Lessons from Star Trek with David Stipes (TNG / DS9 / VOY) and Rick Ravenell (Picard)
The Star Trek universe is an iconic realm filled with unique creatures, advanced technology, and galaxies that have mesmerized fans for decades. One of the essential aspects of bringing this universe to life is the art of visual effects (VFX). This podcast episode offers an enlightening voyage through the cosmos with visual effects maestros David Stipes and Rick Ravenell, two names that have played instrumental roles in creating the visual splendor of Star Trek.
David Stipes' journey from a young visual effects enthusiast to his role as a visual effects supervisor on Star Trek: The Next Generation is nothing short of inspiring. Equally intriguing is Rick Ravenlel's transition from an art history major to a successful 2D supervisor for Star Trek: Picard. Their careers are deeply intertwined with one of cinema's most beloved franchises, offering listeners an intimate look into the world of Star Trek VFX.
As the episode unfolds, it turns into a masterclass on the evolution of visual effects in the Star Trek universe. The duo shares captivating recounts of their challenges and triumphs, like reviving the Enterprise D ship with CGI. Their meticulous work in replicating models to create realistic-looking starships reveals the depth of expertise and dedication behind each frame.
They also delve into the process of creating an entire planet of ooze for the DS9 finale, showcasing their ability to overcome immense challenges. The embrace of virtual production technology in Picard, despite its complexities, is a testament to their adaptability and drive for innovation.
A noteworthy segment of the podcast is dedicated to an often overlooked aspect of filmmaking - communication. The guests emphasize the importance of clear storyboards, early involvement of post-production supervisors, and editors. They provide an inside look into the complex dynamics of real-time production and the intricacies of subcontracting bids for visual effects.
Whether you're an aspiring filmmaker, a Star Trek aficionado, or someone interested in the magic behind cinematic visuals, this podcast episode is an enlightening journey. With insights into the intricate process of creating stunning visuals and invaluable lessons for filmmakers, it provides a rare peek behind the scenes of Star Trek.
The episode concludes with an emphasis on the critical role communication plays in filmmaking. From creating clear storyboards to the early involvement of post-production supervisors and editors, the episode highlights the intricacies of creating realistic, engaging, and successful visual effects for a series as beloved as Star Trek.
Transcript
Paul DeNigris: 0:00
Hi everyone. I'm Paul DeNigris. I'm a visual effects artist, filmmaker and film educator. I have made independent films, I've worked on visual effects for film and TV and I've taught digital filmmaking at the university level for about two decades Now I run a boutique visual effects studio called Foxtrot X-Ray and we specialize in serving independent filmmakers and helping them use visual effects to tell their stories, and that's what this podcast is about the intersection between visual effects and independent films. Welcome to the VFX for Indies podcast. With me today are David Stipes, visual effects supervisor for Star Trek the Next Generation, and Rick Ravenell, 2d supervisor for Star Trek Picard. Welcome to the podcast, guys.
David Stipes: 1:03
Excellent, good to be here.
Rick Ravenell: 1:05
Great to be here, Paul Thanks.
Paul DeNigris: 1:07
I'm connected to these two gentlemen. At sort of opposite ends of my career, David and I worked at an animation studio here in Phoenix, Arizona, called Rainbow Studios. Pretty early on in my career we were working for a couple of fellas who had left Hollywood after working on Star Trek, deep Space Nine, star Trek, voyager and other shows like that. They had come to Arizona to start a little animation studio and develop some film and TV projects and they brought some Star Trek alumni that they were connected with, such as John Eaves, who did some ship design for some of the projects that we worked on, and Mr Stipes here, who quickly became a dear friend and one of my VFX mentors and somebody that I routinely dial up. When I can't figure something out. I say, hey, David, give me some tips, what kind of magic did you guys do back in the day? And it's been a wonderful relationship since then. I guess we've probably known each other close to 25 years now, David.
David Stipes: 2:10
Yeah, close to.
Paul DeNigris: 2:12
And then, shortly after I left Rainbow Studios, I entered academia. A long story there, but I started teaching in a private college here in Arizona and Rick was one of my students for a number of years and I pretty quickly realized that Rick had what it took to be successful in the VFX industry and I said dude, you need to move to Los Angeles. Not all my students ever listened to that advice, but Rick certainly did and he went out there and has been kicking ass out there since what? 2009-ish.
Rick Ravenell: 2:44
Yeah, yeah, is that right? Yeah, and that's exactly what I did. I just packed up and moved to LA and hope for the best.
David Stipes: 2:50
Well, that was a brave but right thing to do. That was the right thing to do.
Paul DeNigris: 2:54
Yeah, absolutely Great advice. Thanks. Like I said, not everybody took it, but you definitely did. I just pointed at the door, you walked through it and then started running and I've been in awe of your career since then and, like I tell you all the time when I see you, I'm just always so proud of you and everything that you've accomplished, and you've just taken it to levels that I could not have imagined when I gave you that advice all those years ago.
Rick Ravenell: 3:22
Thanks, man.
Paul DeNigris: 3:23
The title of the episode is Lessons from Star Trek, and that's because these two gentlemen have worked at opposite ends of the Star Trek the next generation legacy David way back at the beginning when TNG was first on, and then Rick, most recently with Picard, season three, with the ostensibly the ending, the conclusion of the TNG crew and the TNG story, and I thought what a great opportunity to really explore the franchise and, kind of you know, the lessons that independent filmmakers could learn from even something as big and established as Star Trek. The question is what does Star Trek have to teach independent filmmakers? And, like I always say, it doesn't matter whether you're doing a $50,000 character based drama to people sitting in a room or you're doing a million dollar an episode, space opera, time and money are always the enemy, right, they're always the enemy to creativity, they're the limiting factor, they're always the enemy to achieving exactly what you want. So we're always being asked to do more with less, doesn't matter what the budget level. So there's always lessons to be learned. And really, when you think about it, star Trek began as a bunch of people in homemade costumes in a pretty cheap looking set, with just the spirit of kendo optimism. That doesn't describe the average independent film. I don't know what what does. So, before we dive into that, david, why don't you give everybody just the quick non-trek highlights of your career?
