, ignoring the artistic aspect of the job.  I became increasingly determined to create an environment in which the artists would get the acknowledgement they deserved for their creative talents. This insight became the inspiration for creating IC. 
 

So is that how you and your other fellow IC co-founders met, working at Toybox? 

RG: Yea we were all co-workers at the VFX company in Toronto.  As Lon mentioned we were working on films such as Chicago and Panic Room together, and realized that we had similar goals and aspirations. 
 

When the four of you solidified your plans to start IC how great was it to quit your job and become the competition? 

RG: I must say that for me, it was both exciting and a little daunting to leave my job and start IC, but all of us were up to the challenge. 

LM: Becoming the competition is always a scary proposition.  There's definitely a fear and the pressure is enormous 'cause you know the competition is watching your every move, and probably hoping for your essential failure. We stepped up to the challenge, approached things much differently than most, and kept focusing on working with the best directors and great feature film projects. 
 

I know every feature film presents its own unique set of challenges and nuances, but what is the overall plan of attack when approaching a new film project?  

RG: Understanding the Director’s vision for the film and to that end, designing the effects to facilitate the story. Our job is to help filmmakers speak to an audience, so it is of the utmost importance that our work doesn’t take the audience out of the story. 

LM: Just having a plan of attack is essential. I've worked at several houses that didn't have a plan. An overall lack of planning, and proper management and execution of that plan was severely lacking elsewhere. Taking the time to properly pitch a project, work on gathering the troops to design shots or look over development is essential. It's a rather simple philosophy, having the proper management in place to roll out the work, utilizing our pool of skilled technicians to deliver at our high standards… all while making sure we're meeting our budgets. 
 

What software do you primarily use for creating visual effects? 

RG: Our compositing package of choice is Digital Fusion. It was built for film and serves us well.  Photoshop is an essential tool for our Matte Painters and Texture artists. In terms of 3D, Maya is our primary choice. Ultimately though, we will use any tool that is right for the job. 
 

I know "matte painting" is an integral part in making visual effects. Can you tell us a little bit about exactly what it is and how it's applied to VFX production? 

LM: Matte Painting is essential to the industry and having a talented team of matte painters is even more so. The flexibility they allow you, with conceptual art to set extensions, and now more than ever, 3D matte paint projections is a huge advantage in the industry. Matte painters are 
breaking into the 3D environment, creating full digital sets and set extensions. They have a very developed eye for colour and lighting allowing you to utilize their skills further with Look Development and Art Direction. 
 

Although most people conjure images of impossible scenery and apocalyptic explosions when they think of visual effects, few ever think that a lot of VFX work is spent on the things you'd never notice or think out of the ordinary. What were some of the difficulties in creating seamless effects in Mr. & Mrs. Smith and The Sentinel? 

RG: For The Sentinel, a good part of the VFX challenge was to help set the stage for the movie, specifically Washington.  The interior and exterior White House shots were either filmed on a stage or on location, so we had to build and integrate the Visual Effects backgrounds to be seamless. In Mr. & Mrs. Smith, there was an elevator crash sequence with Brad Pitt that had originally been envisioned as a Miniature shoot. But production realized that it would be impossible to give the director Doug Liman the camera angles he wanted practically. Enter IC.  We had to build an entirely CG elevator, shaft and cable to accomplish the sequence, and integrate them with practical footage to pull off the shots. It was definitely a challenge, but we are very pleased with the results. 
 

The multiple storylines in Babel are defined by different types of film stock. I can imagine this type of VFX work required a lot of subtlety to match it with the footage. How did you treat the film stocks differently and what were some of the difficulties in doing so? 

LM: The DP, Rodrigo Prieto, chose specific film stocks and lenses to support the mood of the storylines and locations.  Our requirements were not in treating the film stocks, yet more about how to deal with the specific film stocks and lenses, and have our work blend seamlessly into these storylines.  We dealt with large film grain when working on 16mm with the Morocco locations, as opposed to anamorphic lenses when dealing with locations in Japan, and a spherical lens in the Mexico shoot. It was more about managing the consistency of the look within these formats. 
 

Does it ever irk you that most of us will never fully appreciate your work because we take it to be the real thing?  

RG: No, not really.  It’s a great compliment when people tell you that they didn’t realize that there were any effects in the movie. 

LM: Most of the work we do is invisible and not an effect which the audience can pick out for obvious reasons—no dinosaurs or spaceships.  I get a big kick out of the element of surprise, when it's finally revealed that the shot is a visual effect and the viewer is left somewhat confused, yet still pleasantly surprised.  It's much more satisfying knowing your illusion was a success. 
 

On the other side of the spectrum IC has done some outlandish, downright disgusting effects for The Fountain. How did you recreate Mayan rainforests and fabricate nebulae in space? I heard a lot of your interstellar landscapes were based off of recorded microscope footage of yeast and bacteria culture interactions. How did you translate that into the Final Frontier? 

RG: Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for the rainforest shots in the movie.  But we did design and create the various “Hero” space backgrounds that would serve as the backdrop for Tom’s (Hugh Jackman’s) voyage towards a dying star.  Normally, we would generate these backgrounds by creating hundreds of CG elements.  But the director Darren Aronofsky was concerned that the film have a timeless look, so we decided to use Macro-photography elements as the basis for much larger CG canvasses.  In the broadest sense, we started with real world elements as our paint, and then molded those elements into final canvasses digitally. 
 

How did your work on Stranger than Fiction vary from that on The Fountain? 

