For the film "Terminator II", dozens of people at ILM worked for more than six month on more than thirty Silicon Graphics Iris 4D workstations to create the special effect which reflects the surrounding environment on the shiny chrome Terminator.

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) was selected by director James Cameron to create critical special visual effects for his new motion picture, "Terminator 2." ILM used computer graphics and digital image-processing techniques to help create the "T-1000", one of the principal characters in the film, The T-1000 is made of a fluid chrome-like metal capable of assuming the form of a person or other object. ILM created the transition effects of the T-1000: changing from an amorphous chrome blob to human shape chrome and finally to a real-looking person; changing its appearance from one person's to anotber's; flipping itself back-to-front and deforming in a fight scene; turning a finger or arm into a metal spike, and back to human form; walking fluidly tbrough jail bars; rising out of a tiled floor; pulling a steel bar out of its 'body' and reshaping or 'healing' its human form after being wounded. All these effects had to appear completely realistic in order to carry the story convincingly.
Dozens of people in various departments of ILM worked for more than half a year on a very tight schedule to create the 45 computer graphics shots in the film, including five minutes of computer-generated and computer-manipulated imagery. The result, in the words of director Cameron, was proof "that photo realistic computer graphics can be used in an integrated way to create characters in feature films ... I had assumed that there would be some things they (ILM)wouldn't be able to do ... but, to my amazement, there was nothing that they weren't able to solve. Literally nothing."

The live-action production footage for each scene was scanned into a computer on a unique film-digitizing system developed by ILM and Kodak to yield a high-resolution digital representation of the 35 mm film, frame by frame, The computer-generated chrome was created by computing the reflections by the three-dimensional forms of their environments, which in turn were represented by the film of the scene and other film elements and supplemental still photographs shot at the scene. This allowed the computer-drawn chrome to reflect the actors and scene in which it appeared. The chrome forms were modelled and animated in three dimensions, carefully matched for position, motion, and lighting to the scenes in which they appeared.

Each of the chrome elements was computed as a separate digital element, which was then digitally composited with the background scene and other elements. The chrome human forms were modelled and animated based on motion studies of real actors. Some shots required hand painted animation and touch-up, frame-by-frame. Many employed computer software that allowed the animator to spatially distort live action and computer-generated imagery. As work progressed on each shot, low-resolution tests were done and viewed each day on video. Later tests, and the final results, were output directly to 35 mm film by high-resolution film recording systems.

Creation of these effects required the combined talents of animators, computer scientists, artists, and technicians with many other diverse areas of expertise. Their tools included over thirty Silicon Graphics Iris 4D graphics-workstation computers using proprietary software developed by ILM (much of it especially for this production), the RenderMan renderer from Pixar, the Alias12 software package from Alias Research, and several Apple Macintosh computers using Adobe PhotoShop. Human faces and other parts were sculpted with the assistance of a Cyberware digitizing system. ILM also did optical enhancement and compositing of several other shots in the film. (Catherine Tate, Industrial Light & Magic)

Technical Background

HW: Silicon Graphics 4D/340 VGX, 4D/240 GTX, 4D 25GT, Apple Mac IIFX
SW: Modelling, Animation, Rendering, Image-Processing - ILM Proprietary, Renderman, Alias 2, Photoshop


