Interview with Jeff Light
We spoke with ILM legend and motion capture pioneer, Jeff Light, for Heyblabber podcast. (Listen to Part I and Part II) Below is the transcript of that interview.
Michael: Okay, today I'm speaking with Jeff Light, a visual effects artist who spent many years working at ILM and then at DreamWorks, who has worked on a number of films like Jurassic Park, How to Train Your Dragon, and partially why we're speaking today, Star Wars: Episode I and II. So, welcome, Jeff.
Jeff Light: It's a pleasure to be here, Mike.
Michael: So, as I mentioned, you worked on The Phantom Menace, and I know you said you had some stories about the development of Jar Jar Binks, and I want to hear all about that. But could you maybe give a little background on what led you to visual effects and eventually working at ILM?
Jeff Light: Well, yeah, I had a background in filmmaking and special effects; visual effects were always very at the top of my list. 2001: A Space Odyssey just blew me away. It's a film I never got over. I still watch that all the time. So yeah, I had a background in theater, in directing, and acting, got into filmmaking, and had one year of pre-med, and just said, 'Yeah, forget that. That's way too serious for me,' and got into film at the Ohio State University. I got my bachelor's, my master's degree there in film. This was in the mid-'70s, and I kept wanting to make science fiction movies, and the instructor I had there was just like, 'I want you to stop doing that. That's not art. Okay. What we do here is fine art. What are you going to do? Work for a special effects company someday?' [laughs] This was, like, 1976, so there was no such thing. Then Star Wars comes out, and it just blows everything out of the water. You know, it really was a phenomenal thing. So yeah, I didn't quite know being in Columbus, Ohio, how to get into the film industry. What I did have at my disposal was computer graphics, and I kind of put two and two together in the mid-'70s and said- Well, no, the late-'70s, early-'80s, I think that computer graphics is going to merge with film, with visual effects. So, there was the Computer Graphics Research Group, the CGRG, that started up there, Chuck Csuri's amazing computer graphics program was starting up at that time. So, I got into that. That got me into doing flying logos and that sort of thing in the mid-'80s. And then, when ILM was ramping up to do Terminator 2- They had done The Abyss, but they're ramping up to do Terminator 2, and it's like, 'Look, we've got a handful of people in our computer graphics department. We need to ramp up.' And so, they put out the search, and it just so happened that I went to the computer graphics conference, SIGGRAPH, the year before they were ramping up to do Terminator 2. They had given a talk. Everything that I had been doing was to learn how to pull keys by doing, you know, blue screen extraction, that sort of thing, digitally, and just everything in CG that I could learn. And it was just exactly the right time. So, I met someone at SIGGRAPH, put my application in the following Monday after the conference, and one thing led to another, and I got hired on. I wasn't in the computer graphics department to start off with. I was in the scanning department, but I'm a bit of a jack of all trades. I started writing software there in the scanning department and got into compositing for, let's see, on Hook and on Death Becomes Her, and then I was doing lighting and rendering on Jurassic Park; that was a fabulous experience. And then, yeah, Casper came up, and I was an animation lead on that show. But Lincoln Hu, who was our chief R&D guy, got this motion capture equipment that they'd put some markers on someone's face, and they were doing some motion capture. They wanted to see it for doing some of the lip shapes and that sort of thing, if they could use motion capture. I was good buddies with Lincoln, and so, I worked with him a bit, but I wasn't really doing that per se. But then, Lincoln left the company. After Casper, then I get a call from Jim Morris, who is the president of the company. It's like you see Jim Morris's name come up on your phone. It's like you're going to pick that up. And he's like, 'So, Jeff, how'd you like to have lunch?' I'm like, [hesitant tone] 'Sure, Jim. Okay.'
Michael: So, were you worried or were you like...?
Jeff Light: No, because everything was going great for me there. I'm just like, this sounded like 'I am intrigued. Let's go have lunch.'
Michael: Okay, good.
Jeff Light: And he said, you know, 'I don't know how you're going to react to this, but George is getting ready to do a Star Wars film.' And I was like, 'Oh my god!' He's like, 'Yeah. So, they need to do motion capture. And I've looked at your background; you've managed some projects here, you've written software, you have a background in theater and acting, directing, all this. I think you're the guy to head up the motion capture department, and I want to know what you think.' Now, you gotta go back to this time where, as far as animators were concerned, I had trained some of the animators while I was there with the animators for Casper to get them from 2D to 3D, and they saw that as a step down. [chuckles] They hated CG, but it was coming in, you know, like a freight train. The only thing that's a step further down from that is motion capture. They called it Satan's rotoscope. So, the idea of becoming the poster child for motion capture was like, 'Ohhh, man. I'm going to be hated if I do this.' So, I said, 'Jim, this is a great opportunity. Give me 24 hours to think about it.' I went off and thought about it and just went, 'Yeah, Jim's right. I'm probably about as qualified as anybody to do this. When I looked at what George would need this for, which is a large volume of performance; it's Star WARS; there are going to be all of these soldiers, all these battles that are going on. You can't hand-animate all that stuff, there's just no way. So, I said, yes, but I knew what I was in for. There were animators that were good friends before that, when I became the face of motion capture, they walked by me in the hallway and just go [mutters] 'Satan' under the breath as they walked past me. And that was not a fun position to be in for a while.
Michael: Like, actually angry or joking?
Jeff Light: Yeah, angry.
Michael: Oh, wow. That's rough.
Jeff Light: Yeah, there was just a sense that the technology was just evil. And I mean, just... [chuckle] spiritually. But I felt as though, no, I love hand-drawn animation, I love all of it, and I respected the animators a lot. But you needed someone that was a bit of a jack of all trades, that could be able to go across the boundaries to be able to talk to animators and to talk to the developers, and to be able to make sure that that got delivered for George in time. So, that was a tough time leading up to that, figuring out what technology, not only for final work for the film, but also for animatics. That was a big part of- And I hope we get into talking about that a bit, because that was a lot of our bread and butter throughout the process was doing, kind of, these low-quality versions of this, instead of drawing it and then putting those up there with sound to make an animatic reel. It's like, now, we can have someone perform something, apply that to a Gungun soldier or a battle droid outfit, you know, CG model, and we can kind of just populate them around in the scene. And that was fancy cooking in the late '90s. So, I was able to get the system up and running with the help of a lot of talented people, and by the... Whatever that was, late '90s, '97, something like that, we had the motion capture department up and running. And yeah, that brings us up to Jar Jar Binks. So, should I just keep plowing through? [laughs]
Michael: Well, let me see. I had a few questions. I want to get back to you said your first job at ILM was in the scanning department or doing scanning? What exactly is that? Is that just... Like, if I think of scanning, I think of scanning something physical into the computer, like, just a picture. Is that basically what that is, or is that is it something more advanced?
Jeff Light: The scanner I worked on is now a museum piece. It's just so weird to work on things that now sit in a museum.
Michael: Wow.
Jeff Light: Okay, so when you think about being in the early '90s for Terminator 2, we just think about there being digital cameras. It's like, 'Oh, there's no such thing. All they had was film.' So, the scanning department was making sure that you get in the inner negative, I think we were shooting with, that they strike off of the original negative, and you load that up, and that has to be scanned in a frame at a time. I think it took, like, a minute and a half originally, for us to be able to go [mimics scanning machine sound] across to scan a frame of film and load it onto these tapes. It was pretty old school. [phonetic] Josh Pines, who is the head of the scanning department, was just really brilliant at color science and went on to work at Technicolor. But the idea was you needed to be able to digitize the film that came in and then be able to send that over to the CG department so that they could stick dinosaurs on that. Then it becomes a background or a plate. So, you send that plate over to the CG department, and then they composite whatever on that, and then they send it back to the scanning department, and then we film that back out. You should be able to put the frames next to each other, of what came in and what comes out, and the fidelity of the color all should be the same. So, it was a real scientific endeavor to keep that color science of both the resolution and also the dynamic range of the film so that they look the same, only what we added to it. So, I was working on input scanning. Josh was really focused on the output side of it.
