Scott Fisher

The contrast between Legato and Knoll was interesting. Knoll was from ILM and had a crew working with him, while Legato sounded like he did most of the work himself (out of his 'basement' with his laptop). It is also interesting that this was what Knoll said he wanted - that he missed making the effects himself.

I also liked how he explained VFX - that they weren't visual effects, they were emotional effects. That VFXs told stories with images but they still told a story. Although the thing I took away from his lecture was to keep things simple, or rather to think simple. Why spend lots of money doing something in CG when you can do it in real life? We often get taken in by technology when a simpler solution exists and we shouldn't forget that.

What I thought was really interesting was how much work Knoll and Legato do to actually avoid CG, not because they don't like it as a medium but merely because there are still better ways to do some things. The tactics they end up using are amazingly imaginative, from small scale (ha!) models to re-enacting scenes with cheaper materials/tools, like Legato using a fire extinguishers to simulate the Apollo 13 launch, or renting a helicopter and filming someone throwing a capsule out of it repeatedly for the Apollo 13 re-entry. It's an art all in itself, how to visually trick the camera/audience into thinking it's seeing something that never actually happened and it's gratifying to know that older forms of special effects have not been made totally obsolete by our progress with CG.

(this goes along with how I noted that theatre special effects for the _Wicked_ musical were so much more appealing to watch than the same old explosions on screen. plus, it makes shows like Mythbusters viable and we all love Mythbusters. >_> )

I'm also impressed by how much freedom artists in these positions still appear to have, despite being pinned by the Hollywood glare. The bit that Legato showed us about emulating other artists was especially entertaining, seeing how he had researched Scorsese's _The Color of Money_ and tried to imagine how he would cut together a sequence of the Apollo 13's launch. I also really enjoyed the Hitchcock ad, which really felt in the style of an old Hitchcock film (not that I've seen very many)... in mood and even visual quality of the picture itself.

Legato had quite a bit of very valuable insight into visual effects and shot composition. He was really very excited about technology, but I believe that this contributed to the only weakness that I saw in what he was saying.

Before I get into that though, he made a lot of good points about not being restricted by what you think is possible with a given set of tools. There are ways to get around technological and ideological barriers without spending thousands of dollars, and it's definitely not always a good idea to just use CG instead of composing the shot on your own. I think this is very true, and a good thing to keep in mind when working on something - there is always a way to get what you want, and you just have to figure out how to do it with what you have.

From the very beginning and all the way through his talk he made it a big deal that "anyone can do this stuff now, with the laptops and the storage you have at home." His DIY mentality is a very valuable one in an industry so inundated with bureaucracy that it's difficult to finish things on your own, but he forgets that as students, we usually cannot afford the equipment that, while relatively cheap for a production, would be outrageously expensive for an individual without a steady income of more than 80k a year. The interesting thing was that he just continued to gloss over this fact.

Granted, I can afford to buy a computer that can run Maya. But can I afford to buy the equipment and software required to do rendering and global lighting in a real-time rendered scene with two different motion capture inputs? Not exactly. Maybe in the future Rob, but right now this stuff is still mostly relegated to budgeted productions. I can crunch numbers in my basement with my Macbook Pro, but I can't do what you're doing on Avatar with 1800 dollars and a lot of caffeine.