RG: In both Stranger and Fountain we traveled through space.  The space in Stranger consisted of an impossible camera move from the moon’s point of view of the earth to Will Ferrell’s bedside table. The space in The Fountain took the form of the background environments around Tom (Hugh Jackman) as he traveled towards a dying star. The shot in Stranger was completely fabricated, but we were faced with an audience that has seen enough NASA and airplane footage to have a good sense of the earth from space.  So our design for the shot had a real world scrutiny to live up to, even though that type of flight could not happen. 

In designing The Fountain space environments, we were on a slightly more fantastical bent.  Sure, we have seen photos from space, but no one really knows what a Nebulae or dying star looks like up close.  So we had to design something that felt real, even though we had limited real world examples to draw upon. 
 

I know one of the major set-pieces for IC in the movie Babel was the final shot zooming out of the city skyline of Tokyo. Why did director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu call upon you to synthesize a helicopter shot instead of just doing it? With so many details needed to make the shot believable and so little time to get the film ready for Cannes last year, how the hell did you manage to do it? 

LM: Ah, yes the final shot in the film. We touched base with production early on about the possibility of doing this shot, it came and went as production went on and logistics were being worked out in Tokyo. In the end, it seemed to be a logistic nightmare for them to get the shot Alejandro wanted, so we gave our recommendations on how to shoot based on a few methodologies, and hopped on a plane to discuss further. This shot was going to be a major challenge knowing it was going to be the last shot and had to be perfectly believable in such a key sensitive moment, essentially wrapping up the film. 

I scouted a few locations nearby looking for an endpoint for the helicopter that was to follow a linear move from the balcony.  I took a few reference images, sat down with Alejandro and Rodrigo to discuss composition, Alejandro was very specific about what he wanted and how this was to support the mood he was creating in the film. We had a camera mounted to a libra head on the end of a crane on a track. This was on the roof of a 30-story building, which hung over the side to shoot the actors on the balcony. We were able to pull the camera back the first 20+ feet, then I had them lock the camera down and hold the move knowing we would continue the move beyond that point.  I also took a camera into our previously scouted endpoint position and shot a reference plate, tiled plates of the hero building and 360 moving reference footage of Tokyo adding life to the scene with street, water and air traffic. 
 

I find it interesting that we truly are entering into the Digital Age. Everything from modern chemistry to machinery design is done in simulation before it's ever conducted in the real world. It's now cheaper and more plausible to construct entire sets digitally than to shoot in hard-to-film or impossible locations. Did you have an idea this would be the trend when you founded Intelligent Creatures? 

RG: That we are now able to create believable all-CG environments rather than to find or build them practically is not really surprising.   

LM: When we started Intelligent Creatures, we were small and ambitiously reached for the top as quickly as we could. In doing so we relied heavily on the digital camera and a DV cam to take the real world into the digital world. I think it was one of our first purchases knowing it was going to speed up the process immensely, it was an evolution of the work we did previously on Chicago.  Replacing many set elements with entirely digital sets became fairly straightforward. Once tracking software became much more accurate and easy to use, it changed everything yet again allowing us to now take matte paintings, project them onto geometry and move the camera around, allowing moving cameras with these environments to look believable. I didn't know how far someone would take it, and if the studios would even welcome it, yet films like Star Wars and The Matrix broke new ground for successfully creating convincing digital sets. 

RG: As our technical and artistic expertise grows alongside filmmaker’s imaginations, our industry will continue to push the envelope. 
 

Have you ever kicked around the idea of doing an entire feature film with digital effects? 

LM: Yes, and I'd love to... yet it still needs a solid story. The effects need to support the story regardless of how beautiful they look, or inexpensive the execution. If the story doesn't work I'm not interested. 
 

It’s very refreshing to hear you say that, sometimes I think a lot of people in the Hollywood film industry tend to forget these things. 

I know you guys are currently working on the films The Number 23, a thriller starring Jim Carrey, and Mr. Magorum's Wonder Emporium starring Natalie Portman and Dustin Hoffman. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of effects we can expect from either of these projects? 

LM: We've really focused on the designs of the visuals. Consistently, films we've done like The Fountain and The Number 23 consist of shots we spent a great deal of time designing the look of. We tend to focus more on 2D with a strong 3D support system for this design work.  Most of the shots utilize a strong talent pool. The Number 23 benefited a great deal from some wonderful matte painters, designing the look of a major shot in the film. 

RG: Look for an exciting storybook sequence in which we travel through a handful of pop-up book style environments. The shot is really beautiful.  

LM: The film has a very dark tone, and we've tried to capture that same atmosphere and mood and carry it through every shot. 

RG: We can’t be specific just yet for Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, but look for Intelligent Creatures’ work in the film’s finale. 
 

Thanks both of you for bearing with me, here's the last question: With your company's mentality of always stepping forward to raise the bar for visual effects, what would be your dream project to show the VFX community and the world that Intelligent Creatures is here to stay? 

RG: Good question. I wish I had a good answer. The reality is that we work on one or more dream projects per year.   

LM: For me it’s anything by James Cameron. I've been a huge fan of his for quite some time… he’s a fellow Canadian and great inspiration! He has managed to focus on the two areas that we as artists in this digital age need to focus on—creative and technical—and has molded the two together, pushing the industry to do the unthinkable time and again. I've worked on Visual Effects which utilized his prototype stereoscopic camera setup, and fully respect his creative mind and ambitions. I'm a huge fan of AVATAR and almost cried when word got out that he's finally moving forward with it. The passion I have for that project would burn through our studio and become very obvious where we stand in the industry. 

RG: We have been fortunate to work on some amazing films with some terrific directors. As long as this is possible, we’ll be here. 
 

Well I for one would love to see you guys take a stab at Avatar. On behalf of myself and Mania.com I’d sincerely like to thank both of you for taking the time out of your hectic schedules to talk with us.