Michael: Let's talk about Jar Jar Binks a little bit, and then we can get back to some other things if we have some time. As this is a Jar Jar show, let's make sure we get to Jar Jar. So, how did you become involved with Jar Jar? Now, I was watching the Light & Magic show, I think I mentioned that to you, I'm not sure if you've seen that. It sounds like they were originally planning on... They had Ahmed Best in the suit, a Jar Jar suit, and they were planning on just, like, animating the head initially. Was that kind of their plan and not doing, like, a full body?
Jeff Light: Originally, the thought was that Jar Jar would be motion-captured. So, I got contacted one day that George is going to hold auditions for potential candidates to be Jar Jar Binks. Let me back up even before that, in that we were taken through a group at a time, like 12 people, out to Skywalker Ranch to look at Doug Chang's amazing artwork of the backgrounds and the droids and all this stuff. Just beautiful artwork. And then we get to this six-foot-tall cutout of Jar Jar Binks, and we all went, 'Oh, noooo.' It just was like, 'The ears, no. Mmm...' But then we reassured ourselves, 'No, that'll never make it into the film.' [laughs] So, already I've got one strike against me, which is that I'm running the motion capture department, and then it looked like, 'Oh, Jar Jar Binks is going to be motion captured, so I'm going to be the face of that on top of it.' Anyway, George is coming, and we're going to do these auditions for these actors, and he brought in a French comedian that I had never heard of or since. We put the motion capture suit on him and had him do some stuff. And it was kind of like, 'Meh, nothing really special there.' And I would say, I think it was the Christmas before, at our Christmas party, George had arranged for the company Stomp to come in and do a performance for us, and it was the most electrifying thing I've ever seen on stage. It was just absolutely astounding. And Ahmed Best was part of the troupe, and so I think that's when George met him as well, and he brought Ahmed Best in as the second person to audition. One of the things that we had noticed about the Gungans was that the knee was not in the center of the leg. And of course, all of us that are thinking as engineers are going, 'Well, you can't do that. You can't kneel down if your knee isn't in the middle. You fall over, or the knee pops up through your chest. It just doesn't... the mechanics don't work right.' And George's answer is, 'Make it work,' you know? So, we just have to try to find a way to make that work. So, what I said is, let's have the model shop make a couple of platform shoes that are Ahmed Best's size, and when he comes in, he'll be walking on these, like, six-inch-tall platform shoes, and that will effectively move his knee up. So, we played around with him a little bit, and it was like, 'Man, it is tough to do anything in these shoes. I'm not sure if that's going to work.' He came in, no problem. Nicest guy in the world. Just anything you ask him to do is like, 'Sure, okay!' Just fun, you know? And so, he puts on the shoes, he's walking around, he's doing some things. You look in the background, he's doing a cartwheel in slow motion. Just, his body is, like, defying gravity. Just 'Wow! This guy's incredible.' So, George is like, 'Okay, so you're like this kind of this frog sort of a character and we've got these droids that are coming up towards you.' And he's like, 'Excuse me, what?' He says, 'So, you're there in the swamp, and then there's these droids that are coming at you.' And he's like, 'I'm sorry, but a droid? What's a droid?' And George is like, 'Well, it's kind of a, it's a robot. Okay? It's a robot.' [laughs] We were all trying to keep from busting up laughing because it's, like, the only person on the planet that had never seen Star Wars and had no idea what a droid was. So, Ahmed Best is sitting on the floor with these platform shoes on, and it's just like, someone has to help him get up. With these big shoes on, how's he going to do that? And George says, 'Action. Okay, there's these droids and there's this thing and the ships are coming at you. And all of a sudden, so you get up...' and like a gazelle, he's jumping up on his feet and he reacts, and he does all this stuff and all these antics that you're very familiar with that motion, and he just nails it. He's just a champ. So, we all kind of knew that he was going to be it after that day. No more auditions. It was exciting and terrifying working with George that day because, you know, here's a guy that could just, if you make a mistake, could just lift his finger and just kind of go, 'Oh yeah, you're fired.' [laughs] And also, we were just dying to see George directing in action. That was fun to see. And there was a lot of stuff that wasn't quite prepared that George expected, like the shot list to be made for that day of what they wanted to go through, and they just had boards or something. And so, George was like, okay. And he gets out a pencil and a legal pad, and he starts writing out a shot list. He's just rolling up his sleeves, just doing the work, you know? It's not like he's just bossing people around. He didn't come with a huge entourage. So, it's fun being around George. The only thing was, at the end of the day, after George had had some challenges with working with motion capture, like one of the times he turned to me and said, 'So, where's the frame? Where's the camera? What are we doing here?' And I said, 'Oh, it's a virtual frame, anywhere you want it to be.' And he just kind of shrugged his shoulders and just said, 'Oh, virtual frame. Okay, great.' At the end of the day, we got everything done, George left, Rick McCallum, the producer, went out with him, and then Rick comes back afterwards, and man, did he ream me. He was just like, 'There is no way that George is going to be able to do this in the deserts of Tunisia. This is in a controlled environment. You'd better figure out how to get this done. You guys at ILM, you just don't get it.' I mean, he really went after me. I thought I was going to be toast at the end of that day. We went through, and we tried to find something else, but it was like, no, the Oxford Metrics Vicon system that we had was the best in the world at that time. And so, that's all we could do. So, when the motion capture was applied to the Jar Jar model, I was there to present that to George out at Skywalker Ranch, and he looked at it and just kind of went, 'Nah, nah, this isn't going to work. It just doesn't look right. It looks like a guy in a suit.' I was like, 'Well, that's what it is.' Nothing magic happens between the suit, and if we've done our job right, everything should just fit that character, and whatever the performance is, you should get exactly that. It's like, 'Yeah, I just don't think that works.' So, on top of that, the fact that George just didn't like it, the fact that you couldn't put that Vicon system out in the desert, and also the fact that the animators were not going to have one of the key performances done by motion capture, all that conspired against doing it. So, if nothing else, I wanted to be on the podcast to let you know that I am not responsible for Jar Jar Binks' performances. However, by the same token, I really did appreciate just being there and having all of that audition experience with it. It doesn't end there, in that, going back to the animatics, there was basically the entire film with all the, either Jar Jar, or other Gungan soldiers or, well, we did do all the battle droids. My office mate at the time, James Tooley, I directed him as the battle droid for all of Episode I and Episode II. And James was just really great because he could do these amazing robotic moves. He was the person that was responsible for doing the rigging of almost all the characters. A funny story about that was that when we fit the data of the model of the battle droids onto James Tooley, it wasn't fit quite right, so the butt kind of sticks out, and he's got kind of this constipated sort of a walk that they do when they go, 'Roger, Roger.' [chuckles] You know, you have to think back about those battle droids, but you look, and their butt kind of sticks out. And the first time we showed that to George, we apologized, we go, 'Yeah, I'm sorry, it doesn't fit very well.' And he goes, 'No, it's funny. I like it. No, keep it that way. Keep it that way.' So, for all the films, we kept it so that their butts kind of stick out a little bit.
Michael: Yeah, I can picture that. Yeah.