David Stipes: 4:46
I got fascinated with visual effects with King Kong when I was a little kid, asking my mom how to do that because I knew something was going on. And of course she said, oh, it's a trained chimpanzee. And of course I immediately knew that wasn't right, didn't know what it was, but knew that wasn't it. And then so it started getting me curious. In the 60s I discovered Monster Magazines and Forest J Ackerman famous monsters from a film land magazine and of course then I got to discover Ray Harryhausen, will Subrion and all of the stop motion wonders that they brought forth. So that really was a drive to get involved. Before I got out of high school I'd actually worked on my first feature film as a model maker and I got my first experiences with the horrors or the disappointments of working on models and having them left in the rain and when I came to collect my beautiful prize it was a puddle of rebel and stuff, things like that. I'm actually old enough and I'm on a rot right in front of your faces here, right in front of your screen. I'm old enough that I actually did apply to work on the original Star Trek. I was as green as could be and they patted me on the head and say, yeah, go away, grow a little more, come back. And it took me 25 years to be an overnight success and go to work on Next Generation, because that's how long I had to plod along and work along and I had my own studio. I did get a chance to work on Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers and a few things like that, but got on to Next Generation Season 6 and then worked on Seven. We did that great all good things episode and got an Emmy for that, then went on to Voyager and we got an Emmy for the first episode of that one, the first pilot, and it just kept moving forward to Next Generation I mean Next Generation Voyager, then Deep Space Nine. So I finished off Deep Space Nine, moved out to Arizona where I met, was working with Paul at Rainbow Studios. I worked on a lot of independent films here in Arizona and so I've had a chance to work with a lot of pretty green people here and pretty seasoned people, and I know that Paul has, I think, run into some of the same kind of phenomena too with local filmmakers who have very high aspirations. So I've been blessed to be able to work there and be able to bring some help to the people. I will interject that I also got into academia and was teaching visual effects at a different school and some of my students wound up. You know three or four of them took the opportunity to move to Hollywood and they're doing their thing too and being successful.
Paul DeNigris: 7:36
Well, thanks, David. Obviously, you've got incredible depth and breath of experience. And your students must have absolutely been blown away by what you brought to your classroom experience, and any of them that followed your advice to go pursue a career must be doing really well and like as a fellow professor, like that's the coolest thing to see. I call everybody my kids. I mean, Rick is certainly older than my kids, but you know I call them all my kids and yeah, we cherish their successes Absolutely. Absolutely so awesome. So with that, that's a great segue. Rick, tell us, tell us what you've been up to since, since moving out to LA.
Rick Ravenell: 8:17
Yeah, so I mean my visual effects stuff started when I was a kid, you know, we always went to the movie theaters every every week. That was like our family get together, it didn't matter what was playing, we just we just go there. This is back when we had newspapers. You had to pick out a movie, go there and then hope something was there, and we just watched movies. And then my dad always watched movies. We come home from work saying with my mom she'd be sitting there getting an Afghan watching Star Trek or Star Wars or whatever it is you know. And so that's what I grew up. Watching is just tons of sci fi. So in school I was primarily an art history major, you know, doing drawing, painting, printmaking and all that kind of stuff. And my dad was like you know, being an artist probably not going to make you any money. I want you to be a starving artist, I want you to have a career. But you play a lot of video games on this computer thing that you have. Maybe you can kind of do art on the computer, and that's sort of what led me to the visual effects. It's like well, I want to work on movies, I want to work on TV shows. How do I put these two things together? So I did all my general education in Hawaii, learning again, painting, pre-making, all that. And then I moved to Arizona, to University of New York City Technology, where I met Paul and Basically was like is this the thing? Like? Is compositing real? Like it's visual effects real, you know? Because I had no idea what any of that stuff was. I mean, I went to UAT without a direction and I got my direction from Paul and that was very special because he's like you know, this is what, this is what you can do. You know, if you want to do it, go to LA. So I did went to LA. First thing I worked on was Knight Rider in 2008, which was a TV show with NBC. And what else came out in 2008 Iron man. So everybody's all excited about heads-up displays and graphics and clear screens and all of that, and I thought that stuff was a Great. So they were like, hey, can you make any of this stuff? Sure, why not? Had no idea how to make it, just kind of faked it till I got there. So I got to do tons of graphics and motion graphics work for that show, but I also got to composite everything together. So I got to own all of my shots when you get to end, which is really special and that just sort of propelled my career. You know, I did graphics on avatar, which was super fun. Didn't get to do any comp on that, but it did hide my face and every single shot that I did and put my name in there, so that was really fun. And then since then been jumping around to different studios doing motion graphics and compositing work. Some of the movies I worked on it's after Earth and Ender's Game, and most recently I am now the compositing supervisor and the head of 2D at Outpost and where we were working on Star Trek.
Paul DeNigris: 10:46
Well, thanks, rick. That's pretty awesome career so far and it's kind of amazing, like I Think, when I, when I went to visit you when you had just started at Outpost, I said, I said, yeah, I give it a year, you'll be running this place.
David Stipes: 11:03
You basically yeah you did.
Rick Ravenell: 11:05
Yeah, I was. It's pretty awesome.
Paul DeNigris: 11:07
I was skeptical and then and then you told me you were working on Picard and I got. I got very, very excited and Picard season 3 was everything. A Star Trek fan like me who's been a fan since since before TNG, since I would say probably I Don't know, probably since I was maybe six or seven years all one Trek Trek was the original track was already in reruns and when the motion picture came out I was super excited and and had to go see that opening weekend. And then, you know, just followed the, the original crew, through all their movies and books and comics and all kinds of stuff and I built a, you know, model of the Enterprise, a when I was a kid and hanging from my ceiling. So I've been a died in the wool Trekkie from from a long time, a long time ago. And, yeah, I have always said that the original ending of next-gen all good things is the gold standard for series finales, like it's. When I think about series finales, that is always the number one. It's they stuck the landing in every possible way. And so I was nervous going into Picard season 3, you know, because modern Trek has has kind of, you know, broken my heart a little bit since 2009, since the JJ reboot. I was never really happy with those movies.
Rick Ravenell: 12:25
I was so depressed.
Paul DeNigris: 12:27
I didn't love discovery when it first came on, and even Picard season 1 and 2 were okay. They're kind of iffy. There was some story problems, some characterization problems. So I went into season 3 cautiously optimistic, and when I heard they were bringing everybody back from the next-gen crew I was like, well, now I have to watch it, just for the sake of completeness, because it'd be nice to visit with old friends. I follow all of the TNG crew on on all the socials and it's like they are. They literally are that family that we see on TV. They literally are that tight and you want to root for them. You want their stuff to be good. You want them to, you know, go out in the plays of glory. And they certainly did with with Picard season 3. The crowning moment, I guess, of Picard season 3 was the resurrection of the Enterprise D, you know, coming back into action after being lovingly restored by by Geordie David. David, did you I assume you you stayed up with with Picard season 3? Did you, did you watch?
David Stipes: 13:26
it. I've got through season 1 or 2. I did pick up the, the reveal of the new Enterprise and then the battle and all of that. So, yes, I saw some of the key moments. I will eventually pick up the rest of the show, but I I you were asking if I felt nostalgic about it and in a way I was. It was like when the doors open and stuff, you see, I'm going like, wow, that poor baby looks a little rough or where. But you know I love seeing it. I am going to squawk a little bit. It's like I didn't know that Geordie was such a thinker that he could get his old Thunderbird or old mustang out in the garage put back together so well by himself. So how in the heck did Geordie resurrect the ship off of the planet, get it into orbit? That was kind of a story issue. It has nothing to do with the visuals, but the visuals were awesome. So, rick, did you get? Were you involved in that shot at all?
Rick Ravenell: 14:24
Not the initial reveal of it, but we did the shot where it warps in in front of Jupiter.
David Stipes: 14:29
Oh, yeah, that was great. Yeah, yeah, the CGI work with I think was really nice and so, yes, I thought it was really nostalgic and I love the moves. The moves were, you know, very Enterprise, very next generation. So, yeah, everyone did, everyone did a good job. I just kind of like I want to elbow the writers a little bit like yeah, come on guys.
