befores & afters sat down with the Industrial Light & Magic SVP and chief creative officer at SIGGRAPH Asia.
At SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 in Sydney, Rob Bredow, who is SVP and chief creative officer at Industrial Light & Magic, gave a featured session entitled ‘The Intersection of Art and Technology: Creative Design at Industrial Light & Magic’.
It was a thrilling talk about driving creative and technical design, filled with examples from Bredow’s own history in VFX and from recent ILM shows.
Afterwards, I got the chance to sit down with Bredow to discuss a range of topics.
We started with what his actual role as CCO involves, then moved to the changing nature of the VFX industry, dived into the making of The Creator and how it differed from usual blockbusters, and even discussed ‘DISGRAPH’, which is an internal event Disney hosts in the style of SIGGRAPH, pulling together the R&D might of ILM, Disney Research, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
b&a: You’re chief creative officer at ILM. What does that role entail, and how do you work with creative directors across ILM?
Rob Bredow: In our studio we’re really lucky. We have creative directors around the globe, including Ben Morris, John Knoll, Jeff White, and Rob Coleman. They’re world class experts at supervising, but they also lead a team of supervisors and a team of shows in each of the studios. I get to work with them to make sure that we’re doing the best possible job at creative leadership in the studios.
That can be things like, how do we lean into constraints? How do we give the artists freedom to create and freedom to make their best possible work of their careers and be able to take risks, and then still do that kind of industrial strength reliability that ILM is known for? And how do we strike that balance? How do we do both?
b&a: In your session, there was an interesting question asked there about the challenge of doing lots of great work, but also making it work under budgets and restrictions. How do you do that?
Rob Bredow: Keeping one eye on the efficiency at all times and knowing that that’s part of the creative play is super important. Every new tool we’re developing, every new technique, every new advancement–it’s always done through that filter of: is it increasing the quality of our work? Is it helping with the efficiency? Is it helping the artist workflow? How do we make, especially at our scale, how do we make the easy things as easy as possible for the artists so we can focus our efforts on the things that are going to be the most important?
Even though we have a huge R&D team, amazingly talented engineers, there’s never enough engineering resources to tackle all of the ideas. We have so many more ideas than we have the ability to implement. So helping to prioritize what are going to be the things that are the most important for us to really focus on over the next few years at any given time.
b&a: I also think that’s really interesting given that ILM is really doing much more than just ‘classic’ VFX these days. There’s StageCraft, there’s immersive work, and you’re also part of the Disney ecosystem. What have you found tricky about having so many, I don’t want to call them business units, but maybe they are thought about like that?
Rob Bredow: One of the great things about having such a variety of projects, especially for artists, is some artists really appreciate having that variety of work. One day they can be working on ABBA and go see it in the ABBA Arena, and it’s a completely different experience than watching a movie. The next day they can be working on a Star Wars movie, the next day they’ll be working on something completely different like The Creator.
It’s so nice to have that variety of work, and a lot of that core technology is actually the same. When we invest in a digital human, whether it’s for an immersive experience or whether it’s for a film, most of those technologies are shared.
b&a: It’s very exciting that ILM is in so many places and the growth of Sydney is fascinating. People gasp when they hear you’re up to 500. But, I wonder, what has that been like for you to manage different locations and time zones, and balance the loads between locations?
Rob Bredow: The time zones do make for a few long days here and there, but the great thing is the leadership on the ground, for example, in our new Sydney studio, there are people who understand the culture of ILM through and through. From an innovation perspective, from a collaboration and a sharing perspective, this is what we recruit for. And our leaders already had that built in. So between Luke Hetherington and Rob Coleman who together run the studio from a management side and from a creative direction standpoint, they have many years of experience in the studio. I think Sydney is such a great example for us of a studio that has already hit the ground running and it typifies the culture of ILM right from day one in a way that we just absolutely love.