Jeff Light: Yeah. And if you go back and look at it, it's just like, 'Oh yeah, their butts do kind of stick out a little bit!' But for the animatics and also for Episode I and Episode II, it was fun coming up with techniques for like when the battle droids have to push through the barrier where the Gungan soldiers have kind of a front set up and the battle droids are coming towards them and they have to push this barrier to go after the Gungans, we just had someone with a rope tied around the waist of James Tooley and then let go of the rope so he's leaning against it, and then you let go of the rope so that it looks like there's an effort, like he's pushing through some sort of force field. So, there are a lot of things that we found that we could just use the simplest of tools, but it was all about the performance. How do you get this so that whatever the actor does really seems to flow into the performance of what's going on with the character? And I'll just say, and then I'll shut up about it, but for the animatics, then we had a lot of... Let's see, For Episode I and II, the Gungan soldiers, that was pretty much me in the suit for all the background Gungan soldiers. For the battle droids, that was all James Tooley. And for Episode II, we had Clone Troopers, and there was a shot of Count Dooku, some of Boba Fett. There was one notable thing that we did that actually that was for final work (actually, all these really were final work, I'm just talking about animatics). But for C-3PO, we actually had Grant Imahara, of Mythbusters fame, come in because he could fit in the C-3PO suit, and you couldn't really motion capture someone walking like C-3PO unless you're in the suit. Once you're in the suit, that's kind of the only way you can walk. Your arms kind of come up, and you're really stiff, and there are just ways that if you're in that suit, it makes you walk that way. In fact, you can't even step on a step or anything. So, that was really fun. But the weird thing about it was they brought in these suitcases of the C-3PO suit, the suit, and piece by piece, they screw Grant Imahara into this thing, and it just looked like him in the suit until they put that face mask on, and I tell you, it is the weirdest thing. You're standing there, and it's a guy in a suit, and you put on that mask, and it's suddenly C-3PO. He's walking around, you know, we've got marker balls on him and everything else, and it was uncanny. He suddenly transformed into this character. So, that was... Well, it was great that I got to meet Grant Imahara, but it was also great to work with... See the actual suit and work with that. So, before I get into animatics, I'll stop and see if you've got some questions.
Michael: Yeah. So, you said you were the Gungan background soldiers, and that was, like, wearing the mocap suit?
Jeff Light: Mm-hm.
Michael: Okay. Can we talk a little bit about how that works? Like, the suit? So, that's those skin-tight suits that you'll see, and people have balls or dots when they're wearing them. And then, it looks like, whenever I've seen it, it looks like it's kind of wireframe; their motions are kind of like in wireframe. Is that correct? And then, how does it get from that to, like, the final thing? Are animators coming in, or is that, like, in the computer? The skin and all that to get to, like, the final motion? Or are they animating on top of those wireframe...?
Jeff Light: Those are all excellent questions. , so let me see if I can address that. So, first of all, when we first got the motion capture system, there was no suit. They had toupee tape. They wanted you to strip down to your skin, basically.
Michael: Oh, wow.
Jeff Light: Yeah. And then they would tape these to your skin because they wanted to get as close to the bone as possible. There were very key places around your joints because, effectively, what you're trying to do with body capture, with motion capture, is to describe, what are your bones doing? So, you want to put them on at your joints, and the places that are- Because there's nothing interesting happening between the wrist and the elbow, that should be a rigid thing; you've got the radius and ulna that are there, they twist. But if you put two markers on the wrist and two markers on the elbow, then you can see, you get that twisting action between the two, and it's like, 'Okay, we can describe that.' What you do is you work through the entire body and just kind of go, 'What are the bones that we have there?' And you need to get a triangle between every bone so that you can be able to get that- Three points describe a plane, and so you can get that rotation information as long as you have a triangle in there. So, every one of those lines that you're seeing is kind of playing connect the dots between those markers, but in a very specific way, so that we can be able to know from the critical placement of those markers that we're getting both the positional and the rotational information of the entire body. It started off being just stuck to the skin, and I was like, 'Guys, this, first of all, any place in my body that I've got hair, I've got little patches on my skin where that's been ripped off, and it hurts.' So, I was like, 'We've got to do something else. Don't skin divers have suits or something? Or, like, leotards or something?' And so, we went to a sporting place where they had these thinner suits, and I had Annie Polland, who is the costume person for all the costumes that they were doing for Star Wars, she made up places where we told her to put the Velcro. That way, we could have suits, we had small, medium, and large, so different people came in. We had to have laundry service, because people would come in, they put on the suits, they'd work all day, and then they would stink from perspiration. So, we had to have a laundry service for dealing with that. We were like a bowling alley; we had all sorts of different sizes of shoes that were all worked up with the marker balls on them and everything else. So yeah, we were the first ones. That was something that I just said, 'We've got to have a suit,' and then that kind of became the thing. As soon as anybody said, 'Oh, and ILM is doing these things on motion capture,' the other studios are like, 'Oh, he's got a suit on. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Okay, we'll do that.' And they just kind of copied, you know, what was there. It made sense. So yes, from there, that data that you get of the positional and the rotational information, the trick is then how do you get that to apply to the character? Especially When you look at something like the Gungans or Jar Jar, the anatomy is not the same. So, you get into this mapping problem of the leg isn't exactly the same, so if a character goes down on his knees and you don't have those platform shoes on, what's going to happen with legs flipping up or doing something strange because the fit isn't exact? So, you try to come up with the best fit that you can, and you have cleanup artists that are going through and applying that. But even just setting up the model so that this data of these marker balls, you kind of pour that data into-I think at that point, we're working with Maya 3D CG package-it was a matter of having constraints so that when this cluster of marker balls moved in this direction, they were constrained to move along with that, and you worked your way from the toes all the way up to the head to try to come up with ways to make it fit without buckling or something. A lot of that was really challenging. But once you got it to work for one person, if I was the person in the Gungan suit, and James Tooley was the person that was in the battle droid suit, then it meant that once we worked it out once, then those proportions just worked, and so we could just, you know, go through and do whole performances that way. That makes sense?
Michael: I think so. Yeah, I just wanted to comment on the fact that the suit is just something you kind of thought up, and now it's, like, standard, right?
Jeff Light: Yeah, it became standard immediately.
Michael: Anytime you see behind the scenes or anything, you see people in those suits, and it's not like it was necessarily the way it had to be, but it's what you guys decided would work best, and now, it's 20, 30 years later.
Jeff Light: To address George and Rick McCallum's frustration with the system, I mean, it occurred to me when we were first doing motion capture, that really, you're getting all of the information that you need from the cameras. The marker balls and all that, it was just like, that's just because we're not smart enough to figure out what the cameras are seeing. If you have two cameras, like our eyes, looking in stereo at points in space, you have the 3D information right in front of you of what's going on in front of that camera. It's all a matter of understanding, writing the software to understand what you're seeing. So, by the time Wētā got ahold of it for doing the Planet of the Apes films and all that, they didn't have to have marker balls; they had cameras that were outside, but they were just kind of like regular cameras. They had suits on, but they had very specific patterns that they had worked out; they'd written the software and they'd figured that out so that they could be able to have people riding horses, and doing all kinds of stuff outside, and still, they're doing the photogrammetry, the triangulation, from cameras in space to those points of all the different places there and to be able to get that data out in the field. I knew that that was coming, but it was like, that's a huge software endeavor, and it's gonna take years and some pretty brainy guys. I mean, the photogrammetry software that was written by Vicon to do that triangulation of those marker balls in space was... You looked at the code, and it was just like, 'I have no idea. The mathematics is over my head.' It was tough.
Michael: I was watching that Light & Magic, and I was trying to figure out... I thought Episode I was where the mocap really kind of started, but it looked like on Casper and maybe Dragonheart, there was also some mocap, or is that more... It seemed like they had stuff on the face, I think you said face motion. Would that be considered mocap?