Paul DeNigris: 14:53
He used a healthy dose of hand-wavium Ship.
David Stipes: 15:00
Yeah, Geordie is really great at the best of the engineers.
Paul DeNigris: 15:03
Absolutely absolutely. Replicators can do a lot.
David Stipes: 15:06
Yeah, those droids must have been really busy, absolutely.
Paul DeNigris: 15:11
Rick, as you guys were working on Shots with the Enterprise D, were you guys like pinching yourselves? We're people like, oh my god, this is the coolest thing ever, or was it just another day at the office?
Rick Ravenell: 15:21
I mean we were really lucky that we had two like diehard Star Trek fans on the show our Producer she worked on the remaster and so did one of our CG soups. So they were putting in so much extra effort like all the time, because they were like guys, this is gonna be so cool like you have no idea. So everybody else, they I mean they like working on it because it was sci-fi and it was fun, but they didn't know like how much it meant to like these two people, and those two people were like driving the whole show and the Production of it.
David Stipes: 15:51
So who are the two people that were you talking about?
Rick Ravenell: 15:54
It was Melissa the long and we're Mel Calderon. So is the. He's the CG soup and she was the producer. Thank you and they, they loved it. Like they were so excited about it like we're. Mel. Yeah a company called Horners shipyards who does Maketz for ships, so he 3d prints ships and does all the decal work and sends them out. And he even knew the designer of the Titan in the car, bill Krauss. So they both are Are connected and they talk all the time and so he was so excited just even be part of the project. But then to work on the enterprise deal was just like the crowning achievement, like in his career.
David Stipes: 16:29
I was in awe and humbled when I realized, working on this show, all of these Star Trek shows, just as you are, rick, you are now a part of cinema history. You are a part of something that will never go away.
Rick Ravenell: 16:46
Yeah.
David Stipes: 16:46
And this is part of your heritage that you get to pass on to fans and people who are not even born yet, and so it's a wonderful gift, a gift from the universe to you, but from you to everyone else, if you don't mind me being a little metaphysical there.
Rick Ravenell: 17:02
No, it's really special and, to be honest, we didn't know what it was going to be like while we were working on it, because we worked on season two as well and you know it had its ups and downs, but we were all still excited. And then season two came on. They're like, okay, well, I guess they're doing season three. Maybe this season three, this is the one you know it'll be great. So we you know everybody put in their effort and we weren't sure what it was going to turn out like, and especially the final episodes, the amount of work we put into that stuff. It was really rewarding to see just a fans reaction to it.
David Stipes: 17:36
Like red exploded, like a bunch of our friends are all over it.
Rick Ravenell: 17:39
And we were like I couldn't believe it. You know, like it was really surprised Like people were sharing like gifts of my shots the internet. You know stuff that like I had supervised stuff that I personally worked on. I was like I don't know, it doesn't get any better than that, right it's it doesn't wait till they start doing memes and stuff of it though.
David Stipes: 17:56
Yeah, exactly, I have some of my shots that are actually memes and our little little snippets of like oh this is so cool, you know that kind of thing. Hopefully you'll get some of that kind of stuff.
Paul DeNigris: 18:09
My, my favorite TNG meme is Picard face palming, but I don't think VFX had anything to do with that one.
David Stipes: 18:15
Oh, but mine is the uh, the Android data plan, you know. He's got the phone inside of his body. You know from a phantasm episode.
Rick Ravenell: 18:27
That one's fun. Yeah, that was good, that's like that's my shot.
David Stipes: 18:30
It was. It's a meme yeah.
Paul DeNigris: 18:33
Right on Um. So yeah, david, give us kind of like an overview of sort of how it how would enterprise shot would have been accomplished back in back in the original TNG days.
David Stipes: 18:46
A bulk of my work was done with the physical model. Uh, I can have a, I have a whole, I can do a whole, another little section on the CGI aspect of it, but most of it was done. On the model which was a four foot enterprise. Uh, they did one. I think it was about nine or 11 feet long, but that was so ungainly to work with. I never got a chance to work with that. So it was a great gene model. So we would get the script. Um, immediately you would start breaking down, highlighting every one of the shots, and then you can determine and almost immediately you could determine like, yeah, that's going to be a stock shot. No, it's not. Okay, now the enterprise needs to come and do something. Okay, that's going to have to be new. So then you highlight that. And I, I'm a insane storyboard guy. I just I storyboard everything, which is one of my pet rah, rah, rah things to do. And, uh, I was working with, usually, joe Bauer, who went on to a great fame on Game of Thrones and uh, so he went on and did a great thing on his own, but he was my coordinator assistant, so he and I would talk about what was needed and we would start working on how many hours was going to take to do this shot. And where were we going to, you know, film it? Usually it was done at a place called image G, which was a motion control facility Uh, just a couple of miles away from Paramount. And then we'd go over and shoot. It was then transferred, usually at CIS, composite image systems, cis, and from film to digital, usually a D one format, and then we would take it over to digital magic or one of the similar facilities, uh, um, pacific Ocean posts later on, that sort of thing, and they would be composited. Okay, the uh, the models were, uh, you would have multiple passes, you would have a beauty pass. You would have each one of these was it was programmed with a motion control setup which is computer controlled, and you would do the beauty pass. You would do a pass with just interior lights. There was the engine lights, there was the facade, those little red lights at the ends of the nacelles, and there was also the deflector light at the top, and then there was the blinkies, the navigation lights, and each one was a separate pass. And then they would roll up this gigantic orange screen, bring out black light and blast the heck out of it and they would make a silhouette pass against orange, which um is quite unusual and um, it's the equivalent in film for what we were doing We've been doing lately in green screen and and old, the older blue screen, but it was very, very efficient, very, very efficient. All of those things come together. We, we would take them down. They would all be composited. Don Greenberg did a great deal of compositing at the facilities on all the different episodes. There was a couple of the people but Don did a bulk of it. Um, does that kind of answer your question?
Paul DeNigris: 22:02
Absolutely About more duty tiers. Uh no, and I you know I don't want to go into too technical deep dive because that's not really the audience here.
David Stipes: 22:10
There's tons of other podcasts for like technical deep dives into stuff I just wanted to give give our audience, just kind of like a flavor of of sort of the process, because it's actually there's a point I do want to make, though, and uh, it's relevant to segueing into CGI. When we were doing the motion control, we were lucky if we could get. Maybe if we're really pushing hard and maybe we could overlap in similar moves or something, maybe you can get four shots in a day usually two or three, and that was fine until we ran into you know shows that needed, you know 100 ships in it and they had to be original moves. Now, how do you do that with motion control? Okay, so I'll leave that as I open the question.
