Siggraph

The animation artist who led ILM’s Yoda into the digital age has left the ‘Star Wars’ galaxy after 15 years, and at Siggraph ’08 he provided a glimpse of where he’s landed. Rob Coleman was the longtime animation supervisor behind some of ILM‘s best character character animation (along with Yoda and the Star Wars prequel menageries, he left his marks on Men In Black and the title character from ‘Dragonheart.)

It’s been a dozen years since the talking dragon of that latter film delivered his lines, but Coleman and the ex-ILMers who’ve founded the new studio Lightstream Animation showed that digital character performances are still a high bar that they’re trying to cross. The character they previewed at SIGGRAPH was a talking camel from an animated feature called The Fourth Magi, which Coleman hopes to co-direct with Aussie entrepreneur Paul Curry.

Since the footage of the camel was just a test, the character was presented spouting droll lines from actor John Goodman in The Big Lebowski. But it looked great, and we can only hope that The Fourth Magi script lives up to the evident CG abilities of Lightstream’s team. The core group, which includes Jamy Wheless, John Helms and Tim Naylor, possess collective credits from an ILM ‘Greatest Hits’ list. But they candidly conceded in a panel discussion that they no longer have the technical and personnel resources of ILM at their disposal. As Coleman quipped, “We don’t have our ILM utility belts anymore.”

In fact, they detailed their efforts to set up Lightstream Animation in a small facility in Petaluma, Calfornia — including 17 Apple Macs, 9 RenderMan licenses, Adobe PhotoShop, Final Cut Pro and Joe Alter’s Maya plug-in, Shave and A Haircut. (They praised Alter’s code for coiffing the camel and other critters that populate the biblically-themed ‘Fourth Magi’ film.)

The Lightstream team admitted that it was daunting to be setting up a pipeline while at the same time creating promo footage to sell the movie to potential investors and distributors. But the necessity of having to create promo footage helped them test their ideas of what would constitute a workable pipeline. Over the course of 5 months, 21 artists — a core of 14 plus freelancers — created the 2-minute clip for The Fourth Magi that is screening at SIGGRAPH as part of ‘Eye Candy’. The clip’s gorgeous vistas demonstrate that the artists behind Lightstream learned their ILM lessons well.

The group elicited laughs from their sizable SIGGRAPH audience when they posted a tally onscreen of what they’ve accomplished so far: 991,144 images generated and 2,637,000 camel hairs. The point of their presentation — in addition to creating a buzz for The Fourth Magi — was to assert the upside of breaking away from a big company and following an individual vision.

Coleman, who left the Lucasfilm nest after helping set up Lucas’ Singapore animation studio and ‘The Clone Wars’ series, was especially eloquent on this subject. He noted that animation is a team sport, and that at a big studio you typically wind up having to become a specialist. By contrast, at a small studio like Lightstream, he said that you need to be a generalist, and remain in touch with a broader collaborative spirit.

Which is not to say that the Lightstream team thinks the path they’ve chosen will be easy to follow. Presenting their company logo, which shows a boy holding an open jar buzzing with lightning bugs, Coleman admits that achieving their vision will be
‘like catching lightning in a bottle.’