Ian Failes from befores & afters sat down with Industrial Light & Magic’s Rob Bredow at SIGGRAPH Asia, and shared his thoughts on driving creative and technical design.
We started with what his actual role as CCO involves, then moved to the changing nature of the VFX industry, dived into the making of The Creator and how it differed from usual blockbusters, and even discussed ‘DISGRAPH’, which is an internal event Disney hosts in the style of SIGGRAPH, pulling together the R&D might of ILM, Disney Research, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios.
b&a: You’re chief creative officer at ILM. What does that role entail, and how do you work with creative directors across ILM?
Rob Bredow: In our studio we’re really lucky. We have creative directors around the globe, including Ben Morris, John Knoll, Jeff White, and Rob Coleman. They’re world class experts at supervising, but they also lead a team of supervisors and a team of shows in each of the studios. I get to work with them to make sure that we’re doing the best possible job at creative leadership in the studios.
That can be things like, how do we lean into constraints? How do we give the artists freedom to create and freedom to make their best possible work of their careers and be able to take risks, and then still do that kind of industrial strength reliability that ILM is known for? And how do we strike that balance? How do we do both?
b&a: In your session, there was an interesting question asked there about the challenge of doing lots of great work, but also making it work under budgets and restrictions. How do you do that?
Rob Bredow: Keeping one eye on the efficiency at all times and knowing that that’s part of the creative play is super important. Every new tool we’re developing, every new technique, every new advancement–it’s always done through that filter of: is it increasing the quality of our work? Is it helping with the efficiency? Is it helping the artist workflow? How do we make, especially at our scale, how do we make the easy things as easy as possible for the artists so we can focus our efforts on the things that are going to be the most important?
Even though we have a huge R&D team, amazingly talented engineers, there’s never enough engineering resources to tackle all of the ideas. We have so many more ideas than we have the ability to implement. So helping to prioritize what are going to be the things that are the most important for us to really focus on over the next few years at any given time.
b&a: I also think that’s really interesting given that ILM is really doing much more than just ‘classic’ VFX these days. There’s StageCraft, there’s immersive work, and you’re also part of the Disney ecosystem. What have you found tricky about having so many, I don’t want to call them business units, but maybe they are thought about like that?
Rob Bredow: One of the great things about having such a variety of projects, especially for artists, is some artists really appreciate having that variety of work. One day they can be working on ABBA and go see it in the ABBA Arena, and it’s a completely different experience than watching a movie. The next day they can be working on a Star Wars movie, the next day they’ll be working on something completely different like The Creator.
It’s so nice to have that variety of work, and a lot of that core technology is actually the same. When we invest in a digital human, whether it’s for an immersive experience or whether it’s for a film, most of those technologies are shared.
b&a: It’s very exciting that ILM is in so many places and the growth of Sydney is fascinating. People gasp when they hear you’re up to 500. But, I wonder, what has that been like for you to manage different locations and time zones, and balance the loads between locations?
Rob Bredow: The time zones do make for a few long days here and there, but the great thing is the leadership on the ground, for example, in our new Sydney studio, there are people who understand the culture of ILM through and through. From an innovation perspective, from a collaboration and a sharing perspective, this is what we recruit for. And our leaders already had that built in. So between Luke Hetherington and Rob Coleman who together run the studio from a management side and from a creative direction standpoint, they have many years of experience in the studio. I think Sydney is such a great example for us of a studio that has already hit the ground running and it typifies the culture of ILM right from day one in a way that we just absolutely love.
That’s also one of the reasons that it was able to grow as fast because it had the right ingredients from the very beginning. And also, we were very lucky. A lot of ILMers who had worked around the world either had roots here in Sydney or wanted to come to Sydney. So there’s over a hundred ILM alumni out of those 500. There’s a lot of people with 10 or 15 years of experience who were able to either move home to Sydney or wanted to take a term in Sydney. So that really helped bring a lot of ILM experience so the studio could hit the ground running.
b&a: What do you see as some of the work from home and office aspects of VFX right now? There was this period where security was a problem, where studios were worried about leaks and things like that. We’ve sort of moved on from that clearly because of COVID and remote work. But, again, how has that been challenging for culture in the office and creativity in the office at ILM?
Rob Bredow: We think the sweet spot is a mixture of both. We think the culture of having an in-person studio is really important, especially for the long-term growth of the studio and the growth of the individual artists, production experts, and support teams. Being able to learn from your peers is one of the best things about working at ILM. So we want to preserve that. But also as you point out, there are certain advantages to being able to work from home.
If we were only interested in raw productivity, working from home is really efficient. The people we hire don’t need someone to look over their shoulder to see if they’re getting their work done. They’re motivated to get the work done. And we were really efficient during COVID, but people got tired of being in one place all the time, and there were a lot of disadvantages, too. So I think there really is a healthy balance, and that’s what we’re trying to strike, that is, give really good reasons for people to come into the office. For example, tomorrow I am going to be in our Sydney office and there are no available seats. There’s no room for me. That’s the kind of problem we want to have, which is we need to have more space so that everybody can come in on the days they want to.
b&a: You mentioned The Creator before, and it’s an amazing film, and I talked to Charmaine Chan and Ian Comley from ILM London about the project, especially about how it felt like an old-school 1990s project, just because of not necessarily doing all the classic things we do in visual effects to acquire and survey the set. How do you feel The Creator was a different kind of project at ILM, compared to say some of the other huge projects you work on?
Rob Bredow: With The Creator, a lot of people are focused on how the on-set experience was different, and it was, but I think the thing that was fundamentally different was the way that Gareth wanted to deeply engage in streamlining the process and designing the movie together with visual effects, with visual effects front and center in the process.
The way that it manifests itself is the design of everything. There was a lot of design done in pre-production, but the design was also being done based on what he found when he was on location with the camera mostly being operated by Gareth, ‘finding’ locations. And then he was confident enough as a visual storyteller to see something and go, I think I’m going to augment it back there with something that’s going to make me know that this is this location. But it wasn’t yet fixed.
And then in post-production, again, Gareth had the confidence to know that if that idea didn’t work because it was, say, way too complicated, there was no greenscreen or the matchmove was going to be two weeks to get this thing done, he could then look and say, actually, if I cut here and use this shot instead, does that still get me what I want visually?
So there was this amazing give and take, which was much more like his movie Monsters in terms of getting it done in a constrained environment where he wanted to have a movie that looked like a $300 million movie, but he wanted to do it for a budget that gave him creative control from end to end.
Read the full interview here.
Image: Brian Ach/Getty Images
