The Future Does Not Look Pretty

Practical Terminator robots were designed and built by the late Stan Winston and his team based on Winston's work from the original Terminator films. Winston passed away during the project, and his company, now called Legacy Effects, finished the job under his colleague, John Rosengrant. The film is dedicated to Winston's memory. Industrial Light & Magic handled most of the CG work related to the various Terminators.

When committing to take over the Terminator universe, director McG says he planned to honor the mythology of the previous Terminator films while radically changing the look of the franchise. But he initially wondered whether stepping into the shoes of a famous director—in this case, James Cameron—on a hallowed property would have much upside for him. McG decided to solicit Cameron's views on his experience.

"I explained [to Cameron] this movie is the story of the future war [the other Terminator stories take place in the present day] —the post-judgment day story, which he thought was interesting," McG says. "But he said he reserved the right not to like the movie, and I said I reserved the right not to like Avatar. I think he knew then that I wasn't trying to replicate what he had done, but rather, I was trying to contribute to the great mythology he put forward. That was the moment he offered the story of what he felt following the great Ridley Scott on the Alien franchise. At the time, some people thought he couldn't follow Ridley Scott, and his approach was to respect the first movie while contributing to and furthering the mythology while making a great second movie [1986's Aliens]. He was very successful in doing so, and while I wouldn't be as bold as to say we could be as successful as that, I will say we took every step to ensure that kind of success."

The result of that effort is Terminator Salvation. The post-apocalyptic war between the machines who have taken over the world and the human resistance led by John Connor (Christian Bale) at the heart of the story brings McG's vision of what a world ravaged by nuclear war would look like to the bigscreen.

"I studied with some guys from Cal Tech and MIT about what things would be like after the bombs went off," McG says. "We talked about what it would do to the ozone layer and therefore the color temperature of the sky and the landscape and everything else that would exist after a global thermonuclear war. After talking to them, I felt the sun would be flarier, more intense, and harsh. So we wanted to come up with a look that reflected that. … I wanted to get some dead stock from Kodak to do this, but they didn't have enough to make it work, so we ended up shooting a lot of [Kodak Vision2] 5201 [a 50 ASA stock] for most of the movie, and we even let some of the film get damaged by heat to lose some of its integrity. We also [replicated during the digital-intermediate process] the Oz process [an extreme photochemical color-timing technique], which basically means you hit the negative with a lot more silver than you would traditionally hit it with. What we got, to me, is a hybrid between a David Lean picture and an Ansel Adams black-and-white photograph."

The resulting aesthetic resembles, in the words of Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, "what it would feel like during the Industrial Revolution in Pittsburgh in about 1886. … Using the Oz process is far more than a skipped bleach sort of look—it's more like skipped bleach on acid."

Hurlbut says that his original goal was to perform the photochemical Oz process (the name is derived from the first letters of the last names of the two men who invented the technique at Technicolor—Bob Olson and Mike Zacharia), but the production determined it was too expensive. Instead, they did some tests and asked Company 3 Colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld to duplicate it during the digital-intermediate phase.

The result, Hurlbut says, was more successful than he anticipated, and a far different result than the so-called digital ENR process that filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood have been using to deepen blacks in their imagery. The result was an ultraharsh, desaturated look that lacks grain—the exact opposite of traditional desaturation, which normally uses grain extensively.

The film's harsh look was visualized by director McG (pictured), in collaboration with his DP, Shane Hurlbut. They discussed various methods for executing it before committing to Kodak Vision2 5201, and Hurlbut worked with Company 3 Colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld to duplicate the Oz process during the digital-intermediate phase. They called the resulting process Oz2.

"I read an article by [cinematographer] Harris Savides, whom I used to gaff for, about using the Oz process on American Gangster, and I wanted to try it," Hurlbut says. "When they told us we couldn't afford it, we said we'll use [the photochemical process] as a benchmark and take it to Stefan at Company 3, and he came up with a nice duplication that we call Oz2. It actually made the look more intense, crushed the blacks more, and made it more jacked up. Digital ENR, by contrast, adds grain, but we didn't want this film to have grain. We wanted it to be so clean you could see the grit and grime and grease and the scratches and dirt on people's faces. With the Oz process, the whites that usually pick up the grain become silky and smooth, the mids increase, and the blacks get brought down. So it's a whole different chemical reaction. This technique lets you make it look dirty, but not grainy—it desaturates the hell out of the image."

