- The clouds in Close Encounters of the Third Kind mark Squires’s first contribution to Hollywood movies.
A few weeks ago I was flattered to find that a blog post of mine about computer-generated imagery had elicited a comment from Scott Squires, a longtime visual effects supervisor whose credits include Willow, The Mask, and Starship Troopers. Squires politely took me to task for suggesting that the failure of so many recent Hollywood productions can be blamed on overabundant computer graphics. “Why people continue to blame CG as the reason for poor films . . . is beyond me,” he wrote. The look of a movie, he added, “comes down to the director[s] and how they choose to use the tools. [Directors] constantly zooming in every shot would be no different. You wouldn’t blame the lens for the problem.” I appreciated Squires for sharing his expert opinion, and after checking out his blog I got in touch with him in hopes that he’d have more to say. We ended up speaking for an hour on a range of topics related to special effects: the merits of analogue versus digital imagery, the relationship between effects artists and other members of a film production team, and Squires’s own storied career.
Fortunately they got the project, which would come to be known as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The script had the flying saucers creating these clouds [in their wake]. Trumbull said to me, “When we pour cream in our coffee, we kind of get that cloud effect. Obviously we can’t photograph that, so we want you to figure out how we create it. Here’s $20 in petty cash.” That was my first task. After brainstorming with Doug and some other people—and using my knowledge of photography, chemistry, physics, and some other things—by the end of the week I developed the cloud tank that was used in the movie.
Doug’s main thing was coming up with a methodology to make everything look correct, rather than being technically correct. Today, with computer graphics, you can easily say [to the effects artists], “Simulate this car flipping over.” And it may look technically correct, but it isn’t cinematic. Those artists might say, “That’s what it would really look like,” and I’ll go, “Yes, but we’re looking for something that works good in the film,” which can be a different thing.
When I worked on The Mask, there was a shot where we planned to do [Jim Carrey’s] pants as computer graphics, because he was supposed to be pulling bazookas and big pictures and all these other things out of his pants. When we set up for the shot, the director framed it so we saw [Carrey] from above the knees. We didn’t see the whole pants, and Carrey was wearing a zoot suit, which has these big pockets. So I said, “Let’s turn these into shorts.” We cut holes in the pockets—the costumer was not happy about that, because there was only one extra pair—and had two production assistants passing up the props through the holes. It was all done in-camera.
- Jim Carrey in The Mask
It’s not only the digital effects people who don’t have experience with the old techniques—it’s also the directors and producers. With digital being so accessible, directors like to keep changing things until a week before the movie’s in theaters. It’s not like working with miniatures, where you have to make a commitment. You design miniatures, then you build them, and you photograph them—just just like live action. . . . If the animator needs to change anything [in a CG shot], he just goes in and corrects a few frames here and there. With traditional stop-motion, he’d have to the start the shot all over from scratch if there was a single bad frame. So, there are places where the digital effect makes more sense. The thing is to be open to both and think of them as tools.
