Tim Alexander on Innovative VFX and The Spiderwick Chronicles

For Tim Alexander, visual effects supervisor at ILM, The Spiderwick Chronicles marked a career high ‘ the biggest and most complicated film he has supervised so far, with the largest crew, the most creature animation, and a director, Mark Waters, who had not worked on a visual effects film before.

In the film, directed by Mark Waters, a single mom and her kids move to a creepy old house where the kids encounter strange and often dangerous critters hiding in their own backyard. ILM created Thimbletack, a shape-shifting house brownie who became a nasty green “boggart” when frustrated, Mulgrath the ogre, flower fairies, tiny dandelion-seed sylphs, and an enormous half-eagle, half-lion griffin. (Tippett Studios masterminded the hobgoblin Hogsqueal, a pack of goblins, and a troll.)

“This group has blown me away,” Waters said of the ILM team. “Shooting the movie was the first step, like going grocery shopping. The actual preparation of the meal was a much longer, involved process once you got back home. But it never stopped being fun. I found myself directing animators the way you would work with actors. You could say, ‘Thimbletack is more melancholy here,’ and they could put that into his face. The nuance that these guys bring to the animation is incredible.”

Visual effects supervisors create images using an artist’s eye and an engineer’s mind, typically drawing on skills developed at school or on the job in photography, cinematography, architecture and computer science to the role. Alexander followed a unique path.

One of a second wave of visual effects supervisors at ILM who followed in the footsteps of such artists as Dennis Muren, Scott Farrar, Stefan Fangmeier, John Knoll and others, Alexander entered the industry through the unusual combination of theater arts and electrical engineering. It’s a combination that makes sense when you start pulling at the edges. Theater arts relies on lighting design; electrical engineering includes image processing, which, simply put, is enhancing or interpreting a digitized image.

“The math for image processing actually comes from electromagnetics,” says Alexander, who majored in EE at Cornell. For his minor, Alexander studied theater lighting and set design. “Knowing where to put lights, what color, what direction – a lot of what I learned in college applies directly to visual effects, to what I do in my job.”

Donald Greenberg, a legendary professor at Cornell who, with his students, has pioneered many computer graphics innovations, sparked Alexander’s interest in visual effects. “He hosted ‘computer graphics week,'” Alexander says. “One of the speakers was George Joblove from ILM [now at Imageworks] who talked about Terminator 2. I realized that was something I could do with what I was studying.”

A subsequent flurry of faxed resumes and applications helped turn that fantasy into reality: A visual effects internship at Disney’s Buena Vista Visual Effects division. “The live action section of Buena Vista had always had an optical department and they were setting up a digital department,” he says. An internship during the summer of 92 and a return stint in 93 convinced Disney to hire him after graduation.

“I mostly did compositing,” he says of his time at Disney. “We worked on Operation Dumbo Drop, The Phantom, James and the Giant Peach.” To make life easier for Peach director Henry Selick, Disney moved Alexander to San Francisco-based Skellington Productions. When he finished work on that film in 1997, he cast around for a job in the area and found ILM.

His first show at ILM was Star Trek: First Contact, working as a compositor on John Knoll’s crew, and he continued compositing on The Lost World: Jurassic Park for VFX supe Dennis Muren, Contact, Titanic, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, moving up to compositing supervisor for Knoll on Deep Blue Sea. That led to a job as compositing supervisor for The Perfect Storm. By the end of post-production, though, visual effects supervisor Stefan Fangmeier had credited Alexander with the title associate visual effects supervisor; they received a BAFTA award for their work on the film.

“Stefan mentored me through the process,” Alexander says. “He didn’t have to. But he did. I’d fly to LA with him and go to client meetings. He shared his knowledge and experience; we worked together well.”

Alexander flew solo as a VFX supervisor on two films, Punch-Drunk Love and Want, worked with Fangmeier again as a co-visual effects supervisor for Dreamcatcher, and then stepped out on his own again for Hidalgo and, for the first time, composited shots onset. It was 2003; Alexander was on location with director Joe Johnston and cinematographer Shelly Johnson in Morocco. “I’d take video off the tap, go home in the evening, and mock up shots with location video,” he said, “so Joe didn’t have to scout visual effects locations.”