Paul DeNigris: 22:52
I see a lot of parallels, you know, as I listened to you talk about the different passes and I saw Rick nodding his head. Yeah, you're probably doing that too, a lot of similarity to how we still do you know ship composites and any CG composite. So, Rick, would you just comment again really briefly, and don't you don't have to go super technical, because again, that's not our audience. David blew it up. No, oh no, not at all. I think the way you explained it was was such that even somebody who's not super technical could understand, could follow it. You know, Rick and I we could geek out on like file formats and AOVs and all kinds of like acronyms and stuff like that and lose the entire audience. But, Rick, I'm just going to pass it to you to give us kind of like the overview. Imagine a similar, a similar enterprise shot for Picard. Yeah, similar to the process that David just spoke about.
Rick Ravenell: 23:41
Yeah, so there are a ton of similarities. You know we start with storyboards and then storyboards go into the animators and they'll do like a quick sort of a blocking animation of flight paths and you know we have to make sure it feels, you know, large and heavy. You can't, you can't be making these crazy moves and things like that. And a lot of our reference is the stuff that you know you worked on, david. You know they sent us tons and tons of reference of that stuff and because we had, again, two diehard Trek fans, they're like it would not do that. This is what it would do, you know. So they would help, you know, art, direct and guide the animation process. And then when we get into 3D, a lot of our 3D passes are very similar to the ones you mentioned. You know, like Paul mentioned, they're AOVs for us. So we did separate ones for the nav lights, for the ship interior lights, any of the Nacelle lights and all that stuff. Like we rented them all separately because our showrunner was such a huge fan of next generation that he had a very specific look of what he wanted the ships to look like. He's like I hate Discovery, I hate JJA Abrams, I hate all this other stuff. So we're changing the way this all works right. So that was the biggest challenge for us is trying to make a ship that looks like a model but is better, like quote, unquote, better, you know, because they're like oh cool, like, do they want to look like this one show where they have reflections and it's all very shiny, and they're like no, don't want that. Then we made them that were really flat and they're like nope, too flat, look at the models. Go back and look at the models and make it look like a model, but then put your extra fancy stuff on top of it, and that was kind of how we ended up with what Picard looks like. We were very lucky that we were the first company to nail the look for the ship. We passed the ship looks out to the rest of the entire team, but we did all of our look dev on the tie, in which then, you know, we did look dev on the enterprise and we passed that off to everybody and everybody had to match our stuff.
David Stipes: 25:43
One of the advantages that Rick has that I didn't with a model. A physical model needs to have a mount that it's resting on, and so you can't put the camera down there, if you see the mount. So Rick is at a place and a point where a camera could start looking up at the enterprise, go up over the top and go down and look down on the enterprise all in one shot, and I never could, because there's a point where, oops, I see the model mount now and I can't go any farther. So, yeah, you got a lot of freedom with the CGI and boy, you guys nail that. Look, your model work is really great, really. My compliments.
Rick Ravenell: 26:27
And that means a lot coming from you man. Appreciate it.
David Stipes: 26:29
I know how hard it was man.
Paul DeNigris: 26:32
It definitely evoked. You know the classic movies, especially like the space doc sequences and stuff it evoked. You know Star Trek 3, the Search for Spock them stealing the enterprise from Space Doc and all of that sort of stuff. And yeah, you know, obviously we have a lot more freedom. We can iterate a lot faster than you could back in the TNG days, david. That sometimes contributes to the weightless feeling of CGI, the idea that you know the camera can do anything, the model can do anything. It sounds to me like the showrunner on Picard. Maybe give you guys some more limitations to try and make it feel more like the classical model photography that the franchise was built on.
David Stipes: 27:13
Well, that was always one of my mottos that I try to hammer with students is that you know if you want it to look real, you know shoot it like a real camera and don't go doing any crazy. You know moves that a real camera couldn't do.
Rick Ravenell: 27:28
Yeah, and I think that's super important. Like, if you can start there with like how would you shoot this for real and then expand on it, you got it. It'd be cool if we could just do this little bit and then put that in there and you're already 80% based in reality and it doesn't break that. You know that feeling of like well, this is obviously fake, you know.
David Stipes: 27:49
Yeah, you guys are right on it.
Paul DeNigris: 27:52
Yeah yeah, the ships in Picard always felt real and felt like that scale. And one of the things I appreciated too was, you know, back on TNG the windows were always just lights, except for a couple of you know hero windows where there was something you know built in there or comped in there, but it looked like on Picard. You guys actually like put cabins and the rec room and things like that behind the windows.
David Stipes: 28:18
I saw that I was just going like, wow, you can actually see into it. That was really cool. Yeah, I actually did.
Rick Ravenell: 28:24
I did remark to myself about how neat that was nicely done, yeah we had a couple shots where we got really, really close to the ships and we had one of our artists, bill. He modeled out the whole interiors for that stuff when we flew past it and made sure it was all realistic because he's a model guy, right. So he's like I'm going to make this stuff look awesome. So I'm like maybe like this big and like, but they're going to notice, I guarantee you it's done. I was going to notice.
David Stipes: 28:47
I noticed I was like, oh, you guys did, yeah, absolutely, and of course the extra trick for you is that you actually can do it in perspective. Yeah, the best we had was a little slide back there, a little little transparency, which you know it can go by under the Eve or something, but you can't, it doesn't slide around in. You don't see a displacement of any of the furniture which it does in yours.
Paul DeNigris: 29:09
Yeah, very cool. So let me ask each of you what's the hardest trek shot, the most challenging trek shot that either of you worked on in your, in your time with the franchise?
Rick Ravenell: 29:20
I can go for like the most challenging one that we had. Hopefully everybody's seen the card season three. There's a big explosion at the end. That was an insane shot because yeah it was. Yeah, that was insane. Yeah, like the pure scale of the cube it was. we made it in real scale, so we can get really close to it and remodeled everything in there and then so blowing that up and figuring out the simulations and all that. It's just insane to figure it out, Because we had a couple people that that was. Their only job was work on this cube and make this cube as best as possible. And then we have we get into compositing, which is the department that I'm in charge of, and they're like okay, here's all of our stuff, Please make this work and look better. Which is essentially what happened, right? So we went back and we started pulling tons of 2D elements as well to layer in on it to make it feel like okay, so these explosions, how big is this explosion really? If you think about how large this cube is and how big this fireball is, it's not gonna be moving fast. Like it can't be moving fast. It's in okay, fire in space, whatever. We'll let that slide, right, but the rest of it layering in 2D elements that are practically shot is what adds the feel to it, right. And then they gave us reference of hey, this is the Borg fight we wanna reference, and I'm sure you can imagine where that came from. So we're looking at that stuff and we're like, okay, so their color of their lasers is this color and then this is how they have their lights spread around. So it was basically like a shot of love between 3D, 2D, all the supervisors, all the producers and everything to try to make it to be like the best shot ever, because the client trusted us with this huge shot and they're like, hey, just so, you know, this is the big one, so don't let us down.
David Stipes: 31:17
Yeah, I thought that was a great shot, or a series of shots. This may seem silly, but I was actually impressed that the Borg phasers were tiny in scale, so they weren't big fat sausages flying out or anything like that. They were in scale, like you might see an enterprise phaser be pretty large compared to the ship, but against the Borgs they were little tiny lines. I mean, they did their job. You saw them and everything. You knew what was going on, but they were to scale. It was great. And then I know that final explosion shot. I was wondering like where is the enterprise gonna come from? Where is it gonna come from? And then you took it right out of the fire and the big you know the shields are holding it and everything. It was cool, really cool. Yeah, good job good job.
