Terminator 2 CGI

THE TRICKS OF TERMINATOR 2

In the complex old days, if you wanted King Kong to climb a building, you had two choices, neither 100 percent realistic: stop©motion (painstaking hand©animation of a tiny model, one frame at a time); or cel-animated cartoons (filming hundreds of hand©drawn illustrations off of plastic "cels"). Now, there's a third, more effective alternative, as anyone who saw Terminator 2: Judgement Day could tell you: CGI, or Computer Generated Imagery. The work in the film, out this Christmas on video, was dazzling – a brilliant combination of old and new techniques that made audiences actually believe the unbelievable.

"Our computer animation department tripled in size for that film," notes Jill Jurkowitz, spokeswoman for Industrial Light & Magic, which handled the CGI end of the job (produced on a large budget and tight schedule, the producers used a combination of CGI, models, and masks supplied by ILM, Fantasy II, 4-Ward Productions, and makeup maven Stan Winston). The ILM sequences found the evil terminator (Robert Patrick) slithering through a barred window; having his head split in two by a shotgun blast; walking out of a flaming inferno; and literally coming to pieces in a final fiery moment. Jurkowitz claims the most difficult effect was a sequence in which the evil terminator pours himself into a helicopter seat and then reconstitutes himself as person. "We had to match dialogue and motion," she says, "which can be especially tricky."

Yet little is simple where CGI is concerned. For any body metamorphosis (or "morphing" effect), a technician must give the computer the first frame in the transformation and the final result; the machine will then figure out how to fill in the transitional frames so that the first form mutates fluidly into the last.

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Specifically, that means creating mathematically defined three-dimensional computer models for all the characters or sets, then making an on-screen wireframe display of the model. That model is run through tests for fluidity, and is then "rendered," often the longest process. At that point, surface texture, color, lighting, shadows, and reflections are added (to get it right, hours can be spent on a single frame). Digital compositing is employed to combine the figure with the background scenes that had already been filmed. The finished sequence is electronically transferred back onto film, a frame at a time.

"What we did took a lot of labor," claims Jurkowitz, who reports that 35 ILM technicians worked for a year to craft just 50 shots. That's less than five minutes of screen time, which reportedly cost $6.4 million. Expensive? Yes. And the sweetest irony? No one noticed. Well, hey, that's what magic is all about, isn't it?