That’s also one of the reasons that it was able to grow as fast because it had the right ingredients from the very beginning. And also, we were very lucky. A lot of ILMers who had worked around the world either had roots here in Sydney or wanted to come to Sydney. So there’s over a hundred ILM alumni out of those 500. There’s a lot of people with 10 or 15 years of experience who were able to either move home to Sydney or wanted to take a term in Sydney. So that really helped bring a lot of ILM experience so the studio could hit the ground running.
b&a: What do you see as some of the work from home and office aspects of VFX right now? There was this period where security was a problem, where studios were worried about leaks and things like that. We’ve sort of moved on from that clearly because of COVID and remote work. But, again, how has that been challenging for culture in the office and creativity in the office at ILM?
Rob Bredow: We think the sweet spot is a mixture of both. We think the culture of having an in-person studio is really important, especially for the long-term growth of the studio and the growth of the individual artists, production experts, and support teams. Being able to learn from your peers is one of the best things about working at ILM. So we want to preserve that. But also as you point out, there are certain advantages to being able to work from home.
If we were only interested in raw productivity, working from home is really efficient. The people we hire don’t need someone to look over their shoulder to see if they’re getting their work done. They’re motivated to get the work done. And we were really efficient during COVID, but people got tired of being in one place all the time, and there were a lot of disadvantages, too. So I think there really is a healthy balance, and that’s what we’re trying to strike, that is, give really good reasons for people to come into the office. For example, tomorrow I am going to be in our Sydney office and there are no available seats. There’s no room for me. That’s the kind of problem we want to have, which is we need to have more space so that everybody can come in on the days they want to.
b&a: You mentioned The Creator before, and it’s an amazing film, and I talked to Charmaine Chan and Ian Comley from ILM London about the project, especially about how it felt like an old-school 1990s project, just because of not necessarily doing all the classic things we do in visual effects to acquire and survey the set. How do you feel The Creator was a different kind of project at ILM, compared to say some of the other huge projects you work on?
Rob Bredow: With The Creator, a lot of people are focused on how the on-set experience was different, and it was, but I think the thing that was fundamentally different was the way that Gareth wanted to deeply engage in streamlining the process and designing the movie together with visual effects, with visual effects front and center in the process.
The way that it manifests itself is the design of everything. There was a lot of design done in pre-production, but the design was also being done based on what he found when he was on location with the camera mostly being operated by Gareth, ‘finding’ locations. And then he was confident enough as a visual storyteller to see something and go, I think I’m going to augment it back there with something that’s going to make me know that this is this location. But it wasn’t yet fixed.
And then in post-production, again, Gareth had the confidence to know that if that idea didn’t work because it was, say, way too complicated, there was no greenscreen or the matchmove was going to be two weeks to get this thing done, he could then look and say, actually, if I cut here and use this shot instead, does that still get me what I want visually?
So there was this amazing give and take, which was much more like his movie Monsters in terms of getting it done in a constrained environment where he wanted to have a movie that looked like a $300 million movie, but he wanted to do it for a budget that gave him creative control from end to end.
b&a: A lot of people have been saying it not necessarily looks like an indie movie, but feels like an indie movie. But I don’t think it does. I think it feels raw, not indie.
Rob Bredow: Yes, that’s right.
b&a: Because, it looks amazing. So it doesn’t look indie in that way.
Rob Bredow: Yes, people sort of know, but maybe it hasn’t fully registered, that most of those space station (NOMAD) sets were not complete sets. Those were a lot of synthetic environments. There was a StageCraft LED volume in there, there were different techniques used that are absolutely big-budget movie techniques. And that was done by just being really selective.
From the beginning of his writing to the end of post-production, Gareth worked to keep that control, he was working very closely, with both the production designer, James Clyne,who stayed on for the duration of the film, who was painting every day on every shot to help design with him, and the visual effects team that were present in that little small team.
b&a: And Gareth is of course a visual effects artist. So it’s made even better because Gareth is very knowledgeable about the process. Which leads me to another question–many filmmakers are very comfortable with VFX now, but do you think there is room for ILM and other visual effects studios to educate these directors even more to the level of Gareth, so you get these benefits, which are financial ones, frankly, as well?
Rob Bredow: I think Gareth’s process is unique to Gareth. But I think there are absolutely learnings to come out of The Creator that we can apply more broadly. Part of it is his process and his idea that you don’t always need 250 people on set to create this illusion. He wanted to do it with 10 people on set. Now, he had a lot more than 10 people on set because movies have a tendency to grow and because it’s hard to keep things as small as he wanted.