Paul DeNigris: 32:04
How about you, david? What comes to mind when you think you know the most challenging thing you guys had to do on TNG?
David Stipes: 32:09
Well, I wish I could say something as nearly as cool as what Rick did. I have some shots that I'm delighted that I worked on, but as far as probably challenging, it's gonna be one little shot that I was totally freaking out over, and that was the shot one of the holodeck shots where Rick Fontaine, the James Darren character, he's talking to Odo and he said well, you need to get better duds, you know, and Odo is wearing his brown suit and he goes, oh, like this, and he comes up and he does this motion and all of a sudden he's got a bow tie and his suit turns into a tuxedo as he's talking with us and so it's all in motion. And so we were just going crazy trying to figure out how to do it. Usually the shot the part that drives your composite is the person talking and then everything else goes with that. So we got the part where Renee talking and he did the motion during the tug and everything. Then he had to go and go put on the tuxedo. We had to come back, get him back into position and have him go through the motion again with the tuxedo. So but what wound up really driving it for us is we wound up having to use the tuxedo bow tie as the primary part because that was where his hands had to land, and so, ultimately, the dialogue was the first part we shot. I wound up having to put his head from the dialogue into the composite of the otosuit, into the tuxedo that was finally derived and, like I said, I was just like, oh God, this is like the worst shot ever. And of course it turned out really well. But then they did the very last episode of DS9, what you leave behind, I think it's called and I basically did not like the otoshots because there was just all the CGI, brown goo, molasses kind of stuff going on. And so what do they do? They make a otoplanet. So now we're on an otoplanet with a little rock outcropping and he walks out into the sea of goo that's off to infinity. So I have to deal with that and turn around, and I'll be danged if they didn't say, okay, we're gonna have him do the tuxedo shot again, and I'm just going oh God, no, please. So anyway, those two shots I think are the ones that make me grown the most, but I'll tell you they were big hits for the fans.
Paul DeNigris: 34:58
I remember them both. Oh yeah, so do I.
David Stipes: 35:02
On top of it when poor Renea Bershaw. He was sick with the flu during the whole thing I mean during the initial one that we talked about on the holodeck and so he was miserable but he went through and he did take after take after take and he changed clothes and did take after take after take and never complaint. What a pro. It was really good. He was in his 60s, late 60s, I think. He had to go out on the set and he was being merged into the goo and he just got down and crunched up and rolled up, turned out he was a yoga expert and man, if I ever did that I don't wanna sure I'd ever get up again, but he did. I'm going like wow, he just folded right up and merged down in there and worked. I have another shot. Can I tell another shot? That really wasn't a challenge.
Rick Ravenell: 36:01
Absolutely.
David Stipes: 36:01
In a problem challenge. Okay, I really wanna give a credit here. There was, do you remember the episode in DS9 where Dax is killed by Golda Kott?
Paul DeNigris: 36:14
Of course.
David Stipes: 36:15
And so he's got the power, the energy, and you know, blah, blah, and he fries her and holds her up and basically burns her up. You guys remember that Did you see it. Rick. Okay, Terry Farrell had a labor dispute with Rick Berman and she was not gonna return. This was her last day, her last shot, and I'm on the set as the supervisor and she's crying and you know they call her on to set. She'd blot her eyes and whatever she did to make sure she didn't have bloodshot eyes and go out and do her shot. Then she'd come back and be talking to the people and they're consoling her and everything. Well, anyway, they're gonna do this shot and they decided that they're gonna raise her up on a rig and so they put this leather harness around her hips and through, you know, the crotch area and everything, and then the costume goes on that and then there's a couple of buckles on the side that are hoist her up with cables. Well, unfortunately, this thing is like something out of the dark ages. It was real thick leather. So now, all of a sudden, her trim figure has now got this extra width to it and she comes up to me and says can you do something for me? I look horrible with this thing and I was like you know, she just had this. Her hips were really huge. I don't wanna make jokes or stuff, but yeah, she looked really pretty bad. So she was just so upset. But I was so impressed with how professional she was and she, you know, she went out there, she did the shot, she did the whole thing. So what we did is we went back into digital magic and we used liquid nitrogen. Rick, I don't know if you wind up ever using liquid nitrogen elements for your composites, but if you don't, you should take a look at those things. At, Dan Curry shot a lot of those elements. It's really wonderful. It makes like vaporous gas and stuff. It's yeah, so it's really wonderful. So we use these little tendrils of liquid nitrogen and we would turn them and sandwich them all around the outside of her, basically disguising her silhouette and covering it and making it the right color. So now when Galdicott fries her, all of this energy goes out and gets vapor and goes out into little vaporous tendrils and dissipates around her and at the. So she looked really great and that rap part is she came up and gave me a great big hug and a thank you for saving her last shot. So that was a challenge, but not, as in, a bad challenge. It was something that was good to help the show and it helped her personally.
Paul DeNigris: 38:55
So that's awesome. I was gonna ask you about this because I remember you telling me this story years ago and I was actually gonna ask you about it. Oh, glad you brought it up, thank you. I wanna talk about something else that I'm seeing a lot of parallels between the different eras, and that's virtual production. We're seeing this big push now for these LED screens on set and I know they were used on Picard because I've seen some of the behind the scenes footage where, like the star fields and the warp streaks on the Titan were done practically on set, and to me it's basically just a reinvention of front projection, rear projection, rick, did that stuff make the job easier? Did it make it harder? You know, and David, were there rear projection or front projection shots ever used in Trek that we could draw the parallel between current VP technology and that technology in the past?
David Stipes: 39:55
I seem to remember Dimly that there were a couple of rear projection view screen shots for some particular reason, but primarily they were green screen. So if I go back, you know, a decade earlier on Battlestar Galactic together, they were using huge rear screen things that were generally overexposed and not effective at all. But that's ancient history. But I don't remember them doing much with rear screen or front projection on any of the TNG or Voyager or DS9. It was usually green screen Interesting.
Paul DeNigris: 40:42
Do you think there might have been shots somewhere along the way? That might have been great Like if you could take a virtual production stage back in time with you. You know, are there places where you could have? You could see that technology having been used on? Oh gosh.
David Stipes: 40:57
Yes, we always suffered with view screen eye lines because they always I see, rick Noddy is head they always said, oh yeah, it's a 3D view screen, yeah, but you're shooting it too, do you? So often you know you don't have the master plate of Captain Picard looking at the view screen screen left, you know, and so sometimes you don't know which way the director's gonna shoot that. So then when you do the close up of you know Admiral so-and-so talking to Captain Picard, you'd have to do a version of him looking to the left, you'd have to do a version of him looking to the right, and then you'd have to figure out which one worked so that they looked like they were looking at each other in 3D space. So having his new wonderful virtual screens, I think, would have just been great. I would love to see one of those in person, and I know that I guess he got started on gravity.