Although onset previsualization is common practice now, it wasn’t then. “It was gut instinct,” Alexander says. “I was new to the process and I wanted to confirm to myself that we got what we needed.” But, it’s something he has definitely continued, although now, he tends to supervise a previsualization team onset rather than do the work himself. Even so, he found himself compositing shots on Spiderwick.

“We were doing time-lapse photography on a cloudy day with gaps of sunlight,” he says. “Because we had large gaps in the weather, I pulled photos out of a digital camera, put them into Shake, retimed them making sure we could use every fifth or tenth, and mocked up shots to see if we could deal with it or if we had to stay another day.”

Alexander and animation supervisor Tim Harrington drove technical innovations at ILM for Spiderwick, as well, particularly for creature design and animation: Face Don helped animators quickly block in facial animation using libraries of preset expressions that they could refine with a new Face Select tool. Face Select gave animators access to specific facial muscles via a GUI based on a human face. Combined, the new tools helped animators give director Waters the performance nuances he praised. Also new: a rapid prototyping system made it possible for character designers to quickly create a low-res, animatable model, which was particularly helpful in designing the ogre Mulgrath. And Block Party sped character setups by mapping a working skeletal, muscle and skin system onto the models.

All told, ILM contributed to 30 minutes of the film. The team of 215 artists worked for 15 months on 341 shots, of which 224 had 3D elements. To manage the process, Alexander implemented a radical organizational style at ILM that he had tried earlier on his second Harry Potter.

His first adventure into Harry Potter’s world, as VFX supervisor for ILM on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – for which he received BAFTA and VES nominations – drew on his experience with water simulations. ILM tested the software the studio would later use for Pirates of the Caribbean and Poseidon to create a stunning shot of a ship rising out of a lake. For the fifth and most recent Potter film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Alexander stepped more firmly into the world of creature and character animation, reprising the studio’s work on dementors and adding shots of a horse-like creature called a Thestral. Because he had a small crew and a long schedule for Potter, Alexander decided to organize all the supervisors within shouting distance of each other and dispense with shot dailies.

“We could talk about the shots right then,” he says. “We didn’t have a lot of meetings.” At the time, he said he wanted to try running a larger show in a similar fashion, but worried that it wouldn’t be possible. He got that chance with Spiderwick and discovered that, with a few tweaks, it was not possible, but advantageous.

“We did instant messaging instead of dailies,” he says. “I don’t like dailies where you’re typically in a room for a few hours with artists basically lined up waiting for their reviews. By doing our ‘non-dailies,’ the artists got feedback immediately. When they had shots to review, they just came into my office, sometimes with a whole team. It was neat. People bought into it.”

Alexander cites two things that he enjoyed most about working on Spiderwick. First: “I really enjoyed working with a large group of people, seeing shots coming together that you know were really hard. Obviously, we need to make the client happy. But what I enjoy, is seeing the crew move the shots, feeling the power behind the machine.”

Secondly, perhaps harkening back to his background in theater arts, he enjoyed the creature animation. “I thought the Thestral work on Potter was more intriguing than the water,” he says. “And on Spiderwick, we had a lot of creature work. So many people are involved in the process; it’s so interesting, so interconnected.”

Perhaps it makes sense, considering his love for complex systems, that Alexander is an avid game player – of board games as well as video games. “I probably have a few hundred board games in the house,” he says. His current favorite is Settlers of Catan. “It’s a great social game. A great way for people who don’t know about designer board games to get into them.”

Of course, he also also owns all the next-gen game consoles, and when he looks far into the future, he sees a collision of film and videogames. “I’m not sure how it’s going to happen, but I really feel that’s the next big thing,” he says. “Lucasfilm’s game division and ILM are already collaborating on the technology.”

In the meantime, with The Spiderwick Chronicles under his belt, he’d like to work on another big creature show. “I feel like I’m just starting to get my stride.”