How the famed designer jumped onto the tool during the shift into digital at ILM.
Doug Chiang is now senior vice president and executive design director at Lucasfilm. It’s a long way from his beginnings at Industrial Light & Magic, which he joined in 1989.
Chiang was first introduced to a beta version of Photoshop by ILM’s John Knoll, which he developed with his brother Thomas. From there, Chiang’s already proven design abilities opened up even further and he would soon be contributing to films such as Ghost, The Doors, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Death Becomes Her and Forrest Gump as visual effects art director.
At the recent VIEW Conference in Turin, befores & afters got the chance to sit down with Chiang to discuss his earliest Photoshop experiences at ILM.
b&a: Do you remember the day or the earliest discussion you might’ve had with John Knoll about Photoshop?
Doug Chiang: Yes. Back in 1989, when I first started in the ILM Art Department, I was the new kid on the block and everybody was still using traditional tools and everybody had a different style. I was trying to learn from that as much as possible. I remember specifically one day John Knoll came by. I didn’t really know John that well, but he said he had a new tool to help artists draw. At that time, the Macintosh was something we only used for email. It was not a drawing tool then because we didn’t have a tablet, we only had a mouse, although we eventually got tablets. John said, ‘Doug, try this beta. I need feedback. I want to see if it will work.’
I was very open-minded. I’m always excited about new technology. I mean, I remember very specifically, I was just drawing on the screen and I had my first tablet and I was trying to draw with a stylus and it was very alien to me because I’m used to looking down and not up at the screen. I was trying to draw a straight line and it was disconnected. So I actually took a ruler, put it on the tablet, and I started to draw a line. Then John Knoll came up behind me. He goes, ‘What are you doing, Doug? There’s an easier way.’ He said, ‘Here, look, there’s a line tool.’ It was like magic. I saw the light. I realized then that the traditional templates that I used to use—ellipse guides and rulers and triangles—I didn’t need to use them anymore because the computer could do that.
It just makes that process more efficient. A lot of times when you’re drawing traditionally, you have to really figure out, okay, what is the right degree of ellipse that you’re going to use? You have to do all these tests. With Photoshop, you can literally draw on the ellipse and then you can adjust it to your eye interactively. That’s when I realized, okay, this tool has a lot of potential. It could really streamline the art process.
I started to use it more and more. What I loved about it was that even though it was still very basic—for example, it didn’t have layers at the time—but I could use it to do photo manipulation combined with paintings. Part of the role of visual effects artists at ILM at that time was to take designs and transform them into images for post-production. So whether it’s an animator or a comp’er or somebody downstream, they could then use that as a guide.
A lot of times they were just done in a traditional way. They were always pen and marker, and so they weren’t really the final image, but they gave enough information to be informative. But with Photoshop, we were now actually painting images with real lighting and real lenses. That was transformative for me because now we were creating images that were like, okay, this is what the shot could look like.
b&a: I feel like another early part of using Photoshop was being able to go into visual effects shots and do fixes, especially on Terminator 2.
Doug Chiang: That’s a really important point. Actually, firstly on Terminator 2, we started to realize that Photoshop as a digital paint tool was so powerful that I could create keyframes in it. When I was working on Terminator 2, computer graphics at that time was so hard. It was so labor intensive. A lot of times we could design something, but then to dissect it and figure it out was just impossible, in some ways. It just took so much time.
So, I remember I did these traditional storyboards on 8s of these transformations that would be done with CG. The first part to this was, okay, well, how do you do this liquid chrome man and have it transform and move the way you want? The traditional storyboards guided in some ways, but another part of it was the transitions. Because it had been done on 8s, there was too much information that was lost between keyframe one and keyframe eight. Dennis Muren actually had a great idea. He said, ‘Doug. You’re an animator. How about if you just do a pencil test. Draw it. Instead of doing storyboards, can you animate it? And I literally did. I went back and on an old-school drawing table, I started to animate the storyboards on 2s. It was great because now the computer graphic artists could see that and use it as a template where they could overlay the computer graphics and give them a target. They had timing, they had form, they had everything in there. A lot of that could be taken out of the equation and they could focus on actually executing the shot.
That all then evolved to where I was doing a 2D animated version for CG. Dennis then said, ‘Can we take this further?’ As we were getting into finished shots, the computer could only carry it so far. There were still so many errors. It would take it to 95%, but there were artifacts that we just didn’t have time to re-render or get the software to fix. So Dennis said, ‘Doug, can you take that into Photoshop and actually paint out those errors frame by frame?’ And I said, ‘Sure, let me try.’
It was an interesting challenge because Photoshop still didn’t have onion layers. I remember the first thing that I did was Robert Patrick as the T-1000 walking through the metal bars. It looked great. I mean, computer graphics was almost all the way there. But the transition points and the contact points still looked a little bit off. The shadows weren’t right. And so I literally took all those frames, scanned them into Photoshop, and loaded them up, and I started to fine tune it.
I could create one hero frame that looked great. But then the challenge was, okay, how do you do the next frame and paint that again? And this became a very labor intensive process where I spent days and weeks where I went back and forth. Let’s say the sequence was 30 frames. I went back and forth because when you’re painting with shadow and lighting, you’ll get a lot of chatter. There was no morphing tool for me to use in Photoshop at that time. So each frame was bespoke. Each one was painted new. It was so painful because I would go back and forth painting it and be like, okay, this frame’s still chattering and we have to fix that.
