In Small Soldiers, director Joe Dante's dark answer to Toy Story, six G.I. Joe-sized Commando dolls, prototypes of the most advanced military action figures ever created, go on a mini-militaristic rampage in the heart of suburbia. Weapons experts all, the Commandos are led by Major Chip Hazard (voiced by Tommy Lee Jones). Their mission: to wipe out the seven monstrous Gorgonites, including Insaniac, a Tasmanian devil-like whirling dervish; Slamfist, a lumbering, slightly dim Neanderthal with a boulder for a hand; Ocula, a three-legged chicken with a long neck and one giant eyeball; and their leader, Archer, a leonine hunter (voiced by Frank Langella). The Gorgonites' main defensive tactic is keeping out of sight, so a desperate game of hide-and-seek plays out in Everytown, USA, wherein the small soldiers and their prey interact with humans, often to devastating effect.
Like Jurassic Park and The Lost World, this DreamWorks SKG production melded state-of-the-art animatronic effects created by Stan Winston Studio and cutting-edge computer graphics courtesy of Industrial Light & Magic. But unlike the gigantic creatures of Spielberg's dino epics, the key word for Small Soldiers was, well, small.
Stan Winston is no stranger to minute effects. His studio devised Mousehunt's animatronic mouse and The Lost World's chicken-sized Compys, but those characters didn't demand the complex range of movement required from Small Soldiers' Gorgonites and Commando dolls. Consequently, Stan Winston Studio entered into an unprecedented collaboration with toy manufacturer Hasbro. "In the initial design phase, we worked closely with Hasbro," Winston reports. "We learned an enormous amount about toy-joint technology from Hasbro, then we advanced that by creating more joint movements to increase our characters' performances. All the final designs of the toys, though, were actually created at Stan Winston Studio."
Although its title may be diminutive, the effects load in Small Soldiers was anything but. The militaristic toys had to interact with humans, so Stan Winston Studio constructed up to four puppet versions of each of the 13 Commando and Gorgonite characters. All were built on a 1:1 scale, measuring between 12" and 16" tall, and had a wide range of capabilities. "Stunt" puppets had loose joints and no articulation; rod puppets "walked" via external rods, which were later digitally removed; the many joints of hero cable-controlled puppets were operated via banks of external radio-controlled servos; and totally self-contained radio-controlled puppets were loaded with internal servos and could perform from the waist up without any external cables or rods while being carried around by actors. "The mechanics inside the puppets were so fine," Winston states. "They were built like little watches."
While creature-creator Winston's puppet Commandos and Gorgonites were capable of excellent performances, they couldn't walk or change expression without a little digital help from Industrial Light & Magic. Visual-effects supervisor Stefen Fangmeier (Twister), assisted by co-visual-effects supervisor Ellen Poon (Mars Attacks!), muscled more than 250 character shots through in a breathless five months. Fortunately, ILM's artists got some big help from armies of Silicon Graphics 02s, plus regiments of Power Challenges and new Origin 2000 supercomputers and a handful of Challenge render servers. ILM's entirely CG Gorgonites and Commandos, which were modeled in Alias using proprietary sculpting tools on Silicon Graphics O2s, had to perfectly replicate Winston's designs. "We basically had to be able to intercut directly from a real on-set puppet to our CG guys," says Fangmeier.
A battalion of some 80 ILM animators rose to the challenge of matching the puppets' motion precisely. "Although we wanted to make our CG characters more dynamic and have them perform actions that the puppets could never do, we had to restrain ourselves," Fangmeier maintains. "Their movement was far from realistic human movement, and it was part of their character that they moved a little jerkily, a little stiffly. I mean, they were supposed to be toys, so they were not entirely fluid!"
Although Fangmeier and company attempted to replicate the on-set look of Winston's puppets as much as possible, there were certain times, particularly in close-up, where the CG versions had the edge. "It's very hard to light something that small on set, especially if you're trying to light actors as well," Fangmeier notes. "If the director wanted a little bit of eyelight on the puppets, it was difficult to get light in there in reality, but we had a little more flexibility in CG because we didn't have those size restraints. We could aim a light only at a character's eye without worrying about anything else."
Ultimately, the trick ILM's artists were trying to achieve was not only matching the look of Winston's puppets in terms of animation, but also in lighting. However, director of photography Jamie Anderson's style upped the ante considerably. "I've work a lot with Dean Cundey [ASC], who tends to light everything up so you see everything there, but Jamie Anderson left a lot more in the dark," Fangmeier explains. "His lighting was much more broken up, much more structured, and he also was working with a new Kodak 5274 stock that was 200 ASA, which was quite contrasty, so the dynamic range of the film was really punched. He got rich blacks and highlights. Often in our lighting, I have to fight my instinct to light the characters too much, but this time, we left half their faces in the dark."
One of the most difficult shots involved Archer walking down a darkened hallway, following what he thinks are the voices of his friends—but actually walking into a trap the Commandos have set for him. Not only did Fangmeier leave part of Archer's face in the dark, he and his team also had to cope with extreme depth of field to match the original on-set photography. When Anderson shot the live-action puppets, he employed special short lenses designed to focus on objects that were very close to camera, which meant everything else was out of focus. Consequently, in certain shots, ILM's artists would have to make their CG characters' faces appear in sharp focus, while other parts of their bodies were totally out of focus, which pushed Silicon Graphics Challenges' rendering capabilities. "Most effects photography does not have such extreme depth of field," Fangmeier says, "but because the puppets had to be shot so close to camera, they used a Frazier lens to get down on the floor. That lens had a prism angled at 90 degrees, so they were shooting against a mirror, with this sketchy kind of lighting, and really got very extreme shots with that. When the camera's that low in a low-light condition, shooting a close-up on a little puppet-sized character in a full-sized hallway, the background is basically completely out of focus. Paying attention to those kinds of details, I tried to tie-in our digital foreground character with this out-of-focus background to bring some atmosphere and nuance to the shot. So after we rendered the model with all the lights on it, we put depth of field on him in the compositing stage and decided what to throw out of focus. We rendered additional information to tell the computer how far every point was from camera and used that to throw the focus—which allowed us to keep his face in focus, even as his shoulders were going out of focus. It was much more like trying to bring up that sort of atmosphere and capture that sort of magical lighting on a real actor. That was a fun challenge."
Because of the vast number of shots featuring armies of looming marauders near the film's climax, Fangmeier divided Small Soldiers' workload with former animator Ellen Poon. "There was definitely a lot of work," Fangmeier admits, "so we split it up pretty much by sequences. I handled the earlier two-thirds of the film, which had as many as 20 different sequences, some of which were little ones. Ellen probably handled another 10 at the end, including the big finale, a big battle sequence with lots of action and large numbers of commandos."
Even shots featuring dozens of commandos and the seven Gorgonites were generally handled by a single animator working on a desktop O2. "The challenge with that many characters was getting them all to have some sort of specific action, despite the tight schedule," Fangmeier relates. "That was the name of the game on this show, because we had an extremely short postproduction schedule. Fortunately, our animators were able to whip through the shots very quickly."
Small Soldiers is exactly the kind of project the people who make these kind of fantasy films live for. "Almost everyone who does the type of work we do refused to grow up past 12-years-old," Winston concludes. "We have never been more excited about any project that we've done, because this is what we're all about."