Paul DeNigris: 42:02
So, rick, where was this technology deployed on Picard? Yeah, they did use some of it.
Rick Ravenell: 42:07
I didn't have the opportunity to go and set to see any of it, but we got to see the plates that would come back from it and kind of like what David's saying. Like I think it depends on how you want to use it. You know, because rear screen projection, you know, trans lights, all that stuff in practice it sounds like it's really great, right, but if it's over exposed and it's out of focus and they're like, oh hey, can we add some motion back there? Well then you're screwed because you have to red-way everybody anyway. So also on Picard, we had tons of blue screens and tons of green screens. It's places where they could use it, but they're like we're not 100% sure what's going back there, so we're not gonna put anything up. We're not gonna put anything up and, to be honest, that was like the smartest call they could have made. Because the thing you run into with these LED screens one part is that they're really cool because you can put whatever you want up there and you get all the reflections on your surfaces, right, until you have to change all those. Because if you have to change all those reflections on all the surfaces and you have people with hair. You get edges that get crazy, like can you imagine trying to do a warp tunnel shot? And they're like oh, actually this isn't a warp tunnel anymore, it's supposed to be in like the jungle. You know everything. All the color changes, all the edges are horrible.
David Stipes: 43:17
Oh.
Rick Ravenell: 43:18
So you're just like what? So you're like well, why wouldn't you just put a green screen up? So I think there's give-and-take with it. Like we, they used it for some of the bridge shots when they're traveling through warp. Any of the other windows in the outside you'd see like the warp streaks works perfectly because that's exactly what they wanted to be. But there are other shows where they use this projection stuff because the directors, whoever wants to see it on set, and they get really excited about it. But then they want to change the whole background and it's just. It makes it harder and harder to do it. And if they had just done, increase green in the first place.
Paul DeNigris: 43:51
I know each of you have worked on lower budget stuff. I know David's David's talked about working on some, some indie stuff, particularly here in Arizona. So, rick, you know what would you, what would you say? You know your relevant experiences and and Let me let me also say, rick and I both worked at a Studio called encore for a for a period. Boy right, I was living in LA and we worked on a lot of.
David Stipes: 44:17
TV.
Paul DeNigris: 44:19
Yeah, absolutely my my vlog series that I did back then. Hard to believe it's eight years ago now, but oh wow, eight years. Working in TV, as far as I'm concerned, is very, very similar to working in independent films. Right, because you never have enough time. You never know. Have enough money and you know network TV is like that, the microcosm. You know where everything's got to happen and it's got to happen in this, this truncated time frame. You know, not like, not like a Marvel movie, where you know one one compositor can work on one shot for six months. It's like, you know, every compositor on a network TV show is working on dozens of shots and they have to be done by the end of the week. So it just feels much more like a like an indie film type of type of schedule. So, rick, anything that comes to mind, you know that's that's sort of like lower budget, lower low to medium budget, where you had to pull a bunch of VFX tricks out of your hat to make them work.
Rick Ravenell: 45:15
Yeah, I would say the majority of the episodic stuff that worked on kind of fall into that category. Only recently with the streaming ones, because the streaming ones, even though they don't come out all that once, like for Netflix, they try to finish those shows six to eight months before they actually air. So I finished book hard season three last year like way, way earlier last year. But for the ones like Hong's talking about, those, things air the next week. So you have literally like a week to do everything. Yeah, what happens with that is you have to be, you have to really smart with your, your tools, just your workflows, everything and and get a have a really good to be a VFX supervisor on it that Can look at everything at once and be like, okay, this is all we need to do for this shot next, next, next. You know what happens on these shows that you're mentioning, like Marvel and some of the bigger ones, is that you'll iterate on the same shot for weeks, month, when maybe it gets better but maybe it gets worse. You know, you don't know until the showrunner sees it and they approve it. But for the show runners on television shows, they're like, okay, this is better than what I shot next. You know so the Because they don't have any time, like because the problem that happens in television it's like you're saying, paul is like time and money. More time costs more money and in TV land If you're putting an entire company on overtime it's extremely expensive. So they are just like us and they're trying to be as efficient as possible and if you have to shot works and it looks great, they will push that through first and then spend all the money on the big money shots.
Paul DeNigris: 46:50
David is that? Does that that jive with your experience?
David Stipes: 46:54
Oh, yeah, to give a little perspective, we had seven weeks to do an episode. We were doing, I think, 27 episodes a season in those days, and so I had a show, I in post production, I was had a show in Reproduction, I had a show in production and I had a show in post production all the time. And then so you always had three shows that you were putting your mental and physical energy or creative energy into all season long. And I got the dubious joy once of when I segued off to off a DS, off a voyage or under DS9. I had five episodes I was working on simultaneously, which was really crazy. But yeah, you're, you really want to have good supervisors and that are Thinking ahead. Yeah, so Rick's, rick's right on there. All of that, yeah, absolutely for each of you.
Paul DeNigris: 47:55
What's what's something? What's like a time-saving or money-saving trick that you might have picked up on On a bigger budget project, like a Star Trek, that then you've Subsequently applied to a smaller budget show, or that you would apply to a smaller budget show in the future?
Rick Ravenell: 48:11
our biggest thing, for, for me, is Kind of what David mentioned, or their storyboarding. You know, when you, when you have shots that you're unsure of what it needs to look like, just start drawing some stuff out and get it over to them early, because trying to do animatics in 3d Sure, like people are really great and unreal now right, but it just takes a lot of time. You know, you could hire a storyboard artist and have like an entire scene done in a couple days, get approval on it, and then you already know that you're working towards something that's that the director wants. Because, though, what happens sometimes is you spend way too much time Trying to make something look really good and then they don't want that at all.
David Stipes: 48:52
Yeah, rick's right on. The biggest challenge, at least when working with independence and like out here in Arizona, is the lack of preparedness and and reflected in storyboards. You heard me a few minutes ago say the same thing. It's like I'm a big storyboard guy. I I draw terrible storyboards, but when you look at them you can tell where the composition is. You can tell where things need to be my storyboards. If I need a 24 millimeter lens, my storyboard looks like it's a shot with a 24 millimeter lens, and so Having that kind of a skill set is really important. I actually had a situation, even recently. You know, somebody could well I want you to to do a shot for me. Well, what is it? Well, it's this, this and this. I said, well, send me a storyboard. Never got a storyboard. We finally got together and we're gonna shoot it and the. We were drawing the storyboards before we shot. So you know, it's like I don't know what we're doing. I'm not gonna. I can't tell you how much you're what you're gonna need. I have no idea what you're having in your mind. Those are the things that really came through and start track. I mean, I immediately started storyboarding. I immediately started talking to my, took my boards and talked to the post production supervisor you know Peter Lawrence, and we, you know, sometimes I'd even go and talk to the editor, and then here's what I'm thinking about doing and they say, oh yeah, we can do that or can be thought about this, and then, of course, a lot of times that's that storyboards over to the, the companies that we would, you know, subcontract to. You know digital magic or you know Foundation imaging. You know those, you know some of those different companies, because they have to figure out what they're gonna bid in order for me to put my bid in, and they, my people, always want to bids done like instantly, and so, you know, anything that you can do to communicate and have clarity is going to be valuable, and that come, and whether it's on a star trek or whether it's an independent, and I'm gonna say that the less money you have, the less time you have, the more critical those things become absolutely. Yeah.
