A new model? From backyard movies to Attila the Hun: How digital wizardry built a career for Gareth Edwards. By Lee Purcell | July 2008
Back in high school in Warwickshire, England, Gareth Edwards' career advisor talked with him about his aspirations. "What do you want to do for a living? What is your Plan A," the advisor asked. "I want to be a film director," Gareth replied. "OK," the advisor continued, "what is your Plan B?" "To die in the attempt," Gareth said.
Such tenacity has its rewards. Fast forward some 17 years and Gareth Edwards has a long string of successful television projects under his belt and recently completed the production of Attila the Hun for the BBC – both directing the project and handling all of the special effects on a custom multi-processor workstation using Adobe Production Premium CS3.
This meteoric rise – from filming homemade movies on his Dad's camcorder to directing a million-dollar BBC drama – owes some of its momentum to the practical use of technology. Attila the Hun stands as a striking example of the real-world capabilities of a commercially available workstation, although it did contain a number of features not usually found in an off-the-shelf system. The production workflow was extremely demanding. Gareth notes that Attila the Hun includes 250 visual effects – more per hour than Lord of the Rings.
Despite making extensive use of the latest platform technologies, Gareth doesn't fit the profile of a geek or gearhead. "My Dad had his own computer company when I was growing up," he says. "I was surrounded by them as a kid. As soon as he brought anything home, I would start trying to paint on it or start trying to animate with it. For me, the technology has always been something I've taken for granted. I have never had to understand it; it has just always been there and worked."
The workstation Gareth used for Attila the Hun effects processing is within the reach of individuals or small companies engaged in television production or moviemaking. The key to the high-speed workflow is multi-threading.
With dual Intel® Xeon 5300 processors (each with 4 cores) running in a liquid-cooled environment, 8 processor cores are available for video and effects processing. Adobe and Intel engineering teams worked together closely on multi-threading the Adobe CS3 applications. What this means in practical terms is that complex and lengthy operations – such as cross dissolves, gamma correction, color correction, and composite operations – are divided into individual threads and run in parallel.
Gareth doesn't have precise benchmarks on the performance improvements, but he noted that some of the most demanding operations that could take up to 20 hours on his previous system were taking somewhere around 3 or 4 hours on his new workstation. Other specifications of this producer's dream workstation include 16GB of system RAM, Microsoft Windows XP, 64-bit, 1-gigabit Ethernet, and 1.5 terabytes of RAID data storage with disk mirroring.
Another useful tool to boost performance, Nucleo Pro 2.0 from GridIron Software, gave Gareth multiple ways of optimizing the After Effects workflow by performing specified operations on available processor cores. More complete utilization of the processor resources on a platform is a sure-fire technique for pushing performance to the limit and cutting lengthy rendering tasks down to size.
The Production of Attila the Hun
If you don't have a cast of thousands and you're trying to show an epic battle involving 250,000 Huns, you'd better be very good creating visual effects. The army that rages in the background of the final battle scene consists of four warriors who were shot against a green screen. Short sequences of them fighting, running, falling, and attacking were multiplied by dropping characters into the background in Adobe After Effects, varying the shadows, lighting, and timing of their movements, and repeating until the scope of the battle scene achieved the appropriate epic proportions.
Four warriors who were shot against a green screen.
The final battle scene showing thousands of warriors instead of four.
The shot was then dropped into context within the timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro, using the Dynamic Link feature. As additional changes were made in the scene using After Effects, the updates ripple through to Premiere. These kinds of techniques allowed Gareth to complete the 720p hour-long feature on time (over a span of 5 months) and within the budget. The visual effects alone took five months after the shooting was complete.
Other tools came into play as needed. For example, models created using AutoDesk 3Ds Max served as buildings in the siege tower scene. The original scene, as shown below, lacked the siege towers.
The original scene, as shown, lacked the siege towers.
The 3Ds Max models appear clearly in the ultimate scene.
By creating many of the backgrounds, buildings, and battle scenes on the computer, Gareth was able to achieve a Hollywood-style look for a small fraction of the budget of a typical movie. Scenes that normally would have required elaborate sets, hundreds or thousands of extras, or elaborate camera techniques were generated on the computer using off-the-shelf tools.
Another example shows a messenger racing across an empty landscape.
In the production version of the scene, the background shows what the messenger was racing toward.
Attila the Hun was Gareth's first experience directing a full-length drama. For previous work, he has received a BAFTA and has been nominated for an Emmy in visual effects. For more details on how individual shots were handled, including a QuickTime movie that demonstrates some of the processes used, visit http://www.fxguide.com/article463.html.
