Explain your work on 9909. Andrew Durbin: I used a variety of tools, including Shake, After Effects, Photoshop, Motion, Maya 2008, Syntheyes, and Mental Ray. I started with a chrome ball on the set to capture the real world environment lighting. It was mostly cloudy which works out well for CG. I also took texture and reference shots to be used later for blowing up the house, the car, creature texture, and backplates for the house. I worked alone on the project for 5 months, every day including weekends to get the shots done. This means I have seen most of the actors everyday for 5 months. So if you see someone staring at you with that "how do I know this person”? look on their face. It is probably me. Most of my work you do not see because it was wire removal for the practical creatures. One shot was very difficult because it had little reference for getting a clean backplate and I had to trace it by hand frame by frame. Most of the other wireframes, I stabilized the shot and used the clean back plate to remove the wires. I initially roughed in all of the wire removal shots so Howard could make a cut. I then finished up the modeling of the creature based on shots I took on set. I included a few of the test renders early on in the process. I decided to use mental ray to photo-realistically render the creatures. How did you work on the creatures in 9909? AD: My goal was to make it look moist, raw and menacing with frenetic movement. I even added in a set of fine tiny teeth randomly spaced in the mouth. For the character of the creature it was challenging to take something small, flesh colored and make it look menacing without it looking silly or a man's appendage. So I focused on the motion of the creature. I studied sidewinders, leeches, worms, and a Goeduck. I wanted the creepiness of a leech pulsing toward you. It was powerful and deliberate. I created 3 different sizes to alter the herd of creatures and created different movement for them to give them a character. I showed Howard my early rendering sketches. He liked my CG work and wanted to include more of it in the cut. We decided to replace select practical effect shots. This effectively doubled the amount of shots I had to deliver so I created a small pipeline and render farm to handle the load. A 10 second shot would take 3 days to render. While that was cooking I worked on blowing up the house or the car or a gun blast. I also was told to create a leg version of the creature and move that as well. I created a simple rig based on millipede motion and used that to move the creature. After matching the camera in the CG environment, I used the back plates to animate the creature. Using the chrome ball snapshots for lighting, I rendered the shots in a few passes, including a depth pass, ambient occlusion, reflection pass, and matte pass. I also had to rotoscope out garbage mattes for many of the shots, match the camera lens, and get rid of the pesky actors who moved in front of the fire or creature. I often created a version for Howard to cut in, check out, make notes and then I went back to further refine the shot. Some shots were painful because of the layers and the length of the shot. I then composited the shots together in several passes. The final stage was up to Howard when he Graded the Final Picture. The grading marries the digital images to the live action. How did you put together the other effects in 9909? AD. Near the end of the process Howard said, " think you can do a building?" This turned into manufacturing a small city for the future green screen character shots. I tried to create something that looked futuristic but had elements of this century in it. I recently had the opportunity to interview Harry Cobb, the architect of the largest building on the West Coast and saw the direction he was going in with use of materials and color. I used a lot of ceramics and plastic to create the surfaces of the buildings. It was a great deal of work but I hope you enjoy the creatures.