Jeff Light: So, I don't think we used any motion capture on Dragonheart, but for Casper, the animators mostly... They were all given motion capture. We had an actress come in to do the lines for Casper, I mean, the character of Casper, and then the animators that were doing performance, facial performances of Casper, then got this motion capture data. Most of them threw it away. Most of them just said, 'I'm not using that crap.' There was a couple of animators, in particular, one Mary Ann Malcomb, her animation was stellar. They gave her all of the best, you know, close-up shots of Casper doing a long performance. I asked her about it, whether she was using the motion capture data, and she said, 'Oh yeah, absolutely.' And I said, 'Tell me about how you're doing that.' She said that-and I heard this then subsequently from other people years after-you're always better starting off with the motion capture. What she would do is she would apply it to the face so that it moved the lips and did all the complicated stuff that motion capture gives you, and then she'd filter it out. She'd erase some, she'd animate some passages where she wanted to push the expression in some way. But there was a subtlety that you get from motion capture that you don't get anywhere else. And if you're pushing in on someone's face, or Casper's face-he's giving a dramatic performance, and that camera just keeps pushing in on his face- you need subtlety in those lips and in the eyes around the mask of the face. And she knew just exactly how much to dial that in. That was something also that Daniel Jeanette said when he was directing the animation on The Mummy, and we also had flown over, kind of while we were working on Episode I, they flew us over to London to Shepperton Studios to do motion capture for The Mummy, because Arnold Vosloo, who was the actor that played the Mummy, had an identifiable performance. There were times where his presence, his simple presence in the room, was terrifying. Even if he was just standing there, but the way he moved was very menacing. So, when I talked to Daniel about using the motion capture for all the stuff we had done, he was very proactive about it and just said, 'Yeah, you're always better off starting with the motion capture and then deciding what to take out of it.' There were some animators that, to my horror, I found out that they just kind of threw away most of it and filtered a lot of it out. But the ones that I think were the best ones were the ones like Mary Ann that really said, 'No. Let me not make an emotional decision about this. Let me look at this clinically, let me just see what I can get out of it. How much do I dial in motion capture, and how much do I dial in my animation and find whatever is best for the character?' Does that answer your question?
Michael: Got it, yes. One more question about Jar Jar. So, I just want to make sure I understand. So, beyond those initial, like, tests that you were doing, there wasn't additional mocap with Ahmed Best? It was all, like, based on his performance? Or it was just animated based...?
Jeff Light: Correct. So, all that stuff you see in the documentary about having the head thing that he wore and all that was in response to the fact that they weren't going to motion capture it, so they had to kind of motion capture it. Because George still wanted Ahmed Best's performance, it wasn't like they were just going to say, 'Oh, here's some videos of Ahmed Best. Now imagine what he would do in this situation.' It's like, no! For animation, I mean, even when you have actors that are delivering just vocals for a performance, you usually have a lipstick cam on their faces as they're talking into the microphone so the animators can watch that particular actor's reaction or what they do with their face. Like in Dragonheart, Sean Connery, a lot of why that lip sync looks so good, and he kind of looked like Sean Connery in the way that he delivered the line, was because the animators were studying the video of him delivering those lines and what his lips did and the way he would pause or just whatever he would do, that was something that they were paying attention to. So, in this context with Ahmed Best, because he's on set and the way he moves and just being very kind of relaxed and just kind of that goofy sort of a thing, if you try to pull that out of your imagination, rather than just simply working off what an actor is doing in that space at that moment, you're not going to be able to get as good a performance. So, Ahmed Best was really integrated into that character intimately.
Michael: See, I feel like I've seen shots of him in the mocap stuff, so I thought there must have been some of the actual performance being driven by that.
Jeff Light: Yeah. And when you see that footage of Ahmed Best and me in there, that was that day.
Michael: That day.
Jeff Light: That one day, that's all.
Michael: Oh, wow. Well, that is good to know. And just watching some of those documentary things too, where they kind of say, like, Rick McCallum could be kind of scary, and could kind of be (or was) George's enforcer.
Jeff Light: Yeah, he was kind of Darth Vader. Where George could be the nice guy, yeah, Rick McCallum was the Darth Vader that would turn on you afterwards. And yeah, you didn't want a visit from Rick.
Michael: I'm getting that impression, okay. So very, very interesting. Let me just ask then, how as an employee at ILM, and I guess you would have had at least in this one particular instance, you were interacting with George. Otherwise, how much does the average ILM employee see George Lucas? Is it just dependent on what they're working on? I mean, I guess, obviously, with Star Wars, you're more likely to see him. But if it's not Star Wars, I mean, is he just hanging around in general or...?
Jeff Light: No. So yeah, when we were working on Episode I and Episode II, there would be, I forget which morning it was that he would come, I think maybe twice a week or something that he would come, and people were given instructions. It's like, 'Don't bother him. He's there to do his job, so treat him like everybody else.' So, we'd be, you know, just waiting in line for coffee or something at Java the Hutt, and George would be in line, you know, getting a cup of coffee before dailies. George is very approachable in a lot of ways, just a really nice guy. He'd pull up in a beat-up BMW, which was his junker car, and park in a place that was completely illegal. No one else was allowed to park there, but George could park there. You know, it was fun. But yeah, he'd come there on dailies, so the heads of the departments would see him. I was there as the motion capture supervisor for whenever it was relevant. But yeah, there weren't that many people that were in dailies with him. He'd come in and then he'd go back out. He would also have sessions with Rob Coleman, who is the animation director for the Star Wars films, where George and Rob would be there; Rob would be presenting the work the animators were doing. One at a time, you'd be summoned, kind of, you're in a queue waiting for... It's almost time for your meeting with George. You'd come in, you get your notes from Rob and maybe George, but mostly directly from Rob, and say, 'Change this, change this, change this,' and then you'd be out, and then the next person would come in. So, there would be some amount of interaction, but it's not like George was hanging around. It was very directed. He had a very busy day; he'd come in and then he'd be heading back out. I do remember, though, that George was there on the morning of 9/11, and we were all just completely shaken by the events of that day. I mean, it was still unfolding as we were having dailies, and we were just trying to figure out whether to have dailies at all. And George even said the whole planes into the towers reminded him, I think it was a Tom Clancy book that – George was just so well-read that he knew that there was, this was kind of like a plot of one of the books that he had read.
Michael: Yes. At the end of, I believe-because I read these books too, when I was like in high school-it was at the end of Debt of Honor, I believe it was somebody flew a plane into Congress, I believe it was, and like wiped out the entire, pretty much the entire government, all the senators and everything.
Jeff Light: Yeah, George knew it off the top of his head. And that was a very sobering morning, I remember, for that. But yeah, just went through a lot of different stuff. Another George story that I have about dailies is that we'd be sitting there, and you'd have a production assistant there saying, 'Okay, so first, we're going to show you this, then we're going to show you that.' And they're rolling this footage for George, and he'd be looking at it and going, 'This is the footage from yesterday.' And we're like, 'No, no. This is the new take.' And he'd look at it and go, 'No, that color is wrong. That's the same shade of pink that you showed me yesterday.' We're all looking at each other like, 'No, that's not true.' And then all of a sudden, the PA in the back would go, 'Oh, wait a minute. He's right. Nope. This is yesterday's take,' George knew. I mean, you know, hear about people having perfect pitch; George had perfect color. He could be able to just spot details on things and know it. I mean, there was no question in his mind. It was like, 'Nope, I saw this yesterday.' And everyone else in the room swore he was wrong. It's like, 'No, he was right.' Just scary as far as just how much he knew what he wanted to have, and even if you disagreed with it, it's kind of like, yeah, but it's his vision. It's what he wants. So, there's some of it where we all just had reverence for him. I mean, we're all thrilled to be working with him. But there are some things that also working, especially Episode I, we knew that since George was paying for this out of his own pocket, he wanted to be able to have the shots be as cheap as possible. So, there were some times he would call 'Final' on a shot, and we were like, 'Oh no! We're not final on that. That is not...' And it's just like, you know, 'Shut up. When George says it's final, it is final.' And, you know, when asked about it at one point, where it was just, like, 'Why are you calling the shots final a little early?' And he was like, 'Well, it looks good enough to me. And if I can get each of the shots done 10% faster, then that means in 10 shots, I get one for free.' Okay. [laughs]
Michael: Right. Yeah, I mean, that's something I didn't realize until, I don't know, the last 10 years or so, that with the exception of the first Star Wars, he financed all of these films himself, or through loans. So, the budget is something he was probably very aware of, and trying to do things as cheap as possible. And I guess, if it's not perfect, if it's good enough in certain cases, then he's okay with it.