Focusing on Visual Effects
On a fateful day in London when Gareth interviewed for two different jobs – one doing directing work and the other, computer graphics – he made a decision that would affect his entire career. Thinking it might be the best path to advance his career, he chose the computer graphics job, which turned out to be a springboard to his specialty: creating special effects that give a film a high-priced look for relatively little money.
"I did the computer graphics on a TV show called Seven Wonders of the Industrial World," Gareth recalls. "Within the BBC it went down really well. They basically didn't have much money in the budget. In places, the final production looked really epic. Everyone was asking, ‘How did you do this? How did you make it look so expensive?'"
"So, I got invited in," Gareth continues, "and they basically said, we would love for you to do another series. I said, ‘Well, I will only do your series if you let me direct.' I saw an opportunity and thought, I've got to draw a line in the sand now. There was a bit of tension. They wouldn't commit and I had to leave without knowing.
"A day or two later I got a phone call saying, ‘OK, we're going to let you direct a TV show'. From then on, I plowed all my energy into effects. I was given TV shows that were heavy with visual effects to direct. The great thing about it, if you are doing your own visual effects, as I am, it tends to make your production look like it required twice the money that it did. You can really add to the scope of the project."
Interview with Gareth Edwards Many young filmmakers are faced with the decision early on: should I go to film school or just start working on projects and try to learn by doing? What's your advice?
It's a tough question, but I think most people would agree that the best way to learn anything, is to go out there and do it! With filmmaking, this used to be impossible, as it was so expensive (my ten-minute student film cost me around £4,000) that, as a student, you couldn't really afford to make a mistake. So, you had to learn as much about the craft from teachers and books as you could.
But now that everything has gone digital, I'm not so sure this is true. I think if you took two equally talented people, and you sent one of them on a course for a year and at the end they made a short film, and the other just kept making one short film after another, until by the end of the year they had made 50 shorts, my money would probably be on that kid.
I haven't once been asked to show my degree certificate for any job I've ever got. All everyone asks to see is your work. I think the tools at home are so powerful and moving so quickly, it's hard to see what film school can add to the equation... except college is not just about education. I guess it is a good halfway house to the real world, a chance to make friends and have some fun too. So, to do this with people who love films, maybe isn't such a bad idea?
But I think the days of working your way up slowly through the ranks are over. Most people seem to be getting a directing break these days based on a great short film, or talent in another area of production. You can make a film for $10 nowadays, so all the risk has gone out of filmmaking. There is no reason why you have to wait in line anymore. Just pick up a camera and start filming.
Would you advise someone getting into video and film production to specialize in one specific area or try to master as many different elements of the medium as possible?
It really depends what your goal is. If you want to be an editor, then you should definitely specialize in that. But, if you want to be a director, you kind of have to know a bit about everything.
What I love so much about the digital revolution, is that all those different fields (photography, editing, visual effects) can all come together on just one computer. You don't need a bunch of different departments in order to make a film; you just need a computer with a bunch of different software. If you have the talent and the time to learn them, there is nothing stopping you making a whole film on your own.
Obviously, collaboration is good, but there are many art forms that have been churning out great works by individuals for centuries (painting, music, and writing). The only reason we haven't had that in cinema is because the process was so industrial, you needed a factory line of people and tons of money in order to create these things. But, that isn't true anymore. What is so bad about someone going off and making a whole film on their own? Sure, it will have its disadvantages, but it won't have as much compromise. The filmmaker can picture something and go and film it, without taking out a loan, without seeking approval from 20 people. I'm really excited about the kind of films that will come out in the future; there will be no excuses anymore. If you can picture it, you can make it.
What recommendations would you give a young filmmaker in getting a foothold in the business?
When I was younger, I was trying to follow the Spielberg model: make a short film, show it to some producers, then they hire you to direct TV shows, then you direct a TV movie, then a real movie. But obviously none of this happened for me. Computers seemed to get in the way of all this. Then I realized that maybe for our generation the story will be different. Maybe there will be a whole bunch of people breaking into films using digital tools.
I'd love to say that this is the way into the industry now, but just like before it will no doubt change again, and something nobody can predict will come along and change the rules again. I think the next generation has it easier in some ways, as anyone can create anything they like, but they also have it much harder, as anyone can create anything they like... so the competition will be fierce!
Lee Purcell writes about technology topics – including ray tracing, parallel computing, alternative energy, and open-source software – from the one-time capital of Vermont, Arlington. Visit his blog at http://lightspeedpub.blogspot.com for spirited insights into energy advances.
