Why cloudy days are no good for the werewolves of 'New Moon'

Darkness may be a visual effects artist's best friend, but his biggest enemy isn't bright sunlight -- it's the overcast day. So adding all those CG werewolves to scenes shot in cloudy Vancouver, Canada, was a particular challenge for "New Moon" visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett and his team. "On a sunny day, you get really nice contrasts, but with flat lighting and a furry thing -- the fur really soaks up the light and everything appears flat," Tippett said. "So to make it appear three-dimensional, we had to goose reality. We emphasized their shadows and used rim lights" to make the wolves stand out from the background. But that's not the only way Tippett and company played with reality. When that wolf checks out Bella, it's not a wolf's eyes, it's Jacob's. "We brought Taylor [Lautner] in and had him haul his eyelids back as far as possible and shot close-ups." They then added those eyes to the giant animated timber wolf used in the scene.

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New Moon' shines on special effects with Phil Tippett innovator

Special effects innovator Phil Tippett worked with some of the biggest blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s - including "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Jurassic Park."

Tippett Studio animated the wolves in the hit movie "New ...Tippett Studio animated the wolves in the hit movie "New ...Special effects master Phil Tippett View More Images

But even those enormous hits didn't come close to last weekend's $142.8 million opening for the "Twilight" sequel "New Moon," with its snarling visual-effect wolves that were animated at the Berkeley-based Tippett Studio.

Tippett, whose creations include the AT-AT snow walkers from "The Empire Strikes Back" and the ED-209 robot from "RoboCop," took a break from working on the movie version of "Eclipse" (next in the "Twilight" series) for an interview in his conference room - surrounded by models, memorabilia and movie posters associated with the films he's worked on over the past three decades.

Q: Which movie had tighter security on the set, "Return of the Jedi" or "New Moon"?

A: For "Return of the Jedi," I was totally oblivious to all the fandom. I didn't notice anything, and most of the work was done on pretty secured sets. For "New Moon," it was unbelievable.

It was like a CIA operation. Some of the locations we would go to, the production would be so concerned about fooling the paparazzi, they would take the arrows pointing to the location and turn them the other way. We were actually getting lost.

Q: Did you do much wolf-related research for the movie?

A: We nailed it down early that these were not going to be traditional beast-y horror movie things. ... We watched a lot of documentaries and looked at every single picture book out there on wolves.

My co-supervisor, Matt Jacobs, took a bunch of the art department and animators to a wolf preserve outside of Los Angeles. They got into a pen about the size of this room with about 10 wolves and just spent the afternoon with them.

Q: This sequel was made in less than a year. Was your workload insane?

A: It was actually kind of fun. ... It kind of harked back a little bit to the Roger Corman days. With the vast amount of money these things make, we don't get paid much - and the speed with which you work, you have to rely on your skill and just get it done.

That's actually a lot more of a creative kind of milieu to work in as opposed to these hundred-million-dollar movies, where there are 50 executives worried about everything.

Q: What's your favorite Roger Corman memory?

A: I was working on "Piranha" and we were shooting all this mayhem, with all these swimmers. Dailies would go back to Los Angeles and Roger would call.

Joe Dante, the director, would be on the phone saying, (sounds exasperated) "OK ... OK ... OK, Roger ... fine, Roger ... OK, fine, thanks." After the conversation was over, we would immediately ask what Roger wanted. Joe would say "He just said 'more blood.' " He wanted more blood on everything.

Q: What's the last movie you've seen with no special effects or visual effects in it?

A: I don't think they make them anymore. Probably "The Informant," although I bet you there were visual effects and I just didn't notice it. I thought that movie was terrific.

Q: Is there a movie that you did good work on that no one talks about?

A: Probably "RoboCop 2," which was a terrible movie doomed from the very beginning, but I look back fondly now because it was the biggest stop-motion (film) since "Mighty Joe Young" in terms of number of shots and complexity. And Craig Hayes' design was so cool.

Q: You have the full-size ED-209 in one of your warehouses. Has anyone offered to buy it?

A: Some British group came by and wanted to buy a bunch of stuff. And I actually thought about it for 20 minutes. It was a lot of money.

Q: And you didn't do it?

A: No. It's my junk. Plus, if it's worth that much now ...

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'New Moon' Wolf Pack: How The Characters Came To Life

'It gets a lot more tricky to make them digital, yet photographically representational,' visual-effects master Phil Tippett says.