Jeff Light: Yeah. He had his producer hat on all the time. Even when we're waiting between things, and I'm just standing there and Rick McCallum and George are just BS-ing a little bit, just waiting for something to happen, what they were usually talking about was 'What were the box office numbers this weekend for this film or that film? How much of a profit did that make?' And just talking about box office. That was a big deal for what they were talking about all the time.
Michael: So, at that point, was ILM, were you on Skywalker Ranch? Is that where ILM was? Or no? Was that separate?
Jeff Light: No, we were on Kerner Boulevard in San Rafael, and Skywalker Ranch was a bit of a drive from where we are. So, we were in the Canal District, which was not a particularly exclusive part of San Rafael. It was kinda the dregs, but it was great. I mean, I really loved that. And the motion capture department was Martinez Bay, which was across the street from ILM, and so it was just like a warehouse that when we first opened up that place and they said, 'This is going to be your motion capture studio!' it was filled with all sorts of crap, they had to bring in a forklift to pull stuff out. But I found out that the whole - in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, that whole race in the mine with the little miniatures that they had done of the little carts going over the rails, that that was all shot in that same space. So, it had quite a history to it. So yeah, it was something that we had kind of our own little space. But I mean, even in the space I'm in right now, which is my studio, it's a garage that's been converted to be habitable. It's kind of where you can get work done, and that was one of the wonderful things about ILM was when people would come and visit and just be standing in the hallway, there would be people going, 'Excuse me! Excuse me!' and just rushing through all the time. It was like being in a beehive; there was a lot of action that was always happening, and people were running to meetings and going back and forth. And you know, walking down the hall, I thought I recognized somebody and he kind of waved to me as walking by and I went, 'Oh, that's Jim Carrey. Oh, he's working on The Mask. Oh, okay.' So, you just see famous people walking past you sometimes as you're going through the halls and that was a lot of fun. Also, just seeing, you know, the matte paintings up on walls. One wall, there was matte painting that they had for Die Hard 2, which was the airplane, the final shot that they do a pullout on that. And so, you'd see the stuff from these movies hanging up on the wall, and matte paintings are amazing because if you go, like, four or five feet away from the matte painting, it looks like a painting. And then, you get to this distance of six feet away and it looks like a photograph. Push back to five feet and it's like painting, photograph, painting, photograph. These guys were so good at knowing just exactly where to stop because it's all money. You know? If they made the whole thing look like it was a photograph, then it was like, yeah, you're wasting money. So, it was just a lot of fun, especially back then, because the guys that I really admired were the ones that were the optical guys that had done all of the, you know, ET and Star Wars and all that, and it was optical printers. The optical printers were still there when I came into the scanning department, and that was another thing where I was one of the people they didn't like because I was in the scanning department, which was going to replace the optical printers. But that's the problem with progress is that when you're out there in the front, then all the people that are doing have been doing it for years like, [grumbles] 'Who's this guy?' But they were all great guys. I just loved all of them. I had so much respect for what I'd seen at that point. But coming in in 1990, that was the dawn of the digital age at ILM. Riding that wave up through 2003 when I was there, it was like, those are some of the best years of this discovery process that we had of what we could do. I was just talking to Steve Williams, Spaz, on the phone two nights ago about his animation that he had done on the T. rex for Jurassic Park, and just what fun we had. I was lighting the shot, he was animating the shot, and you'd be working on this stuff, and you look at it and you just go, 'Oh my god, that looks like there are dinosaurs in that kitchen. That looks like there's raptors in the kitchen.' Up to that point, you see it in low res, you're making all sorts of mistakes, but you get to the final shot and it's like, 'Damn, that looks good.' You know, it's just, it was amazing to see this stuff coming out and no one had ever seen anything like this.
Michael: Yeah. I mean, I feel like Jurassic Park is the movie that, famously, George Lucas will point to and say, 'That's when I knew I could make the prequels,' Whether or not- But yeah, I mean, I definitely remember that too. That seemed like a big leap in the technology from what we had seen before.
Jeff Light: And we were basically forbidden from doing CG dinosaurs on Jurassic Park.
0 We were only there supposed to work with Phil Tippett, who was going to do stop motion, and we were going to add some motion blur to it and do something else.
Jeff Light: But Steve Williams, even though he was told, 'Definitely do not do that,' went out and put together a test of the T. rex chasing some Gallimimuses and showed that to Steven, got it to him. And Steven was like, 'Oh my god. No, this is how we have to do the movie.' And Phil Tippett was really crestfallen about that, and also Stan Winston's studios. I mean, it turns out that Phil Tippett had some great animators there, so they did some of the animation. Stan Winston did the big animatronic stuff. But anytime you saw the dinosaurs that were in full shot, where you saw all of them at once, that was the only way you could do it was CG. And I can't tell you how many people that got into the visual effects industry that came up to me and said, the first time they heard that T. rex roar, they said, 'Oh, I've got to work in this industry.' It really had a big effect on others.
Michael: I feel like a lot of the stuff that ILM... I mean, obviously, going back to Star Wars, but all those movies, I'm sure, inspired so many people to go into the field, or to go and do other things related to, you know, trying to figure out how to do things that appear in Star Wars, like, the technologies. So, I know I kind of sidetracked you a little bit. You had some stories about animatics, right?
Jeff Light: Yeah. And just to be clear for, what's been done in the past is to have storyboards that are just drawn, just pencil drawings on a card or whatever. Those are photographed, and then they would put in the audio and the music and all that, so that you kind of see the pacing and you can get a feel for what your film is going to be about so that before you go to actually make the movie, you kind of make the movie, you know, a really janky version of it. Some of what they did was to actually get Barbie and Ken and, you know, just dolls, and they just shot cheap video. And like, for the pod race stuff, they would just have the silliest looking stuff, but it gave you the camera angle, it gave you the lens that they were thinking about using, and what motion was going on, and it was better than just a drawing. And then, for the motion capture department, that was a great tool that way, but that also meant that we were able- So, I had another system that was a real-time system that was the Ascension system, Flock of Birds. It was a magnetic system, so you could put on a different suit that had a pack on it and everything else that put out that would, there were these sensors that would cut through the magnetic field that a couple of these big magnets, they would generate some, you know, pulsing magnetic field that you had a fairly small volume that you could work in, but you could get real time feedback on that. We were able to crank out all these performances, and so they'd have us do all sorts of actions on that stage that would be there for the shots. Ben Burtt, who is, you know, a legendary sound guy, came one day, and I wasn't even sure who Ben Burtt was, but he wanted to put on the suit to do some of this stuff, and that was a lot of fun. There was a time where I was directed to be Jar Jar and to have the performance where Jar Jar is on the battlefield and he gets his foot caught in the piece of a battle droid, and as he's moving around, it's firing off and all that. I even had my vacuum cleaner there that I suggested to George, we could tie that to Ahmed Best's foot and just, you know, have him kind of work with that. So, we did try that. That vacuum cleaner is still sitting over here in my room.
Michael: Oh, wow. That's history!