Rick Ravenell: 51:01
I agree.
Paul DeNigris: 51:02
I have. I have clients all the time, or prospective clients, to ask me this is what I want to do, how much is it gonna cost? And I'm like I need to see something. Yeah, you haven't shot it yet, but what do you know? Yeah, this big on screen, or is it, you know, a hero?
Rick Ravenell: 51:16
element what is?
Paul DeNigris: 51:17
it need to know.
Rick Ravenell: 51:18
Yeah, I think the part that that also dovetails into that is doing like Looked at or style frames. You know, because sometimes you'll work with directors that are, that they have a hard time looking at storyboards Especially. You know, if they don't look like much. But having somebody they can do conceptual art or or style frames in addition to those where they're like this is how you guys want to shoot it, right, but this is what's actually gonna look like, or something like that is really good to show them to, just to get their head wrapped around it.
Paul DeNigris: 51:46
Okay, so that probably covers my next question, which was what if filmmakers consistently get wrong about working with VFX, regardless of the budget, right? So, other than not being prepared enough, what's a what's another thing? And when I say filmmaker, I I could mean directors, I could mean showrunners, I can mean producers. Well, you know, what's other than not being prepared enough with previs, if you will, storyboards planning, whatever. Hmm what's something else that that filmmakers or clients get just get wrong about the visual effects product, the process that you've noticed, and consistently, regardless of the budget level.
Rick Ravenell: 52:21
Yeah, I think the it's it's kind of a it's kind of an open question to that. But you, I think it's the limitations and visual effects based on how much time they have. Right, because sometimes, like, you can look at something and be like, wow, they did this so fast. You're like, yeah, they had 150 people on it. You know, like, if it's a small company, like having realistic expectations of like, ask these questions, like, hey, can you guys do something like this? You know, because sometimes, sometimes they, there isn't that dialogue. They're like we really want this, this and this, this is how much money we have. And you're like, well, I want to say no, but I also want you as a client, so why don't we jump on a call and talk through it? You know, what is it that you actually need and this is what we're able to give you, because sometimes those are completely different. And and once you start seeing eye to eye with each other and be like, okay, this actually needs to air soon, we can do this, this and this, what do you think they're like oh, yeah, that sounds great. How about we try this? Just getting that dialogue like early, early on, because I mean, sure, we can do anything in visual effects but costs a lot of money and it can take a lot of time and just realizing expectations between the vendor and you know and the visual effects company.
Paul DeNigris: 53:34
Yeah, as I always say good, fast, cheap, pick-two.
David Stipes: 53:37
Oh yeah. Yeah, I've got a drawing of that thing right here next to me. I think there has been sort of a change in the attitude toward visual effects. I remember being on set and Often I was considered to be an obstacle to production. Okay, and so they didn't want to do visual effects very much because one, we're gonna take too much time, we're gonna slow down production and we're gonna cost a lot of money and and then a lot of times you know they would want to do stuff like my Remember original glass matte paintings. Produsia came up to Matthew Yurisic and said I really would like to fly around and go around to the back of the Back of the painting. See what the back of the building looks like. Of course that's a two-piece, two, two dimensional piece of glass on top of some primary and of course now with digital, you can do that. You know, with 3d modeling and stuff, you literally can fly around a two-dimensional thing fabricated in the 3d space. So what happens now is there's the assumption that we can do anything. Well, again, with money and with time, and you know 500 people working on this, you know, on the show, yes, you can do a lot of stuff. So I think there's a tendency to want to dump stuff and you know the old let's fix it and post. It's like everything's post, now, even during production, like it, you know. So, oh wait, well, you guys can track it. We don't need to do a motion control, we don't need to shoot. You know the tilt, angles or anything. You guys can figure it all out. Yeah, you know, you know it's gonna cost money and some. I see that has been a tendency and a trend and of course, I Definitely see it here as people don't have a lot of experience. The other thing I think is I wanted to bring up is People don't get the visual effects artist supervisor involved early enough and so they think, though well, we're just gonna shoot this, we'll call somebody in them and need them, and you know, by that time sometimes they're in real trouble. And then the other thing is just just not taking advice.
Paul DeNigris: 55:54
So, to summarize, plan your shots Involve VFX as early as possible and take our advice.
David Stipes: 56:01
Yeah, don't surprise us, Don't try to do our job for us. Don't surprise us right.
Paul DeNigris: 56:06
Fix it and pre. Don't fix it in post. Yeah.
David Stipes: 56:09
Yeah, well, I come, the other acts, part of that swings around to be to the director, decide, make decisions. Because I know I'm well, I won't say I know I guess I could. I could guess that Rick probably is running of these things where, okay, well, this looks pretty good, can you go ahead and do another version of it for us? And can you make it a little greener? Can you make that a little redder? Can you know, can you adjust this thing? I'm not blowing it up a little bit? Oops, it's too big. Can you make it a little smaller? I don't know you run into that at all, rick.
Rick Ravenell: 56:40
you know endless variations and course I mean and because I work for Multiple vendors it's like we have our internal supervisors, we have our internal VFX supervisors, and then it goes to the show supervisor and if it passes the show supervisor then it goes to show runner and Then they'll all that and then all the EPs look at it. So it's like you have like seven different people. It's got to get through first before it gets to the person that actually makes the decision. So somebody down, somebody down the line could be changing it and like being like, yeah, that's the thing that I wanted. And then the person above them is like what does you do? This is nothing really.
David Stipes: 57:17
Yeah, this is nothing like what I wanted. Yeah, yeah, I worked on a feature film like that. Said who is the final authority? That? And the production manager said I am going to be your authority and I had it in the contract. It turned out I was giving them shots. He's approving them. He never showed them to the director. He finally showed them all. The director said I hate everything. You know. Months and months and months of work. The final person never saw anything.
Paul DeNigris: 57:42
Yeah, I've encountered similar problems to where, particularly on TV movies, you know you have a producer, maybe a director, if they're still connected to the, to the movie. Sometimes they're not. Yeah, it's that you know they're guns for hire and they're gone and a producer is approving and then the executive producer has to chime in and they make a bunch of changes and then I have to go to the network I I actually prefer that over the the client, the client, where you have one point of contact but they don't know what they want. The oh yeah, I, you know the client. I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it.
David Stipes: 58:14
Should go back to number one. Yeah, yeah, I've been there done.
Paul DeNigris: 58:18
That's, that's never, never good. Where do you guys see the industry, the VFX industry, in 10 years and I know this is a loaded question because there's a lot of stuff going on in our industry?
