PhilTippett_Dino_Sup

I used the same technique on ED-209 on Robocop. It was a lot harder then because it was shot on 35mm film. And if we want to get into the weeds, I would shoot 1 frame of ED-209 with its guns recoiling, then I had an auxiliary shutter that I would close. I would back wind the camera 1 frame and then shoot that frame with the lights on the set off. And then shoot the overexposed cotton and light pass. And that was done over and over and over again until the shooting was done. It was insane. Craig Hayes wired the lights. They were flash cubes from a still camera. sometimes when I touched the wires it gave me an incredible shock. And Craig would be in the other room and I could hear him laughing at my pain.

The cannons that blast at the beginning of MAD GOD look like pyro. In fact, they are just cotton illuminated with an interior light and shot separately at a high exposure. The effect is really cool.

yes! Thank God!

It's easy. About 30 years ago, I shot about 3-4 minutes of MAD GOD on 35mm film. And then when we rebooted, everything was shot digitally using Canon and later Red cameras. I like the look of film grain, because it diffuses the image, so we added a film grain to the new footage to match the original. It's done in compositing.

In the olden days, producers knew what visual effects were. Now they’ve gotten into this methodology where they’ll hire a middleman – a visual effects supervisor, and this person works for the producing studio. They’re middle managers. And when you go into a review with one of them, there’s this weird sort of competition that happens. It’s a game called ‘Find What’s Wrong With This Shot’. And there’s always going to be something wrong, because everything’s subjective. And you can micromanage it down to a pixel, and that happens all the time. We’re doing it digitally, so there’s no pressure to save on film costs or whatever, so it’s not unusual to go through 500 revisions of the same shot, moving pixels around and scrutinizing this or that. That’s not how you manage artists. You encourage artists, and then you’ll get – you know – art. If your idea of managing artists is just pointing out what’s wrong and making them fix it over and over again, you end up with artists who just stand around asking “OK lady, where do you want this sofa? You want it over there? No? Fine. You want it over there? I don’t give a fuck. I’ll put it wherever you want it.” It’s creative mismanagement, it’s part of the whole corporate modality. The fish stinks from the head on down. Back on Star Wars, Robocop, we never thought about what was wrong with a shot. We just thought about how to make it better.