Kottke pointed me in the direction of an article in Wired with Darren Aronofsky discussing his upcoming film, The Fountain, which has already proven to be his most controversial and divisive film. Some early reviews have been scathing, and its first press screening at the Venice Film Festival was greeted by a chorus of boos. The following night, though, festivalgoers gave the movie a 10-minute standing ovation.
In the article Aronofsky not only discusses how the idea came about and the hard work it took to bring it to the screen (Everyone in Hollywood said no to The Fountain at least once, including the people who eventually made it
), but also his views on CGI:
“No matter how good CGI looks at first, it dates quickly,” he says. “But 2001 really holds up. So I set the ridiculous goal of making a film that would reinvent space without using CGI.”
Instead he:
buck[ed] the conventions of CGI and using an ingenious application of microphotography to simulate space, Aronofsky has given the scenes in the nebula a handwrought quality that evokes the luminous etchings of William Blake.
I tend to agree with him, CGI effects can look dated fast and you can always spot them in my opinion. One of the annoyances in the new Star Wars films was George Lucas using computer graphics for everything including backgrounds in ordinary buildings. Some of the sequences look more like a computer game and I’m still not sure about films where entire sets are CGI (Sin City, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow). As it turned out, the answer lay in a 400 year old cow shed outside of London:
“The whole approach of my team is to take old-school techniques and street technology and figure out how to do something fresh and original with them,” he says. To reinvent space organically, Dawson and Schrecker hunted down old cloud-tank technicians and even hired artists to paint the nebula scenes by hand. But nothing looked good enough.
Then Aronofsky’s team discovered the work of Peter Parks, a marine biologist and photographer who lives in a 400-year-old cowshed west of London. Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge. The secret of Parks’ technique is an odd law of fluid dynamics: The less fluid you have, the more it behaves like a solid. The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.”
The microzoom optical bench furnished Aronofsky’s film with something neither a computer nor an old-fashioned matte painter could deliver – chaos, in all its ultra high-definition fractal glory. “The CGI guys have ultimate control over everything they do,” Parks says. “They can repeat shots over and over and get everything to end up exactly where they want it. But they’re forever seeking the ability to randomize, so that they’re not limited by their imaginations. I’m incapable of faithfully repeating anything, but I can go on producing chaos until the cows come home.”
It was, in fact, a reel of Parks’ simulated solar flares that finally convinced the creative department at Warner Bros. to forgo the usual terabytes of digital data. “The studio gave Darren a really hard time,” Parks recalls. “Nobody believed he could make this film without CGI. The studio thought he was crazy. He had to fly that reel across the Atlantic five or six times.” But synthesizing a nebula in a drop of fluid to Aronofsky’s liking turned out to be the hairiest job that Parks and his son had ever taken on. With a stack of Hubble photographs for inspiration, they worked from before dawn till late at night for 10 weeks. The cost of a single f/x sequence from ILM can reach several million dollars, but Parks shot all the footage Aronofsky needed for just $140,000. Digitally composited by a Toronto-based f/x house called Intelligent Creatures, Parks’ imagery gave The Fountain’s space scenes a cinematic richness that couldn’t have been simulated by an army of Pixar animators.
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