Rick Ravenell: 58:29
well, right now, the the biggest hot thing on around the block is AI. So AI is it's doing amazing things, and I think the people that are able to Utilize it in ways that I'll say makes sense are gonna be ones that succeed. You know there are companies out there right now that are using AI to Do things like redub movies, you know, and so they have the mouth lines up to all the different languages. That's kind of cool technology. Like I don't want to do that frame by frame. I don't think anybody wants to do that frame by frame. So if you can teach a computer to do that, that's based on how the artist would do it. That's pretty cool, man, you know. And then you see the things like the deep fakes. You know what people are we doing? Facial replacements. That type of work is super hard. You know any beauty work Paul, I know you did some with us at encore. Any beauty work is really really painstakingly tough, and Anything you can use to make that go smoother if it's AI based, if it's machine learning based, whatever that is, that's gonna make you more Efficient and and better at what you do. So I think being able to utilize these new technologies to help you be more efficient at your job. It's gonna be able to make you more creative, because nobody wants to roto something. You never machine do it. Then you can focus on the creative part and have more fun. I'm really curious to see where AI takes all of our technologies, because even the programs I use right now we have machine learning and AI built into them and you can. You can use that and it's kind of kind of exciting, kind of scary at the same time. But I don't. I'm optimistic. Yeah, that's great.
Paul DeNigris: 1:00:07
I Agree, the AI is definitely gonna be part of, part and parcel of what we do going forward. And a lot of people are, you know, may sayers and they're they say, oh, that the RIP visual effects artists are I, our IP, our directors, or whatever. And it's like Guys, horses did not go extinct when Henry Ford invented the Model T, yeah, like.
David Stipes: 1:00:28
You're just gonna have the effects, people that are going to interface Possibly, and probably very differently than they do now. So what I see I'm really impressed with Rick's coming up with there and I hadn't really thought it out in terms of AI, but yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. I think the work is just gonna get better and better. It's been amazing From you know Some, from like some of the early art star things and the early, you know light wave things, to what we're doing now. I'm truly phenomenal, and so it's it's. I'm actually very excited to see what else you come up with, because when I see shots like what Rick's been working on or you've been working on, paul, you know that's the sort of stuff that I would. If I could have done it, I would have gotten the Academy Awards back in the day, you know, and you guys do it day by day, just matter of factly, and and the stuff is just so amazing and, yeah, so it's, it's good. Once again, even with AI, it May, it may make the process faster, but I'm gonna Circle this back around. It still comes back a lot of, a lot of the issues are still gonna come back to the director and the, the creators of the shows. They need to have their act together. They need to be able to make decisions and articulate in a way that would allow the new, up-and-coming visual effects people to interface with them and with the software that's coming.
Paul DeNigris: 1:02:06
Absolutely. Ai is only as good as the prompt from the from the human operator right. Yeah so as long as we have clients out there who don't know what they want, but they'll know it when they see it.
David Stipes: 1:02:19
You might be able to program, some variations a little faster than what we might have done at this point exactly.
Rick Ravenell: 1:02:25
Exactly, and I super agree with David saying like the, the quality, like seeing where the quality goes right. I'm gonna plug avatar because when avatar came out, like nobody knew what it was gonna look like, right, and now we have the newest one, the way of the water. I Think my brain shut off, like in the first 10 minutes of that movie where I was like, okay, they know how to make water and all this stuff is just amazing. And then I just watch the movie. You know, like you forget that, like all of that water is completely fabricated. You know you forget that these characters were. They're just in like little suits, like underwater, like trying to breathe with Rigs and all kinds of crazy stuff, like if you see any of the behind the scenes for that, that movie and and you see what, what like what an island, what they did, you're just like, oh my god, that's and that's what they did for this movie. You know their, their technology is already better for the next movies, right. And all of that technology comes down to Television and stuff that you guys working on right now. We're using deep Compositing on these TV shows, which was developed for Avatar. You know Weta was using deep for a long time. They're like oh now, nuke just uses deep always, you know. And so seeing that technology is really exciting, because wherever that stuff goes, it all rolls down to everybody else. So seeing the quality of television shows like Game of Thrones like Game of Thrones looks like a movie, but they're doing that on like television, quote-unquote budgets but timelines and they're able to push that stuff out. So what do? What do TV shows look like in the next five years, next ten years? Like that they're gonna look amazing. You know, people are figuring out how to use this technology and make it and, you know, bring all these crazy stories to life. And to me that I think that's the best part, that's just the most exciting, to see what people can do.
David Stipes: 1:04:10
Yeah, I consider myself to be fairly visually savvy and I'm always delighted to find shots that I know are trick shots and I can't tell where the trick is and I can't tell exactly what is real, what is not real, unless it's something obviously like a dragon or something. But but a lot of like the scene replacements, face replacements, I mean all of this work that goes into making a production. It's, you know, the old classic invisible art, the invisible effects, and it's just getting better and better and For old dogs like me it gets harder and harder to catch the tricks.
Paul DeNigris: 1:04:51
Well, that is an absolutely perfect place to wrap up, so I want to thank you, gentlemen, for being being part of this podcast.
David Stipes: 1:04:58
Thank you.
Paul DeNigris: 1:04:59
It's been a very, very special hour talking with you. I appreciate your time and and expertise always.
Rick Ravenell: 1:05:07
Thank you, of course, lots of fun. Thanks for having us.
Paul DeNigris: 1:05:09
Where can people find you online if they want to see what you've been working on, or or just want to, you know, catch up with you, rick.
Rick Ravenell: 1:05:17
I actually don't have a website. If you want to check out my video, it's Rick's vfx RIC KS vfx. I'm videoing. See some reels, some of the stuff I've been working on. And yeah, I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn, cool.
David Stipes: 1:05:33
Fantastic David, how about?
Paul DeNigris: 1:05:35
you.
David Stipes: 1:05:35
I'm on Facebook just David Stipes, but I have David Stipes calm, which is kind of a Probably my last vestiges of a website. I haven't really done a lot but you can see a lot of my really old work if you want to see antique stuff. But what I'm more proud of is David Stipes net and that's an actual writing blog and I have a lot of articles and I talk about behind the scenes things and I'm going to be adding more content to that. I and I've been I've got probably close to 30 articles I've done. I'm going to be adding more of them to the blog. So Trying to document the what behind the scenes while I can, while I can.
Paul DeNigris: 1:06:18
So Fantastic, fantastic, and I will be.
David Stipes: 1:06:22
I will make sure to bookmark that becaus
e, and Rick, when you can, I would recommend documenting anything that you're working on, because people will find it interesting in the future and it does tend to fade away if you don't get it down quickly. I'm sorry, paul, I jumped on you there.
Paul DeNigris: 1:06:38
That that's all right. That's all right, but David's right. You're part of Star Trek now, buddy, so you know, you know, future historians of the the Trek franchise will be talking about the exploits of Rick Ravenel, 2d supervisor, at Well, I'm starting.
David Stipes: 1:06:55
I'll be talking about you.
Paul DeNigris: 1:06:57
All right, well, thanks so much, gentlemen, and thanks to our audience for tuning in today. If you liked what you saw here, if you learned something, I want to hear from you. So please like, comment and subscribe and I will see you on the next installment of the VFX for Indies podcast.
