When I posted Moriarty's piece on Sony Imageworks, I wanted to have a spy in Centropolis FX present their side of things, to find out what the deal was, to figure out if the people behind the beautiful effects work in Godzilla were up to. (P.S. I still love the effects, I just want a reel of nothing but them there cool shots though) Finally I found a CFX spy, a guy/gal on the inside that knows everything that happened on GODZILLA, and can give me that side of things. The spy was cautious, and had me edit up their writing as to cover their ballerina steps, so I fiddled around with this a bit, but here's the true story of how Godzilla came to the screen...
So here goes:
1. I do not recall Dean or Roland ever state that Sony only did the "clean-up" work. This is simply not the case.
2. CFX never planned to do the entire show in-house. In fact, at the beginning they only were going to do the composite work and very little CG. People forget that CFX was a start-up company a year and a half ago. I can't recall anyone starting a company, finishing a show like GODZILLA all under two years. It was a minor miracle. The more we got into the project, CFX realized that we were going to have to beef up their cg dept. considerably if we wanted Roland to have creative control over the main actor in his movie. They teamed up with VISIONART at the beginning and they were hoping to go with the two companies until January when we knew from the ID4 days that they would have to bring on two more houses. This is exactly what happened.
3. While CFX did explore motion-capture at VISIONART, not CFX, CFX abandoned it at the end of August/early September. All the while CFX were still doing key- frame animation.
4. The breakup of what each house did is the following. CFX did ALL the GODZILLA animations, 40% of the composite work, 20% of the babyzillas and the entire Bridge sequence where you see some groundbreaking CG work. The entire scene was CG including the bridge cables which anyone can tell you is an impossible task. SONY would take CFX's GODZILLA animations light, render and composite them in the Helicopter Chase sequence and the Cab chase sequnce. As mentioned above, they were brought on in January. VISIONART animated most of the babies but when they ran out of time, CFX took on the remaining animation and SONY lit, rendered and composited them. Meanwhile, DIGISCOPE composited any shots that the above three houses couldn't get to.
5. SONY was not kept out of the loop at all. It is in their benifit for the effect house to have as much info as possible. It makes the shots and hence the movie look better. ALL the houses were shown the cut sequences that they were working on which is more than most directors let happen. Usually the effect house is simply given the shot that they are supposed to do without any context. Roland is one of the few who belives in showing the artists everything so that they can put some character into the creature, although apparently many believe that didn't work out too well. By the way, SONY referred to GODZILLA as BARNEY so that when they sent out tapes to be dubbed or memos, people wouldn't know that they were referring to GODZILLA. As you know, we had a lot of looky-loos as it was and we tried to keep it as secret as possible. CFX referred to GODZILLA as FRED for the same reason.
6. While SONY did make a financial investment into CFX, it was part of the movie budget. SONY has no control over CFX. Only Roland, Dean and the other two execs there have that.
7. Due to the relationship between SONY and CFX, they are considering joining forces again to take on the wonderful challenges of STUART LITTLE. As opposed to GODZILLA, SONY will probably be the lead house on this, with CFX being house 1a. Tests are being done as we speak. As an aside, CFX had to convince SONY and Dykstra not to use motion-capture on STUART LITTLE due to their bad experience with it on GODZILLA. My source at CFX says motion-capture is an excellent technology when you want to employ human movement to a cg character a la the cg extras in TITANIC, but not for animal movements. For example, Cameron, if he ever does SPIDER-MAN may employ the technology for the swinging Peter Parker.
8. Due to the large overhead SONY IMAGEWORKS has, CFX is a much cheaper place to do effects at high quality. CFX overhead is virtually non-existant since the execs there (I think there are four) take no salary. But no one has the ability to do a 400-600 shot show on their own, except ILM maybe.
Centropolis FX seems to have an excellent relationship with SONY IMAGEWORKS and plans to partner with them on several more shows in the future. Did they save CFX's ass? You bet they did!! But so did the artists at CFX, VISIONART and DIGISCOPE. While I may have quite a bit of misgivings about GODZILLA the film, I personally love the fx work, I just wish the design had lent itself to more 'character' like Ymir in 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH.