But ultimately, it worked. What was great was that it evolved into more extensive digital wire removal tools. The whole process became a workflow that became an industry standard, and that’s why I really enjoyed Terminator 2 because we broke new ground, combining the tools in that way.
b&a: Did you also use Photoshop on that final lava vat sequence?
Doug Chiang: Yes, when the T-1000 falls into the lava vat, we had a bunch of variations of transformations because we wanted to show the T-1000 malfunctioning. Computer graphics was doing one very elaborate version which was all-CG, and then there were some other ones where we did traditional morphs for the transitions. And then Dennis said, ‘Let’s introduce something else. Can you actually do a painted transition from one face to another?’
It was very specific. I remember I said, ‘Okay, well, let’s try it.’ This was an even bigger challenge than doing the paint-out fixes for those bars. It was, you had keyframe one, then 30 frames later, you had the second keyframe, and they’re very different. And I had to tell myself, ‘Okay, put on your painting hat, Doug, and let’s paint that transition.’
And I literally did. I firstly painted rough images of those just to get the timing out. I treated it like a painted cel animation to get the timing, and then from there I fine tuned the painting. So they became almost like 30 little mini matte paintings. It was such a challenge because the shadows and the lighting were so tricky. There was one part where I couldn’t get the chatter out. Everything else was working. If you squinted your eyes, it was believable. It didn’t look hand painted, but there was one part I just couldn’t get. I went to Dennis and I said, ‘I just can’t tackle this transition.’ He had this brilliant idea, he said, ‘Let’s just paint a lava splash over that. It worked! If you look at it now, I mean, it’s a little embarrassing because I can see my hand in it, but back then it was groundbreaking.
There’s even another moment in that lava vat where I used a Photoshop swirl filter. That one was easier because I could kind of incrementally adjust it. That’s not one of my favorites. It did look like a 2D manipulation. But it was an amazing scene to work on.
b&a: You won an Oscar for Death Becomes Her. Can you talk about how things evolved there in terms of the way you used digital tools?
Doug Chiang: When I was working on Death Becomes Her, Bob Zemeckis wanted the very gruesome, twisted neck look. I started designing that with pencil and Prismacolor, but it looked like a comic book. It was kind of like, yeah, that’s the idea, but it was really hard to translate. You couldn’t tell if it was realistic because it didn’t have lighting. You couldn’t tell if it had proper anatomy. So I brought it into Photoshop. I photographed some of the ILM staff PAs, and then I started doing photo composites and started to paint the twisted neck. That’s when I discovered, wow, you can really be very precise about shadows and skin details, where the paintings that you’re creating are now really north star images for post-production.
That’s where I think the digital paint tools really were useful because you could actually paint photographically. If I was trying to do that traditionally with acrylic paints, it would’ve been much harder to try to capture that same quality. But now you’re actually manipulating the same pixels and you can choose a value from that frame. So it actually allows you as an artist to fine tune that so that you can still maintain the lighting while designing at the same time.
A really good example was when I was doing the hole in Goldie Hawn’s belly. At first I went too gruesome and painted spine and tissue and stuff like that, so it looked real, but it became a horror film. Bob was like, ‘No, no, let’s make it more cartoony. Let’s make it so that it’s a clean hole. We’re mixing Tex Avery with live action.’ It was great because then I could repaint it, remove the spine, remove the tissue, take the gore out of it, but it was still photoreal. To do that traditionally would’ve been really hard.
The painting I did then became a really good guide. The computer graphics artist could see the texture of the hole itself and see that we didn’t want to show all the organs, we just wanted to show a burnt out texture of the skin.
b&a: Another film that came a little later was Forrest Gump, and it just feels like a real next step in terms of digital manipulation.
Doug Chiang: When we did Forrest Gump, that is when we really pushed it. Those facial re-sync’ings of historical footage were mindblowingly hard for me. One, you’re trying to take de-graded images and then manipulate them. Back then we didn’t have 3D morphing tools that were easily available where we might today project faces onto geometry and animate them. So my solution was breaking it down like in a traditional animator’s worksheet where I could break down the vowels and the phonemes. I literally treated it like animation and I was able to do basic shape manipulation with our morphing tool. I’m not a tech guy, so I learned just enough to use it. I was able to get the timing.
We did a test with Tom Hanks for that scene where he meets John F. Kennedy and the President says, ‘I believe he said he has to go pee.’ It was a really short test. What I did was I literally just took that footage and brought it into our morphing tool. I would basically pull the jaw down and do all kinds of distortions just to get the timing so that it looked like he was talking and saying those vowels and phonemes. And then I brought all those images into Photoshop. Having that timing there meant I could start to repaint the mouth. That was sheer terror! You would think it would be easier to paint a degraded image, but it was actually harder. Trying to paint blurry images with film grain and still make sure that you’re capturing the same pixel density as the rest of the footage, well, it just drove me insane.
But on each show, we were always innovating, and I think that was the excitement for me. Prior to coming to ILM, I worked at a company called Digital Productions, and so I was very familiar with designing computer graphics and knowing the limitations of that. I brought all of that knowledge with me when I was working at ILM because I knew the limitations, but I also knew that we had to push the technology. I definitely was fortunate to be there at that transition from traditional techniques to digital.
Doug Chiang’s career is also highlighted in an extraordinary way in the two volume set Doug Chiang: The Cinematic Legacy and The Star Wars Legacy by Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet, available for pre-order here:
Many of Doug Chiang’s contributions to ILM projects are covered in my upcoming Industrial Light & Magic: 50 Years of Innovation book, available for pre-order here:
https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/industrial-light-magic-50-years-of-innovation_9781419784019/
