Exclusive Interview: G.I. Joe’s Visual Effects Guru (Part 1)

Share on Facebook posted 08-05-09 by Julina Tatlock

Advance reviews are out for G.I. Joe, and the one point that they all seem to agree on is that it’s a wild ride of action sequence after action sequence. One review went so far as to say that if you took every action climax of every Bond film and cut them together, you’d get GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra. The story centers on an elite team of G.I. Joe fighters who employ the world’s most advanced scientific weaponry to battle the growing evil organization known as the Cobra. So far, so good, right? Who doesn’t like crazy action sequences heaped one on top of another like a high-speed 30-car pile-up? We haven’t seen the film yet, so we can’t yet tell you whether the story holds together or if the action is cool or absurd, but since we know they they didn’t really destroy the Eiffel Tower, and Channing Tatum can’t really take a flying leap over a bus (or into a helicopter), it’s pretty clear that there’s a heavy dose of visual effects in this film. So who better to talk to than the guy who’s in charge of all of these visual effects?

That would be Greg McMurry, a sure-handed Hollywood veteran who this year marked his 30th anniversary in visual effects. In 1979, McMurry flew out to Los Angeles from his job at PBS to work on the first Star Trek motion picture, and he hasn’t stopped working since. In the intervening three decades, McMurry has supervised the visual effects of a wide range of action-packed movies, including the John Woo thriller Paycheck, the Jean-Claude Van Damme picture Timecop, The Ruins, Death Sentence, Poseidon, The Core, and even — Woah! — Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. As G.I. Joe prepared to smash its way into theaters this week, 30 Ninjas Editor in Chief Julina Tatlock caught up with McMurry to chat with him about the pivotal role that visual effects play in the movie.

The Accelerator Suits: Built for Power and Speed

30 NINJAS: Let’s talk about the accelerator suits for a minute, because they’re all over the trailers, and they look pretty cool. Tell me about the inspiration for the suits — what you were looking towards creatively in terms of the movements and action when you were shooting Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans in those suits?

GREG McMURRY: Well, virtually all the fast-moving pieces were totally animated by Digital Domain, and they did a lot of testing. The other supervisor on the film, Boyd Shermis, he was really interested in that sequence. That was sort of his pet sequence, and his great goal there was to develop a way that people could run fast — you know, 60 mph — and not look silly, and they worked very hard, and I think successfully, at Digital Domain.

30 NINJAS: They didn’t want him to look like a young Clark Kent racing the kids in the beginning of Superman?

G.M.: You know how Spider-Man looks sort of weightless when he flies around and jumps up on the side of a building? You know, a spider is kind of weightless, but that wouldn’t be right for a full-grown man in an armored suit …

30 NINJAS: It’s not so manly, no.

G.M.: Yeah, and they also have some mass, so Digital Domain, under the direction of Bryan Grill, did some tests in the beginning, and they really kind of got it right away. They were very successful at depicting an actual massive human being who’s superpropelled, [so when they're] running around, for example, if they go around a corner and jump up on a building, they are going to damage the building. You know, with that kind of speed and weight. You know, there’s a whole lot of technology that’s actually real that engineers are working on for exoskeleton suits — not so much for speed but for strength — and the ancillary result of that work, science hopes, will be for building limbs for people that have lost a leg or something like that. So there’s a lot of research going into stuff like this. But some of it is about building the super soldier or someone who carries a lot of equipment for a long distance. Or, remember in the movie Aliens, when Ripley got in the giant robot forklift machine to move things around? It’s a technology that science has touched on and has been working with for quite a while. Our emphasis was mostly about how fast they were, how fast they could run, though we do depict that the suits made them very strong. We thought what fun would it be to do a chase scene with cars, and guys in accelerator suits, and a high-speed motorcycle. So we spend most of our time with the accelerator suits with their ability to make a soldier move very fast.

30 NINJAS: Was there discussion about how “doll-like” vs. “action-figure-like” they should be? Because the suits, with their articulated limbs, sort of make them into those figures.

G.M.: That’s never occurred to me, but I think the group just came up with a great design. But we struggle with concepts like these that aren’t used for the first time in any one movie, so we always try to make something special about what we’re doing vs. what other stories have done in the past. Remember, the G.I. Joe Force is a fighting force, so we concentrated on weapons and speed, which we thought was something unique that our suits might do that other suits might not do.

The Spontaneous Car-Chase Zen of John Woo

30 NINJAS: Previously in our conversation, you made it sound like the production tries to avoid using visual effects. Is that true?

G.M.: I think historically that’s true. In concept, when we use the visual effects, we’re called on for things that we can’t do practically and that we can’t do in front of the camera. One of the conceptual differences of putting together a visual effects sequence vs. practical [non-computer-generated] sequence is that it’s put together with little tiny pieces that often don’t come together until postproduction, which is the big challenge for the visual effects people: to be administering the director’s wishes when you’re not going to see the final composite until many months down the line.

30 NINJAS: I guess this is where the animatic or the previsualization comes in. [Previsualization is a technique that is used to see the scenes in a movie before filming begins. Animatic is an animated version of the storyboards.]

G.M.: Yeah, that’s been a great help to us in the last several years. It’s become more and more easy to produce animatics or previsualizations. It really dials your whole crew into a vision. Sometimes directors actually find them problematic, because some directors really get the juices flowing when they’re on the set — you know with a car or something like that. When I worked with the director John Woo — in car chases, for example — you can go in with a little guidance with previsualizations, but what we get when we’re standing there — the ideas that come up in the process of filming — are really sort of the better ideas. There’s a really good balance of times that we live with previsualizations and other times where we sort of shoot from the hip, where we see what the actors bring to the scene. That’s another big thing: When an actor suddenly provides us a new performance that really changes our whole way of thinking about the action sequence that we’re doing.

How to Chase a Missile With a Supersonic Airplane, All Without Leaving
Your Chair

30 NINJAS: So even with the previsualizations and the animatic, there’s still a certain amount of creativity that continues on through the shooting.

G.M.: Previsualizations are one of the biggest tools that help us budget. For example, in our upcoming G.I. Joe there’s a sequence where the character Ripcord takes a supersonic jet called Night Raven, which is powered by some unknown force, and uses it to chase a missile, and we basically had that whole scene worked out in previsualizations; because virtually every shot was a virtual shot there were only a handful of live-action background pieces. And then, of course, there were pieces where we had to tie Marlon Wayans, the actor who plays Ripcord, tie him into the cockpit — which was a chair basically, and everything else was virtual around him. The entire sequence, you would barely know the difference between what we previsualized in terms of shots, because everything was virtual. We weren’t shooting very much [with the camera]. The creativity from Stephen [Sommers, the director,] came when we were previsualizing. Previsualization was not a guide to photography; it was basically him inventing the sequence, and then budgeting becomes easier because you can show a visual effects company the sequence and they can price each shot based on what they see.

30 NINJAS: (laughing) Powered by some unknown source?

G.M.: Well, yeah, we very particularly did not want to make it look like [the Night Raven jet] was powered … it’s an interesting case about propulsion in a film like G.I. Joe. We didn’t really need to make anything fly conventionally; these guys have supertechnologies that they use in their G.I. task force. We thought, why do we have to have the turbine jets and the exhaust trails that would come out of an F-22? We got to invent our own supersonic capability, which is one of the great things about being a visual effects supervisor — you get to invent things. They don’t have to work! You just need to look cool.