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When I pose the same question to Lasseter in a phone interview, he gets it: "Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity, a standard you use to judge your tools and abilities. I like to take a full step back and create something that doesn't exist and looks real; and if you keep doing this, the world is wide open as far as what you can do.
"Here it's always a two-way street, artists challenging technology and technology inspiring the artist constantly. I follow Chuck Jones [the creator of classic Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoons] the way Phil Tippett follows Ray Harryhausen. We study Chuck Jones cartoons for timing -- they're masterpieces."
At the same time, Lasseter is as driven as anyone at ILM to push the expressive capacities of the box: "The complexity of the imagery is going to be astounding to audiences. It's exciting to think of the computer as a medium -- that thing I hear you typing on, if it's not obsolete at this hour, by noon it will be. Toy Story took four years to make; during that time the advances were astounding. The first sequence we did was the army men -- it works great, everyone loves it -- but if you look at the level of complexity of those images and compare it with the last images in the chase sequence, you can see it's increased tenfold. When A Bug's Life comes out in 1998, we'll see an increase in image complexity of another order of magnitude." (The big advance: facial expressions.)
"What I like to do is not blend computer stuff with live action, but to create another world and have the audience sit there and know the world doesn't exist, but still feel it's believable. The computer allows us to create the believable-unbelievable, or the unbelievably believable. When [the celebrated children's book author-illustrator] Bill Joyce saw Toy Story, he said, 'It's not like something you made, it's like something you dreamt.' "
3. Tippett Redux
Back in 1992, Phil Tippett saw his dreams crumbling on the computer screen. But in the early days of Jurassic Park, there was a terrible crash at the intersection of art and technology. It soon became clear that computer animators weren't immediately qualified to visualize mammoth reptiles dynamically and persuasively. As Spielberg's "Dinosaur Supervisor" (as his credit on the film read), Tippett schooled a corps of ILM and Tippett Studio animators in animal motion and behavior, encouraging them to prepare to "play" dinosaurs as actors would, with everything from mime and dance classes to field trips to animal sanctuaries and museums. "Before this," one ILM animator admitted, "I tended to just move my little mouse around and not use my body."
The ILMers, says Tippett, had to key into the manifold bizarreness of real-world movement -- "a twitch [for example] a dinosaur might make before it started to turn. Only then could they begin to understand the kind of reflexes and action they needed to emulate." Tippett enlisted the computer in his cause and turned computer animators into fans of the spikes and hiccups that would show up on their dinosaur read-outs.
In collaboration with ILM, Tippett's close associate Craig Hayes developed the Direct Input Device (or DID, also known as the Dinosaur Input Device or the Digital Input Device). The DID, which Hayes had been thinking about for years, is basically a skeletal puppet rigged with electronic sensors. The sensors record information on a controller box that translates it for software and use in a computer. From Tippett Studio's perspective, the DID allowed stop-motion artists to keep a tactile connection to their work and animate computer-graphic characters without learning a whole new technology. At the ILM end, it enabled computer animators not yet at full dino speed to study data that signaled the weirdness and anomalies of animal movement. Says Tippett: "If you look at the raw data you get from the DID, there are all these spikes and hiccups that pure computer-graphics guys would never have thought of; but eventually they saw that all this weirdness related to something a dinosaur might do."
For Tippett, "it was extremely painful, the entire process of coming to grips with the computer." He still insists, "The computer doesn't like to do anything that's really good," and regards the video display terminal as a "one-eyed monster with a keyboard. We're people who live in a multitude of environments; to just sit in an efficient work station is pretty criminal. And it's a false economy." Tippett holds no rancor toward computer animators. But generally, he says, "I prefer people who have some experience working in the real world -- they have more of an overall idea of things. If you live exclusively in a virtual world, there's a litany of details that you don't think are important -- but they are." Tippett contends that artists need to dig into their materials physically: "If you don't cut your finger, if you don't know you have to move around an object or keep your eyes peeled while you're working on it, you may lose the notion of consequence -- that whatever you do has ramifications, so you have to be careful. If you have had that experience, doing stop motion or whatever, you think on your toes a little more."