In terms of VFX, there were times when he wanted to choose which characters to turn into robots. That wasn’t all decided upfront. Sometimes that was decided as we were going through. He would make those choices based on that combination, that collaboration between James Clyne, the production designer and our VFX supervisor, Jay Cooper. They would make those decisions live as they were going through in post as the edit was changing. And that’s a very Gareth-specific process.
There are some filmmakers whose movies I love who really plan their films out at the beginning, and then they find this efficiency by working with their ADs and block scheduling and block shooting in an amazingly efficient way. And that wouldn’t be Gareth’s process. Gareth’s process is, I want to go to real place. I want to have a small enough team so that I can go anywhere in the world for less than the price that it would take me to build an expensive set. And that’s such a great talking point, and I think that’s very Gareth-specific.
Another filmmaker like Jon Favreau might be more apt to say, ‘I want to previs this out so I know I have what I need to do, and then you can build it for me in a sound stage. We don’t have to take the crew anywhere and we can shoot one and a half times faster than if we were having to go from set to set and pre-light and do all this stuff. We can just do most of it in ILM’s Volume.’
b&a: What is ILM not doing? Has ILM done a commercial in recent times? I want commercials back at ILM, Rob…
Rob Bredow: [laughs]. We have been doing commercials. That was one of the things during the strike that kept us busy, plus the immersive music work like ABBA Voyage and the KISS avatars.
b&a: I guess I’ve also noticed you’ve really been taking on a large range of projects. Another I recently covered was the Netflix ‘Life on our Planet’ series, which, again, was not necessarily a huge budget.
Rob Bredow: It’s something that’s really been a dramatic transformation in ILM in the last 10 years. There were movies and TV shows that we couldn’t find a way to work on because the finances didn’t work 10 years ago. Today, if there is work that’s creatively satisfying that our creative directors are excited about going after, we can almost always find a way to make it work financially. We’re so much more efficient. Our artists are so great at what they do and they’re fast. They can cut to the chase. And our worldwide locations have enabled us to work on projects that wouldn’t have been on the table before.
So from that perspective, we can work at a wider variety of budget ranges and put the most on the screen for those dollars for all different kinds of projects, which is super rewarding. And it’s creatively satisfying to find something like The Creator where Gareth comes to us and says, ‘Listen, I’m not even sure if I can talk to you guys because I don’t have a ton of money, but this is what I want to do…’.
And all of us are like, ‘Oh, we want to do that.’ And then the producers are hand in hand with our supervisors through every step of this trying to figure out, okay, how can we get this done for this number? Over and over again. And it’s very satisfying to be able to work on those projects of all ranges.
b&a: Last question. I mentioned the Disney ecosystem, and I’m always fascinated how that works now because ILM on its own does amazing R&D, but you now have the capacity of Disney Research, and Pixar’s work and WDAS’ work. In your role, what do you oversee here? How do you bring people together as part of this?
Rob Bredow: Yeah, it’s an amazing group. When you think of the graphics community that is Disney, from Disney Animation to Pixar to us and Disney Research, it may be the biggest graphics community in the world, certainly in entertainment. You may have heard we have this secret but not-so-secret meeting every year called DISGRAPH, which is Disney’s internal SIGGRAPH-type event. It’s super fun. And it is literally internal sharing between all the graphics experts and animation experts across the Disney company. And the learnings that can come out of that are pretty exciting.
Disney Research Studios, in particular, is a small but very powerful research orgnization based in Zurich. So much of what they do has direct application to what we do. Examples like our Medusa scanning system are one of the more well-known systems that were invented at Disney Research and then productized at ILM so that we can offer it to the industry as a service. We work on a lot of films that leverage Medusa.
Another example more recently is the system called Anyma, which allows us to drive a high-quality facial performance, without having to sit in a Medusa rig. You can do just a couple of cameras or a head cam and drive that. And that was another collaboration between Disney Research and ILM. So, those are a couple of well-known research projects, but we have 50 projects going on.