During the course of the grueling shoot across New Mexico, Hurlbut used Vision2 5217 stock in addition to the 5201, which he used for all daylight exteriors and interiors and much of the film's bluescreen work. For certain sequences shot at night along the Rio Grande region of New Mexico, he used Vision2 5219 stock. Hurlbut shot the film using two Panavision Platinum cameras, a Panavision Millennium XL camera, four Pan-Arri 435s and four Arri 3 crash cams. After extensive tests, he chose Panavision Primo lenses for their stark contrast. He also used 50ft. and 30ft. Technocranes, along with a gyro-stabilized Ultimate Arm rigged with a Lev Head to film extreme chase sequences.

Also central to the film's post-apocalyptic look was Hurlbut's lighting scheme. The DP says the constant smoke and fires seen on the landscape were a potential roadblock to achieving McG's vision.

"The big thing that was different in this movie from what I've done in the past was the element of smoke for night lighting," he says. "We basically wanted a world on fire at all times. Spot fires are everywhere, like an eternal flame. They just keep burning, no matter what. And it's not diffusion smoke; it's plumes, and they create a tapestry and a texture. They were largely done practically, although there was some digital smoke where the wind knocked us out a few times. So night exteriors became about backlighting smoke, creating shafts through trees to give it a kind of otherworldly look. My moonlight was gray, not blue-blue like in other Terminator movies. This all made it more spooky, a dark mood."

Of course, given its subject matter, the film never would have worked without a massive visual-effects effort. Under supervisor Charles Gibson's guidance, about 1,000 visual effects shots were created. Industrial Light & Magic and Asylum Effects handled most of the heavy digital work. Equally important was the participation of Legacy Effects, which began work on the project under its previous name, Stan Winston Studio. The late Stan Winston consulted, and his colleague and successor, John Rosengrant, designed new robots. The company also offered up original molds and designs from the earlier Terminator movies. (The film is dedicated to Winston.)

At press time, it was undetermined whether one of ILM's contributions, original Terminator T-800 robots bearing the visage of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, would make it into the film. McG was still waiting for permission from Schwarzenegger to use his likeness.

"ILM took scans of the young Schwarzenegger from Stan Winston and made it all look photorealistic," McG says. "Hopefully, we'll get that (permission) done, and if you see it, you'll see it was very complicated to make it look real. But to be honest, we tried not to lean on digital if there was something we could do in-camera. Thanks to help from Stan Winston—may he rest in peace—we were able to do a lot of it in camera. After he passed away, his No. 1 lieutenant, John Rosengrant, took over and did a great job designing and building robots for us."

Industrial Light & Magic and Asylum Effects handled most of the digital visual effects on Terminator Salvation. In particular, ILM handled all action scenes involving Terminator robots and designed a host of new Terminators that fly, swim, and interact with many other effects. Ben Snow, ILM's visual effects supervisor, says it was complicated because the story called for an army of Terminators performing the functions that real machines perform in actual military situations.

ILM's primary focus revolved around all-digital versions of the many Terminator models seen in the movie, and there are lots of them.

ILM's visual-effects supervisor on the project, Ben Snow, says this kind of work posed numerous challenges, such as preventing the harsh, high-contrast look from messing up visual-effects plates and maintaining a low visual-effects footprint on location.

