The wizardry of computer graphics has become so other-worldly that it's easy to imagine the army of specialists that worked on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen hidden in some underground laboratory-bunker, scurrying like super-intelligent lab rats to create "sights no one has ever seen before" under the excruciating pressure of a hugely expensive franchise picture.
But the role of visual effects supervisor is as hands-on and real-world as jobs come. Industrial Light and Magic's Scott Farrar has performed it to perfection on both Transformers pictures. His work begins long before the shooting starts, when producer-director Michael Bay and his colleagues begin brainstorming with Farrar and his colleagues on how far, this time out, they can push the art of the impossible. It ends when the film lands in the theaters.
Farrar gets to act as what he calls "a special-effects referee" when ILM begins constructing and animating the good-guy Autobots and bad-guy Decepticons at the ILM compound in San Francisco's Presidio. The title takes on weight when you realize that animators are doing tumbling turns and karate chops to figure out their characters.
And when the movie begins shooting, Farrar is on set during all six months of principal filming, in every locale from a Bethlehem, Pa., steel plant to the Jordanian desert. (He even earned a second-unit director credit on this movie.) During post-production, he kicks into overdrive, as the hundreds of people under his leadership bring so many miracles of light and action to life that they threaten to burst their disc space.
Farrar has become such an integral part of the Transformers experience that Paramount has turned him into a focus of the film's publicity. On the phone from San Francisco opening day, just back from the Los Angeles premiere, he laughs when I ask what he's doing next. He says, "My dance card is punched. These movies take a year and half for me to do - and when I say a year and a half, I mean that's constant work. I cannot commit to another movie until I know about Transformers 3."
From Day One, Farrar's job stretches from the blue-sky of ideas and imagination to the dates of the schedule and the dollars and cents of the budget. Bay relies on Farrar's expertise for drawing the game plan and putting a price on it. Once Paramount and DreamWorks grant their approval, "we start building robots right away." An average-size robot takes three months to create. It takes an additional three months to perfect the skeleton that allows it to move within a shot without any of its pieces flying away. Farrar also helps Bay guide the "animatics" and "previsualization" - the moving storyboards that allow filmmakers to test their ideas before they go on the set.