From "Star Wars" to "Indiana Jones" to "Jurassic Park," visual-effects maestro Phil Tippett has had a hand in some of the greatest movies of the past 30 years. This past weekend, if the wolves of the record-setting blockbuster "New Moon" thrilled you, then you have him to thank.

In an exclusive interview with MTV, the owner of Tippett Studio was eager to chat about making the wolf pack come to life, the intensive research that had his computer artists hanging out with the real thing, and why trips to the "New Moon" set often became a hairy proposition.

MTV: Congratulations, Phil, the fans seem pretty pleased with the movie so far.

Phil Tippett: I suppose so; I'm not quite one of that ilk.

MTV: You're not a teenage girl?

Tippett: Nooo. [Laughs.] I've been through it — I've been through the teenage-girl thing not that long ago with my daughters. But I'm on a break from it now.

MTV: You worked on Chris Weitz's "The Golden Compass." So, did he just call you up and ask you to do "New Moon" as well?

Tippett: No, actually we didn't deal with Chris that much. We were involved in "The Golden Compass," then everything came our way right at the very end [of the "New Moon" production] in a 911 call [from a producer]. She realized that she had a bunch of wolves to do, so she gave us a call and said, "Hey, this is right up your alley, what do you think?" And we said, "Yeah, we're onboard."

MTV: What were the greatest challenges on "New Moon"?

Tippett: With the werewolves, the big deal from Chris and from Stephenie Meyer's books was that these things are horse-sized wolves, not traditional beastly, werewolf-y, quasi-human type things. They are, for all intents and purposes, timberwolves. And so, that's the trick; you get into that uncanny valley — the land usually occupied by computer-generated canines and cats, which are so much a part of our world that when you're trying to do a duplication of the character that's not fantasy, it's so common to everybody's observation that it gets a lot more tricky to make them digital, yet photographically representational.

MTV: So, real things are harder to make than made-up things?

Tippett: Very much. If you have a bug from another planet, or a giant robot, or something like that, you can get away with murder — but when it's something recognizable, then the onus is on you.

MTV: Did you do a lot of research into wolves?

Tippett: Yes, they're required to do very specific things, to move certain ways, and to that end we do an incredible amount of research — the co-supervisor on the show, Matt Jacobs, led an exposition down to a wolf preserve in Los Angeles. He brought a bunch of the animators and art department guys, and they observed a bunch of timberwolves to commune with them and their behavior and get their vibe.

MTV: This is one of the most eagerly anticipated movies of 2009. Were there a lot of top-secret measures you had to take as you worked on the effects?

Tippett: There were things that were amusingly irritating. Like, the paparazzi got so bad following the stars everywhere that in some instances we were going to these godforsaken locations out in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes the production would put up signs pointing to a different location to confuse the paparazzi. Of course, that would totally confuse us as well, which would make us show up late to the set. [Laughs.]

MTV: That's hilarious. Tell us about the wolves themselves.

Tippett: Well, we put a good amount of time into studying the behavior and the physical actions of timberwolves, and then multiplied that up to a 1,200-pound character, so that the weight and mass appear to fit properly into earth-specific gravity and all that stuff. Sam Uley is the big-kahuna wolf, definitely the biggest one. Each wolf is between 1,200 and 800 pounds, and a lot of that is on a shot-for-shot basis — Embry and Jared are the smallest. Sam is the biggest one, then Paul and Jacob are roughly the same size — Jacob is maybe a little bit bigger.

MTV: In one key scene, Jacob's wolf makes eye contact with Bella. Tell us about that shot.

Tippett: One of the things Chris was very insistent on was that all the wolves have human eyes, as opposed to normal wolves who have these golden, very piercing classic wolf eyes. The way he had laid out a number of scenes was there were some extreme close-ups of wolf eyes, with Bella reflected in them, like that Jacob scene. Chris wanted to make sure that Taylor Lautner's eyes would be the right choice, emotionally, for those scenes.

MTV: How did you achieve that?

Tippett: We got Taylor to peel his eyelids way back, and we got in really close with a camera and shot his eyes.

MTV: Wow. Was it like "A Clockwork Orange" thing?

Tippett: Yeah. [Laughs.] No, we had him do it with his own hands, so he could find his own comfort level. We didn't use any instruments of torture.

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