"We are always trying to minimize our profile on set," Snow says. "On this film, we used our iMoCap system to catch the performances of stunt men who are standing in [for a Terminator robot]. That's an example of a solution to keep us from being too intrusive on filmmakers. It's a technique we first used on Pirates of the Caribbean and again on Iron Man, and it helps us reduce our crew to the visual-effects supervisor, coordinator, and the person taking the image information. That person doubles up by shooting high-dynamic-range images for us. The three of us can also set up witness cams in the corners of the set, so that makes iMoCap easy to use in a way that does not slow down production. … The caveat, of course, is that you need [in post] a fantastically good roto team because you will be cutting out people since you are not putting greenscreen behind everyone, and you also need a really good compositing crew to pull extractions from smoke and things like that. Of course, we had all that, which makes things simpler on set. On this film, we even worked with the stunt crew on an entirely choreographed fight scene using iMoCap between the heroes and a T-800 Terminator, and then we replaced the stunt guys. That gave the actors someone to act against, gave the editors someone to cut with, and it gave ILM tremendous flexibility."

Snow says that a bigger challenge for the effects team was the film's harsh, high-contrast look.

"That normally plays havoc with computer graphics, and because of it, we had to reinvent our lighting approach and part of our pipeline," he says. "It can play havoc because, although CG is evolving and we long ago moved beyond the 8-bit realm, the dynamic range of the images coming out of the renderer is not normally up to the dynamic ranges captured on film. Now for this project, we are able to use energy-conserving shaders to compensate. As we got to floating-point technologies, that became easier to do. In the past, we would have had to decide which slice of information to take out of the film and limit ourselves to 8 bits of data. Nowadays, we have floating-point data and a way more expanded set of information to work with. We also developed a DI proxy lookup table to know better what things would look like in final processing. We tried as much as possible to keep images in a more neutral space and then used the DI proxy to crank up contrast and reduce saturation as needed."

For Terminator Salvation, ILM built on proprietary tools and techniques it developed in recent years such as an image-based lighting technique, which was extended for the film and used in conjunction with the energy-conserving shaders to provide a more accurate re-creation of physical light interactions within the scene.

"That means we could more accurately reproduce things like the intensity the sun has in relation to the intensity a light on the set might have or a card being held by a grip might have," Snow says. "That way, we can have more accurate modeling of the light that is more physically correct so that our creatures can be more robust when they drop from a desert environment into a dark environment with flames and sparks going off, without us having to rework it substantially. That is something we really pushed forward on this show—new shader techniques running with [Pixar's] RenderMan to allow us to deal with harsh environments."

ILM also created new fluid simulations for molten metals built to advance the company's Sci-Tech award-winning PLS fluid software.

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"Past techniques that we've used, such as filming backlit Methocel on a soundstage [as ILM did during work on 2002's Star Wars: Attack of the Clones], wouldn't work here because in this movie the molten fluid has to interact with the creatures directly," Snow says. "So we basically used our simulation scheme for fluid with a backlight radiosity function to give us believable lighting and illumination of the molten metal."

ILM primarily used Autodesk Maya for animation; Apple Shake, The Foundry Nuke, Inferno, and ILM's inhouse tool, Sabre, for compositing; and the company's inhouse Zenviro technology for painting photographic textures onto CG geometry.

"Our roto team also used a tool we developed inhouse called Commodore, which gives them the ability to work quickly at full floating-point dynamic range," Snow says.

These various innovations during production and post were all designed, according to McG, to serve his ability "to create a patina of duress" for the movie. The production, he concedes, was a difficult one, even beyond the infamous shouting match between Bale and Hurlbut that dominated headlines for a short period. In fact, the director suggests that incident merely typifies the nature of the passion that he and the rest of his team brought to the project, which McG is confident will show up on the bigscreen.

"We really got our hands dirty making this movie—creating a real environment and then doing fantastic computer generated enhancements where necessary," McG says. "As far as people yelling back and forth on set, I encourage that because I want great passion. That's why I hired both Shane and Christian. I wanted a fiery set. My idea of a nightmare is a set where people just phone in the work. Christian Bale, for instance, smashed his hand pretty good fighting a T-600 robot, one of Stan Winston's machines. Several people got heat rash from standing too close to explosions, and a few got ear infections from the rotor wash off helicopters kicking up so much dust. It was beautiful in that way, and I think it helped us create what I was trying to achieve."