 We're at Industrial Light and Magic. For the last 37 years ILM has made some of the most well-known effects in Hollywood history. Have you seen the Star Wars movies, the Indiana Jones trilogy, or the Transformers films? You know the work of ILM. Jeff White was the visual effects supervisor on the Avengers and Transformers Dark of the Moon. I sat down with him to talk about what first inspired him to get into special effects and a problem ILM had about a particularly colorful Hulk. You know I think so many of us saw Star Wars and said okay this is where we want to work and you know knowing that ILM kind of was founded to create that and then just following it over the years and then getting a chance to get a job here was really a dream come true. Let's talk about the most recent film you did, The Avengers. We're actually sitting here in the motion capture stage where you said you shot a lot of stuff for that movie. What's the process? What happens in these four walls? One of the great things about Avengers especially with the Hulk was having Mark Ruffalo come up here and do a performance. We actually did several rounds of that. He came here initially just to come here on the mocap stage and we showed him his motion kind of retargeted onto Hulk very fast and loose so they could play with some ideas. At the same time we captured a range of expressions from him that we used to drive the digital version of him. Our process on this one rather than just kind of jumping straight to the Hulk was to actually build the digital Mark Ruffalo first and verify that when we took the data that we captured you know from all his expressions, put it on the digital version of him and then looked at them side by side that they would look the same so that you know we were really figuring out the difficult problems by having a perfect reference. And then because the Hulk had elements of Mark incorporated into his design which I think was a really great decision for this film we were able to take a lot of that same work and kind of apply it to the Hulk. Sometimes I feel like you may see CG characters and they will kind of like pop out from the environment they won't kind of blend in and he is seamless throughout that entire movie. You know what steps did you take to kind of make him blend in like that because it seemed a step above the stuff I had seen recently. Because the design was based on him he did a performance for every shot. He actually came up here and put on the helmet cam and put on the you know ridiculous looking tracking suit and went through the entire process and Joss could direct him and you know very quickly work through you know what the shot was, make some selects off that and we track all of that data, apply it first to our Mark Ruffalo digital double, again make sure that we had that as a good match and then apply it through retargeting process to the Hulk because the Hulk is such different proportions from Mark Ruffalo. There is a lot of work in terms of you know taking his performance and then the animators really crafting it into you know what you see on the screen and a lot of hand done you know work in terms of putting that together. What I think then helped us really blend it into the plate was when we were on set Mark was there for every Hulk shot and so we were able to render the Hulk and stack him up side by side with Mark Ruffalo there and you know something that we kind of learned on Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean is you have the real actor there even if you're not using any part of them just to have the reference of what do you know Mark's eyes look like in this shot, in this lighting, in this environment and then making sure that our Hulk matches that. Because a lot of times we would put our same digital character in there, we'd render it and you know like hey this looks great and then we'd start comparing it like whoa there's a lot that's off that we need to go fix even down to just the angle of the eyelashes could make a big difference in terms of your perception of the character and that kind of match. So you know I think especially for the things where CG tends to be a big struggle like around the eyes where you're trying to put some thought and some emotion into the eyes being able to have that reference performance was really valuable. What are some other areas that are traditionally a struggle when you're trying to go and put a character together like that? Well I think you know for the Hulk he's a human and yet he's not only giant sized but he's got green skin and you know we sort of joked around all the time that green is a really difficult color. Humans are very sensitive to green and differences in that color and he's in so many different environments. He's down on the Park Avenue Viaduct and he's jumping up Stark Tower to the outside and the blue sky or the building shadows would all change his green color to sort of bad looking colors. We had Minty Hulk and we had Pumpkin Hulk and so we worked very closely with Marvel in terms of trying to make sure that his color was consistent throughout and that we also early on in the process Joss decided that the green really wanted to be a pretty desaturated green and I think that helped us a lot in terms of making him look real because it's very similar in saturation to kind of a natural flesh tone. So you know rather than something that kind of pops off the screen he integrates really nicely with the other Avengers that are there. So Joss Whedon directing the Avengers not something that had done a huge big budget film like that before. What was that experience like? You know I was really excited to get a chance to work with him on this project and had been such a huge fan of his coming into it and it was really fantastic. I think all the humor that you see in the writing and that you see on the screen is what it's like working with him every day and he's pretty amazing at pulling out references to movies and artists that we'd be scrambling to go look up to see what he's talking about. But it was a really