Jeff Light: Yeah, it is. It's still got the Scotch light markers on it; we used it for motion capture. But there were things there where I acted that out for the animatics. And there was another taken there where Jar Jar, they're surrounded by the battle droids, and the general is like, 'We'll fight to the end.' And then Jar Jar says, 'I give up.' And when I was being Jar Jar, I just went, 'I give up, I give up,' and it made Doug Chang, who was directing the session, really bust up laughing, and they're going, 'Okay, well, we have to do a real one. You can't just be goofing around like that.' And he's going, 'No, that's really hilarious. I love, no, we're going to keep that.' And that's the way they directed Ahmed Best to do it for the performance. So, there were some things that you did that you found in the animatics that then kind of make it into the movie in some way, and you never know what those things are going to be. So, there was just a lot of fun stuff that we were able to do. One of the things, especially for Episode II, that was exciting to me was that Rob Coleman, who's just a dear guy, he said that George decided that there were not going to be any Clone Trooper outfits or armor that they built, they're going to be 100% CG. The film was going to be called Attack of the Clones, and Rob says to me, 'And you are in charge of the clones. They are going to be mo-capped, that's your baby. So, hold auditions for whoever you need to do that. That's going to be yours.' And so, that was a huge deal for me, was to direct the performances of the Clone Troopers. In many cases, if there was a hero performance for one of the Clone Troopers, where they were going to be close up, or there was, like, one shot of the transport where they're kind of hanging on and it comes down and it lands and they all kind of come out, and they have their blasters ready and all that, I did every one of those parts because I knew the timing of what I wanted it to be for how their bodies needed to shift all in time. Because you're on just the floor, you know, but you have to imagine it's coming to a stop, and then you run out, but the guy in front moves at one pace, the guy in back waits for the guy, and then moves forward. You're having to do all this in your head, so if you're directing it, it's just like... I need to be in the suit, you know? It's just easier for me to just do it rather than to tell someone else, 'No. "Wait and stop, and do this.' Also, there were some performances of like Count Dooku, some of Boba Fett, they were ones where they just needed to be in a spaceship as it's landing or that, you know, it comes down, Boba Fett kind of it comes down to the ground or something, and we'd have someone on wires so that it looked like it, you know, it had the motion of someone having the impact of hitting on the floor." So, we'd either do that for the animatics, or we'd do it for actually for the real film. A lot of that was just fun to see it when it finally got into the film, that you knew that there was some contribution that you had made that gave it that look, even if it's just in a very tiny way.
Michael: So, you were all those troops in Episode II then?
Jeff Light: Well, we had different people that we had in the suit for... Right now, his name is escaping me, but he was this bodybuilder of a guy that was our cleanup artist, he'd just come, put on his headphones every morning, and he just cleaned up the motion capture data to get it ready for production, but great big guy. And so, for the Clone Troopers, where they're all down in the training area and they're, you know, doing martial arts stuff, he was perfect for that. Even just walking, his arms came out from his body because he was so muscular, you know? So, his walk was very different from anybody else's walk. That was something that I learned in motion capture was that I would have someone just do a walk across the stage before we started doing the performance that day, for every different person that came in. I built up a library of different walks that we had because there are sometimes that someone would have a very distinctive walk and you would know if it was a woman versus a man. If you applied one walk to one that just didn't quite fit, it was hilariously bad. So, you learn so much about human anatomy and how we move in ways. I had one case where we had two actors that were down on the ground, I think they were Gungan soldiers, and one had to help the other one up. It would have been a nightmare to animate by hand because the shifting of weight from you being in a sitting position on the floor and someone coming over and lifting you up, and how much you're leaning on that person as you put another foot underneath you to push yourself to get into a standing position, and then stand up, that's a lot of dynamics. And it's not like a Mickey Mouse cartoon where you can just kind of make whatever has to happen. It's like, no, no, this has to live alongside live action, so the dynamics, the physics, and the weight of a body that's six-foot tall or whatever has to be correct. So, that's where motion capture is just terrific. Also, getting subtle performances where you just needed to have a soldier standing, or a lot of the Clone Troopers that were just standing in formation, but you don't want them to freeze. Even though they're standing at attention, they're still moving. How do you animate that? Well, you put someone in a motion capture suit, and you have them stand at attention for a long time and you get these little subtle body shifts that start from a place in the foot where there's a little shift in the foot, and then that ripples up to the legs and then up to the chest, and then up to the head, and kind of back down. It's just hard to even describe what's going on there in the body, and really tough to animate. But with motion capture, it's a breeze; you get it for free. So, there were a lot of things that... There were places that we found for motion capture, and it was fun to direct, it was fun to... James Tooley in Episode II, where he played all the battle droids, but there was like one scene where they're in one of the, like, the throne room or something, and they go, 'Intruder! Get him!' And they run around these guys and hoods and, you know, they do this action where he's got the gun and he's moving between other characters. We put up a ladder for James to kind of duck under, or go around, or something, so the dynamics of his body would change as he was doing that, and you drop everybody into the shot of where they're supposed to be, and it looks like, 'Oh, he's just running around that guy.' But first of all, if you animate it, the dynamics wouldn't be quite right, probably. But by having just a little bit of imagination and a person in the suit, and they're imagining where they're at, you could get a terrific performance. It was terrific because it didn't stand out; it was great because it was invisible. You didn't care about how, you know, it's not Shakespeare here, we're just trying to make it so that it looks like that droid in that situation, so it feels natural. And that was fun to make the performances disappear. That's what visual effects are supposed to be. You're not supposed to notice them. If you notice them, we probably did a bad job.
Michael: So, after ILM, you were at DreamWorks, right? Was that also mocap work?
Jeff Light: No, the experience that I had for rigging characters, then I just decided that I was going to go into that. So, I was what they called character TD, or a rigger for the characters. So, I did some rigging on Over the Hedge, but then became rigging supervisor pretty quickly. The big one, though, for me was How to Train Your Dragon; that was a blast working on that film. I mean, I just love the film. Sometimes you work on a film and it's kind of a stinker, but when you work on a film that you really love the story, and you're proud of the final product, it's really great to do that. But Nathan Loofburrow, for the most part, was really focusing on getting all the people rigged, and I was focusing on getting the dragons rigged, and we just had amazing people on the team. But yeah, there were a lot of stories about that, because especially for How to Train Your Dragon, that story, I mean, we went through three sets of directors, the story itself changed and changed and changed and changed. Every time Jeffrey would come in and look at it, Jeffrey Katzenberg, he'd just go, 'No, guys, it's got to be older, he's got to be older.' So, they redesigned Hiccup to be a little older, because he started off being 7 years old, and then he was 9 years old, and then he was 12 years old, and then he was kind of a teenager. For Toothless, he started off being the smallest, in fact, they even have that character of the smallest dragon that he sees is kind of walking around him or something, I forget which scene that is. That was originally supposed to be Toothless was this little, puny dragon, because that's what it is in the books. It wasn't until we got into it, and the story changed, it was like, 'No, Toothless has got to be a badass, cool dragon.' So yeah, it was redesigned at the very last minute, and that was a really difficult time to rig that up. And oh, when I say rigging, I probably should explain that because most people probably don't know what that means. When you build a character, you build it as a statue; the modeling department builds it as a statue in, like, a T pose or some sort of pose, but it's a statue. Then, the rigging, what you need to do is animate it. So, you need to have bones that can, you know, flex, and when those flex, how does the skin behave? If you're going to do facial animation, you know, all the rigging in that. So basically, there's a whole set of controls that are standard set of controls that animators know how to work with. So, if they work on Hiccup and they work on Astrid, they have a standard set of animation controls to be able to animate that puppet. So, we take a statue and turn it into a puppet for animation. So, that's the rigging department.
Michael: Okay. So, that was the first How to Train Your Dragon; they're making a live-action one now.
Jeff Light: Yeah, made.
Michael: Oh, made. Is it out already?
Jeff Light: Yeah.
Michael: Oh, okay. Have you seen it?
Jeff Light: I have not seen it. But it's Dean DeBlois that directed the live-action version; he also was one of the directors on the films, the animated films. I understand it's really very good. But yeah, I don't know, I'm sure not a fan of the live-action version of the Disney films, the classics, like Beauty and the Beast and all that, it's like, no, no, you missed the magic.
Michael: Gotcha. Yeah, we watched all those movies with my kids. Certainly, the first one. But we haven't seen we haven't seen the live action How to Train Your Dragon, which I guess is out, which I didn't realize. So, you've also done some instructing, right, throughout the years? Like, after your time at DreamWorks? And even like, was it right after college, were you doing that?
