Meanwhile, Rygiel and visual effects producer John Kilkenny would be on set shooting plates and meeting the new demands that "it can do anything" digital technology places on effects artists — such as changing everything on the fly. "Jim and I were on set every day, helping to design shots so they would work later in the digital world," Kilkenny says. "The film originally started off with about 175 effects shots; now we're well over 200, and many have changed quite a bit since Jim and I came on. For example, we'd be shooting out on location when [director Frakes and the first unit] would imagine a better way of doing something creatively and say, 'Gosh! We'd love to do this!' Jim and I would handle those immediate changes and then disseminate the information to Richard and our artists. My role became overseeing the budgetary and creative concerns of the whole team, and ensuring that we delivered exactly what the client wanted, on time and on budget."
Blue Sky/VIFX also handled one of Insurrection's most lyrical passages: an "altered-reality" sequence involving some 17 shots, in which a beautiful Ba'ku woman, Anij, shows Captain Jean-Luc Picard how her people can seemingly bring time to a standstill. "In this altered-reality world, everything slows down and becomes very acute," Rygiel observes.
Part of the slowdown effect was accomplished in-camera while plates were shot on location. An MRMC Milo motion-control system was used with a variable-speed camera that was subtly ramped from 24 to 120 fps during each shot. "We cranked the camera up while shooting some waterfall elements on location, so the water would slow down as it was falling. That was pretty amazing, especially when the camera was moving," Rygiel enthuses. "All of the shots in that sequence are composites, so we shot probably 10 different plates, including a couple of waterfall passes, some flower passes, and the actors. We also added light rays that slowed down, and dust elements and CG leaves in the background."
Besides the waterfall, another visual cue that things are not quite what they seem is an alien bird, a cross between a swallow and a hummingbird, whose wings slow dramatically as the time continuum is halted. The effect was accomplished by Blue Sky/VIFX animators in New York, led by digital animation supervisor Mark Baldo, then composited by the studio artists in Los Angeles. Baldo recounts, "When the hummingbird was moving in real time, the wings were just a blur, so Doug Dooley, who animated the hummingbird, was literally posing them into completely different positions from frame to frame. The hard part was doing the 'slow-motion' animation. In real time, the wings would beat completely in just a few frames, but in slow-motion, they would probably take about five seconds to go from the bottom-most position to the top. We were still only working at 24 fps, but it's the positioning of the wing in each frame that creates that illusion of a super-slow altered reality. In order to make the hummingbird a very iridescent creature, one of our senior technical directors, Dave Walvoord, wrote a special procedure. The hummingbird's feathers looked almost black, but whenever the light hit them, the feathers went green."
And with this success came the ability to develop a synergy between Blue Sky/VIFX's East and West Coast divisions. The California-based Rygiel, who oversaw creative teams on both coasts, says "This film enabled our New York and Los Angeles talents to work together for the first time. It wasn't difficult. It was just a matter of phoning, sending videotapes and e-mail images, and keeping the lines of communication open with the director, funneling through me to them."
The New York studio of Blue Sky/VIFX was also charged with designing and animating a new alien addition to the Star Trek menagerie: the Palm-Pet, which looks like a cross between a baby seal and a hamster and is small enough to fit in a child's hand. As Baldo recalls, the accelerated design phase was quite a challenge: "That was extremely quick. They needed us on set with a maquette two weeks after they gave us the go-ahead. What was so exciting was that there was nothing, not even a cocktail-napkin sketch, to start with, although the script described the creature as a cross between a caterpillar and a jellyfish. Some of the early designs were pretty wild. Everyone who wanted to submitted a design, and it came down to a core group of our modelers and animators, including Mike DeFeo, Sean Cusick, Jim Bresnahan and myself, all drawing and going crazy trying to get ideas. Sean Cusick's sketches ended up being closest to what they had in mind, so that design was selected and refined. We then had our artists start sculpting. The first unit was shooting the scene that introduces the Palm-Pet during our first day on the set, and when I showed Jonathan Frakes the maquette — I'll never forget this as long as I live — he held it in his hands and said, 'What's not to love?'"
While the plates for the Palm-Pet scene were being shot, Cusick was busy building a CG model of the creature in Alias. Senior animator Doug Dooley brought the tiny critter to life in Softimage. Once everything was working to everyone's liking, the Palm-Pet was rendered in CGI Studio, Blue Sky/VIFX's proprietary renderer. "I think they pulled it off pretty well," Rygiel says. "It's something you've never seen, but it had to have the fine detail of a living, breathing thing. They managed to make it look cute, as opposed to looking like a slug."
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