phenomenal experience and I think the great thing that he brought to it was making sure that in the end the visual effects always serve the story that he was creating. I think people really connect with these characters and then our job was to just make sure everything looked good. One of the really fun parts about working with him is that because he's such a fan of comic books to begin with he knew what people wanted to see the Hulk do and so he gave us those moments. Another effects supervisor influenced by Star Wars was Grady Koffer. We talked to Grady about his work on the film Battleship and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. So we got a call that there were a few shots on There Will Be Blood that kind of sat in the middle of his movie and that was kind of the big whenever they strike oil in the middle of it and there's the big geyser of oil and there were lots of ways to kind of tackle that kind of shot. Now for Paul who's definitely a purist and really honors the craft of filmmaking and likes the purity of the frame and all of that because I could have done, this was a little early, I could have done a big CG simulation and done all of that and for that show that didn't really seem like the right solution. It was something that actually was a special effects form and it was great. It had a pretty good looking kind of representation of oil and we did a big kind of, we shot it as kind of a miniature. We actually sprayed oil up in the air down in LA and filmed all of these elements and it became kind of a large kind of comp of those kind of elements and it worked really well and it was all very real and then a lot of the cameraman got covered with this kind of fake oil but you know it worked out in the end. You were the supervisor on Battleship. You guys have a long history of great sci-fi movie special effects. When you're taking something on like that, was it daunting and what is the process and some particular innovations you guys brought to the table with Battleship? It was daunting. For sure. And a lot of that were, I mean there was a lot of big ideas in this and that's kind of what you want. When you find a director who, and Pete is definitely an idea guy, it's kind of nonstop. He'll show up in the morning and go, I've got it. Get my previs guys out here and he'll throw out all these interesting things and you go down all these different kind of creative journeys and ideas and stuff. But when he pitched it, it wasn't just kind of naval warfare, it was naval warfare meets sci-fi alien invasion on a grand scale, on a summer blockbuster scale and he wanted spectacle. He wasn't shying away from it. He was like, I'm here, I'm making a big mega summer movie. And the way he described it was that this alien invasion, they land in these ships called stingers which are, if you look at their silhouette, they're kind of based on these water bugs. They can kind of hover or walk along the surface or float along the surface of the ocean. But we wanted them to start kind of submerged. So in their reveal, and this is kind of a big part of the movie, they all kind of breach up through the water and then they splash back down. That's already pretty hard, right? We know that that's kind of a large scale fluid simulation and that was going to be something we're going to wrap our heads around. But as the project, we were in pre-production, he said, okay, not only do they breach and they sit on the surface of the water, but I want all of these tubes and stuff underneath them and they kind of suck water up out of them and then recycle it over them constantly. They're just constant waterfalls. And of course you nod, you're like, okay, that sounds great, very interesting. And so we kind of knew at that point that, and IOM has actually a great history of water shows specifically, they've done some really, really groundbreaking stuff. But maintaining that over the course of this entire show, for a lot of it in broad daylight and in very, very wide kind of spectacle shots, we knew we were going to have to raise our game. And it was pretty amazing here at IOM because they have a really, really strong R&D department. And so you get all these guys together in a room and they came up with what they call it the Battleship Water Project. And pretty much over the course of comes to a year, they re-engineered how we tackle kind of large scale fluid simulations at IOM and then how we render it for all, we wanted to kind of represent water kind of through the entire kind of lifespan of water from a big kind of splashy mass of water to the little spitty kind of particulate that comes off of that, to the little mist that comes off of that. And all of it we wanted to be influenced by air fields and simulated kind of movement of vortices in the air. It was a huge, huge project. But at the end of the day, it really enhanced kind of your experience of these stingers and became a part of their personality. Pete's mandate from the beginning on this film was authenticity. Everything had to be very authentic. And we were scouting the Missouri one day down in Pearl Harbor and there was kind of a cut-in throughout the day that Pete wanted to have a bit of an effects meeting dockside at the end of the day. So I met him. And so we're kind of sitting there and there's this like, you know, wall to wall, there's the Missouri kind of beautiful and majestic kind of filling the horizon. And he said, all right, that I get. That's real. You know, I feel that, that ship. Your work has to look just as good as that. I have to believe your work. And it was, I mean, it was a challenge, you know. That's no pressure. That's no pressure at all. But you know, but it was great. And it actually, it set kind of a high lofty goal for us. And that's, that's kind of what you want, you know, you want to aim high. Well, Grady, thank you so much for spending some time with us. It's been a real treat just to get an insight into what you do every day in the facility. And yeah, thanks so much. Hope to talk to you again soon. Yeah, awesome. Thanks.