Jeff Light: Yeah. Basically, when I was in my master's program at OSU, I taught the animation class, I taught filmmaking classes, and I taught a variety. But the main thing was animation that I taught. And then, even when I was doing flying logos and that sort of thing, they didn't have anyone really to teach the animation class, and I went back. I mean, over the course of about 10 years, I was still teaching animation. So, you know, needs more follow-through or overlapping action or whatever it is, you know? At one point, in fact, when The Illusion of Life book came out that Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston were two of the nine old men from Disney had written this book, I was like, 'Oh my gosh, we have to use this as a textbook for the animation class.' And it turned out that they were available to come and visit and talk to the class, so I was just over the moon about being able to meet Frank Thom- Okay, so Frank Thomas, animated Thumper, and he animated the kiss scene in Lady and the Tramp, and just all this stuff. Both those guys were just the sweetest guys in the world. And I was able to have breakfast with them, ask any questions I wanted. I prepped my class, like, 'We're bringing in two of the nine old men from Disney. So, make sure you have your questions ready.' These guys come in, they take off their coats and then kick off the snow from their shoes, and they go, 'Okay, well, anybody have any questions?' and crickets.
Michael: Oh no!
Jeff Light: No questions whatsoever. They were so intimidated by these guys, they had no questions whatsoever. So, I was like, 'Well, I have a few more questions,' just had to kind of make things go along there. But one of the wonderful things about this, even when I was doing flying logos for Krantz and Three Productions, is one of the times they brought in Chuck Jones as one of the speakers, just to be inspiring for us as computer animators. And Chuck Jones showed reel after reel of some of his funniest, funniest, both Road Runner cartoons and also One Froggy Evening, A Bear for Punishment. Some of them, they're just laugh-out-loud, beautiful films. But then we got to go out to dinner with Chuck and sit around the table and ask him questions. We asked, 'Okay, so how do you come up with a Roadrunner cartoon? You know, you're cranking these things out one after the other.' He said, 'Oh, so we had something we called a yes session.' The rule was: no one could say anyone had a bad idea. We would just come to the table with some ideas on index cards and that sort of thing. And if someone threw out an idea for a gag, and it was a stinker, it would just sit there; people would think about it and see if they could do something with it. And if they didn't, someone would say, 'Oh, and I also have another idea.' And we like, Oh, what? Oh yeah, okay. We can work with that.' So, there was never a bad idea. No matter what you put down, it was something that, you know, if it died, it died on its own. You don't have to tell someone it's a bad idea. What you do is you're trying to foster this environment of positive energy in the room, so that you can laugh, so that you can be able to enjoy yourselves while you're working. And that was something that I thought was just brilliant and was, at its core, the way that you need to work in a creative environment is to build this environment so that it's a safe room, so that you feel free to be able to just throw out ideas all over the place. That's how they were able to be so prolific in turning out these cartoons was that they just had each other's backs. It was improv, you know? It really was improv.
Michael: Oh, wow. It seems like at ILM, you had a number of different jobs, a number of different things that you worked in. Was that your choice? Or in certain cases, like, I'm not sure, just looking at the names of... Like, I don't know if there's... Sometimes it's like digital animation or computer animation. So, are those just, like, is that sometimes different names for the same thing? Or are they very specific disciplines where it's...?
Jeff Light: Very specific disciplines, yes. At a certain point, they just didn't want to make the credits longer, so they'd just throw everybody's name and call it 'digital artists,' and then you have an ocean of names that come up in the credits. No, it comes down to kind of a philosophical thing for me, and also, just the way ILM worked. That's part of what I loved about ILM is when you finished working on a show, then you were just kind of up and, like, floating, and you were waiting to see if someone picked up your name for being on another show. Gail Currey was the production manager that we'd go to, and she'd say, 'You have any ideas? These are the shows that are going on. Do you have any idea of what you want to do?' And, you know, you'd be savvy enough to kind of find out what productions are coming up next, whether it's Jurassic Park: Lost World, or whatever the thing was. So, if you wanted to do something different, and you had gone to that production and talked to the people in that production to say, 'You know, I'm really interested in growing into this new position,' and you've demonstrated to them that you have the capability of doing that, then if you said, 'That's what I want to do for this next show,' then she'd go, 'Okay, great. I'll assign you to that.' It's because after you work there for a certain number of years, and people got a clue that you could be thrown in the deep end of the pool, and you'd figure it out, you know? You'd just be able to swim. And that was something that I really loved. The philosophical part for me was, as far as I know, we only get one lifetime, and I was able to do lots of different jobs. Like, for Harry Potter 2, I was a cloth supervisor. I didn't know anything about doing cloth sims. But it was just like, 'Oh, that's cool! Yeah, I'd like to do that.' It was a lot of fun. And yeah, did lighting, compositing, scanning, software development. We built a scanner after I was first there, working with a scanner that Kodak had co-developed with ILM. Later on, we built one from scratch for scanning in 70-millimeter film. So, that was really great. But yeah, then working as an animator, working as a rigger, a lot of different jobs. It just meant that not only was it interesting, but also you got to meet different people and work with different people. That's one of the things that was just the most fabulous thing about being at ILM that I missed was just the different people that were there, some of them were just so unbelievably talented. Working with Steve Williams on Jurassic Park... So, I'm lighting the shots, he's animating the raptors for the raptors in the kitchen sequence. And I'm like, 'Okay, it's 6:00 and I need to have that shot to push the button, because I've got kids at home, and I've got to get home.' So, I'm going down to the pit where Steve Williams is working, and he's, you know, doing the last-minute animation. Steve knew the software better than it knew itself; his cursor was moving faster than the software could update. It's like a machine. I had never seen anyone work faster than the computer! So, he would click in a space on the screen that a pop-up menu would come underneath a second afterwards, and it would click on the thing that was coming up, and he would just kind of go around ahead of time, because it was like, nothing's going fast enough for him. His brain was going faster than the machine! It was just amazing to watch. He was just an amazing animator. But also, just the energy of some of the people that you'd work with, and the different disciplines and things they knew. I mean, you just couldn't help but have respect for these people. It was challenging, also, because there were people that were very technical, that were real, you know, they had their degrees in computer science, and you have people that were the most artistic, didn't want to touch anything having to do with a computer, but they had to for their jobs. Some of them didn't; some were model makers and that sort of thing, and they're all getting coffee at the same place, and they're just, you know, if you're a supervisor, you're working the dynamics between the two areas to get the product out. So, it's just an amazingly alive... You miss it when you leave. Even if you leave for good reasons, that you go, 'Yeah, I don't think this is for me anymore.' Still, you miss it the second you walk out of that door for the last time.
Michael: From the outside, it sounds like it would be really fun and challenging. Because in a lot of cases, you're figuring out things for the first time, or this is the first time they're being done, and you're the forefront. You know, as we talked about with those suits before, like, it's a decision you made, and it's still being used years later. So, it sounds like it would be a great place to work.
Jeff Light: Well, and you're working alongside the best in the business. You know, someone that has been an icon to you, and suddenly you're having a conversation with them in a conference room or something, it's just like, 'I can't believe what I'm doing today.'
Michael: Right. You mentioned Phil Tippett before. I was like, that's one of the names I always think of. Phil Tippett and Dennis Muren, those are kind of the names, you know, from the original trilogy that I kind of remember.
Jeff Light: Yeah, I worked directly with Phil just a little bit, but enough to just see he was just, he is such a great, sweet guy. Dennis Muren, I worked with a lot. I mean, I just went from show to show to show. Anything he was on, it was just like, 'Oh, count me in.' And Dennis was just one of the most brilliant visual effects supervisors in that he could see exactly where to cut off. If someone said, 'Oh no, that shot's not final.' He'd go, 'If the audience is looking over there, then we've lost them. This is final. It's good enough. That's fine.' But there are other times where it was just like, 'Nope, we need to flop the frame. We need to do other things to try to figure out why it's not working. There's something that just doesn't look right.' Dennis was also great at being able to say... There were times where he wouldn't final a shot until- I mean, he would just say, 'Doesn't match the reference.' I had a shot that I needed to do of a Harrier jet, just to do the effects of the jet exhaust that was coming down that held up the jet, and he just said, 'If it looks like the reference, then that's what you go by. Never go off what you think it is. Check your reference. That's gospel. If it matches the reference, then it's good. It's final.' And it's just like, he knew, you know? He really had a great sense. Also, it made me realize that the role of the visual effects supervisor is to understand the director better than the director understood the job, so that when he would hear from Steven Spielberg, 'Here's the way I want the dinosaurs to perform,' or 'Here's what I need out of the shot,' Dennis could go, 'Right, he's saying this, but here's what we need to do in order to be able to get that.' So, he could get very specific with very technical people to go, he would know that Steven's probably, 99% of the time, going to go, 'If Dennis likes it, Steven's going to like it.' He was right.
Michael: Well, this has been great. I don't want to keep you too much longer. I guess we should comment on your name, which is very appropriate for working at Industrial Light and Magic for as long as you have. I was listening to an interview you did on the 8111 podcast, you mentioned that I think you said you were at jury duty and someone asked you if you were the Light in Industrial Light and Magic, and I thought that was that was pretty funny. Does that happen a lot? Or is that...?
Jeff Light: No, but like I've been to Filmtools buying cinema equipment, and they would see my name on the credit card and go, 'Jeff Light. Is that really your name? Are you doing cinematography?' It's like, 'Oh, for this particular film. Yeah, I am the DP for it.' They're like, 'Oh, that's a great name!' As a dummy… if I had known afterwards, I would have just made sure that for my credits in the film all the way through, sometimes it's Jeffrey B. Light, sometimes it's Jeffrey Light, sometimes it's Jeff B. Light, all sorts of things. Just, Jeff Light. It's just a good name. I should have just gone with Jeff Light, my name in the credits for each of the films that I worked on. So, no, I was... Yeah, it's a good name. I feel very lucky to have that.
Michael: Sometimes last names work out like that. It does make researching a little difficult, though, because I'm like, 'Jeff Light, ILM,' and then it's like, Jeff Light & Magic is like, no, not exactly the person I was looking for. One other thing. We talked about this a little bit before we started recording. We talked about you're retired now, but you are working on a stop motion picture. So, is that kind of what's keeping you busy? Just working on your own projects?
Jeff Light: Yeah, we could have a whole podcast about what it's like to retire from working in an industry like visual effects. You know, with all the things, all the people I've worked with and all that, I mean, there were times that I would be interviewed by magazines and, you know, radio or television or whatever. I had one time where they wanted me to give a talk for, like, junior high kids during Episode I to just kind of show this stuff off, and they had 3,000 people in this auditorium, and they bust them through for, like, three or four shows. You're on this huge stage, like this stadium sort of thing, and I was the star of the show to talk about the pod races and, you know, how that stuff came across. It's like, holy cow! I mean, it's one thing to be in a job where it's very high-profile like that, and then you retire and it's crickets. It's just you, you know? We were talking about teaching before I did, I was Chair of Visual Effects at the Savannah College of Art and Design. So, I finished off kind of bookended my career with teaching to give some of that back, and that was good. But I was away from my family; I was on the East coast, my family was on the West coast. That just didn't work out. But I was able to at least give some of the information that I had learned in visual effects at the end of all that. But then it all stops and, you know, you're just you. It's a funny thing. When I was at ILM, I had my ILM jacket. When I was at DreamWorks, I had my DreamWorks jacket. And in some ways, by putting on that jacket that has the logo on it, you are part of something bigger. And then you go to retire and you're just you, and it's like, what does it mean to be me? And you have to kind of figure that out all over again and be comfortable in just your skin. So yeah, I finally landed on working on a stop motion film, although I'm not sure whether I'm going to put any AI imagery in there. I'm not sure if I'm going to put CG imagery in there; kind of depends on what the script demands and want to go to figure out what needs to happen because there's some demanding things that are in the script. I mean, I wrote the script, but as I'm writing, I was like, 'I don't know how I'm going to do this.' But I figured, well, I don't need other actors. I don't need other things. I can do this all my own and just kind of go through the whole process. If you're creative at all, to not be making something is just… it’s a little maddening. It's kind of like, if you need to create and you're not creating, you start turning that inward and, you know, you start to gnaw your own leg off. You need to be doing something. So, it's just like, 'Okay, well, I'm making a film.'
Michael: Do you have any plans for what you would do with it? Like, would you put it online or is it something you would just keep?
Jeff Light: Oh, I'll put it online. Yeah, but I'm just not- I have no idea how long it's going to take me to finish this. I have to really clean up that website because it just hasn't been touched for a while. I've even got some films that I haven't put on there that I need to. So yeah, there's if I'm going to really put in the effort that it's going to take to do this, I need to be able to maybe have a website that really calls it out in particular and showcases it. There's a lot about social media that I'm just not up on as much as I should because I'm more interested in making of the film than in promoting. That's always been a problem of mine is marketing and promoting is a very different thing than making the film. There are people that, hats off, are really good at doing both. I'm not one of them. So, I appreciate you doing the podcast. I'm very happy to be talking to you today, but I'm not very good at promoting myself.
Michael: Well, I'll keep an eye on your website. If you want to let me know whenever you are done, if it's, you know, a couple of years, just let me know. I'll definitely do my best to get the word out and I'll definitely check it out. Is your website, like, the best place? I know you said it needs some updating, but is there anywhere, anything anybody else should be checking out, or just keep an eye on that? Or your YouTube page?
Jeff Light: No. Yeah, I'm glad that I've got a lot of my films out there that are just short films. A lot of the later ones... When I was at DreamWorks, I started a film club there so that some of us that had experience in live action, but were working in animation, could get a chance to, 'Oh, I'm going to do sound this time. I'll direct this time. I'll edit,' you know, whatever. We kind of worked it around with different scripts that people had. That was really terrific, but it was like a one-day shoot and, you know, shoestring budgets, and all that. So, a lot of the work is just exercises from film club and all that, and some is earlier work. But I don't really have anything that I'm ready to promote at the moment.
Michael: Okay. Have you considered writing a book?
Jeff Light: I've considered it, but there's some... I'm telling you the high points. There's a lot of low points of things that, if I was going to write a book, I'd want to include some of the battles that went on that were some really dirty things that happened. But even then, I'd be kind of like, I'd better lawyer up before I start doing some of those sorts of things, because there are some people that might come at me saying, 'Well, that's not exactly true,' when it's exactly true. Even on the Industrial Light & Magic thing, there's a lot of stories where you're getting the happy version of what's going on. And there were, you know, these are people, these are real people and they're competitive, they're highly competitive people. And sometimes people don't want you to succeed because they want to succeed in your place. So, that was part of leaving ILM was it was just a rough environment in some other ways.
Michael: Yeah. What you're saying earlier about some of the people not being happy about the mocap or the scanning, like, if they think their jobs are at stake, they probably can be unhappy and not so happy about, you know, progress.
Jeff Light: Yeah. If I start talking a little bit, then the thread will start coming out. So, I'll just go, 'No, it was all mostly just wonderful.' [chuckles]
Michael: Okay. All right. I really liked hearing your stories and getting an idea of how it was working on the prequels, and just in the industry at the time when you worked on it.
Jeff Light: Well, and I'm thrilled, I mean, for Episode I, Episode II, there's some things about those films that people have not been so kind about them in comparison to the other Star Wars films. But for kids that were growing up during that time, it's like, no, it has resonance for them as part of their childhood. And working on Hook, Hook was another film that when we were working on, it was like, 'Oh man, this is just such a stupid movie,' and years later, you hear people go, 'Oh, I watched that all the time. That was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid!' So, that's part of what's wonderful about getting the opportunity to work on some of these wonderful films is that they're helping to make memories for kids and for families. That's part of why I was attracted to it in the first place was that to have that opportunity to get to work on something like that that's going to last. It's like, you can't ask for better than that.
Michael: Yep. Well, thank you very much for speaking with me today. Good luck on your film.
Jeff Light: Thank you.
Michael: Good luck with retirement, and I look forward to seeing the finished product someday. Thank you.
Jeff Light: Thanks so much, Mike.
Michael: Thanks.
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Transcribed by Aveline Malek at TheWordary.com