“TERMINATOR 2” AND COMPUTER ANIMATION - GERHARD JOHANN LISCHKA

“Terminator 2 ” is a movie programmed to be successful, because success is always successful. Paradoxically, this obvious platitüde is well justified. It is the heart of Hollywood, of the everlasting ideology that movies are made for one reason only, and that is to be successful. This - doubtlessly - has become true fo r sports, for business and for the rest o f our everyday lives. It is a way of thinking that dates back to early Hollywood and its system of stardom, and to the later elevation and deification of single movies (i.e., products) and their actors and actresses. In all of these cases, the film (product) becomes the star (person) and the star (person) becomes the film (product).
As soon as “Terminator 2 ” was released it was said to be successful beyond measure. The movie certainly owes its success in part to “Terminator 1 ”, that is, to the fact that the audience had either seen Part One or, at least, had heard of it. (Such a system of movie sequels, having its origin in the serialized novel and continued in its populär television form, the TV series, had proven to be successful with the James Bond and Rambo films.) However, the film ’s superstar, body-builder Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the use of extravagant techniques, especially Computer animation, also contributed to the film’s ability to fascinate and attract the public, thus contributing to its success as well. The plot of “Terminator 2 ” relates to that of “Terminator 1 ”, but “Terminator 2 ” can be understood without “Terminator 1 ” for all contextual elements from “Terminator 1 ” that might be of any importance either become part of the action or serve merely as gags. So, for instance, Mister Schwarzenegger, who had been preserved from “Terminator 1 ”, need not be an actor anymore - which used to be part of filmmaking in the olden days - but a machinelike (almost) perfect body that defines itself in and by action. This also explains why he does not have to talk, or rather he just has to learn to talk in certain situations. In “Terminator 2 ”, even this is rendered obsolete, for he actually dumbfounds us by his anthropomorphoses. As Cyborg #1000, made from liquid metal, daunting us by his toughness, brutality, insidiousness and adaptability as the incarnation of evil, he renders us speechless.
“Mr. Terminator 1 ” (T#l), transformed into the protector, the good guy of this second movie, lands on Earth (naked, by the way), as does “Mr. Terminator 2 ” (T#2) a short time later. T#1 is searching for young John Connor to protect bim from being murdered by T#2. This is the body of the story, around which some more crumbs are dispersed to avoid having the action fall apart: John has foster parents whom he does not obey, a mother (Sarah) in the lunatic asylum practicing for her escape because nobody believes her story (which is true, so she is not schizophrenic). In her desire to protect her child, she assumes a male body to overcome the men guarding her. A chip researcher (Mr. Dyson of Cyberdyne) is on the verge of realizing and producing the chip datingfrom the future (from “Terminator 1 ”, that is), which would result in the destruction of the world. And this destruction must not happen, this is the “noble message” of the movie. On the way to Mr. Dyson, the whole “family ” Sarah, John and T#1 arm themselves, and Sarah - full of defiance - scratches “NO FATE” into a table. At Cyberdyne, a Countdown starts that proceeds via motoreyele, delivery van, helicopter and truck through a seemingly endless series of explosions and shootings - (similar to those in the opening sequence of the movie). At last, T2 is defeated in the Steel mill and T1 sacrifices himself as he had programme d the power of the future destructive chips also within himself.
“Terminator 2 ” is a wild chase of the Good by the Bad. Yet, good and bad are not easily distinguishable. T#1 does not kill, he “only” injures. He is programmed “to protect you”, as he teils John. But also T#2 (that devil) drives in a police squad car with the inscription “To protect and to serve”. Sarah wants to be a good mother, but others prevent her from being that. Her son is a precocious urchin. When he uses a Computer for breaking the code of a cash dispenser, is that just simple mischief?
The moral is drowned in the fascination of action and leaves us slightly stunned. We have never seen such fireworks of stunts and effects at the movies, even though we have seen many similar ones hefore. These are the aesthetics of video clips whetting our appetite fo r illusion on the big screen - and yet, the fascination is blown away when, upon leaving the cinema, we ask ourselves what it was all about.
When questioned for sense, much of our technoculture would fail the test in its self-possessed craving for the greater, the faster, the more incredible. Again, it is success for success’ sake that grins at us. But this movie on the threshold of Virtual Reality cannot be understood in the old stardom system, it must be seen from the point of view of Artificial Intelligence, from the trivialization of Man by the Machine. The management, apparatus now defines the star in a way guaranteeing success under the premise of how success is achieved. This implies that from now on the idea is in search of a suitable incarnation, and not the actor looking for the idea that makes him a star.
It is the turning-point in the use of Computer animation that plays such an important role in the success of “Terminator 2 ”. Historically, it derives from the lavishly produced trailers of the James Bond movies on the one hand, and from Stephen Lisberger’s “Tron” - the first partly Computer generated movie - on the other hand. To this is added the energetically Condensed language of the music videos and the progress of Computer technology itself.
So - still slightly dazzled - we watch the transformation powers of T#2 that scare us as no obstacle can stop this liquid metal humanoid: he is injured and gets up again, he walks through fire, he transforms himself from a black-andwhite tiledfloor into a security officer, he walks through door bars, he drips through the ceiling of an elevator and pours himself through a helicopter’s window, he is split into crystals and puts himself back together again from molten little cells. Finally, he dies his own death in a sequence of eruptions (in the shapes of those killed by him) in the boiling Steel engorging and incorporating him.
The decisive factor in these metamorphoses is that they are implemented in the movie frames in such an incredibly realistic manner. Until now, Computer animation had to give in when confronted with realism: we knew what was drawn or animated or in anyway fake. But now, illusion catches up with reality, or vice versa. Therefore we talk so much of Simulation, as the ground of reality has become insecure, as there is no way to determine where the outside world is not just a projection of the inside world any more. This, again, brings autopoiesis on the stage, a term referring to the fact that in the symbolic languages that make our reality understandable or at least describeable, it is not the living organism itself that talks, but its structurally coupled system of reality.
All of this also means Computer animation, a program setting the frame of feasibility, yet the same program allowing for the generation of an imagery (or text or sound) that - without the use of a camera - is not the traditional representation of the exterior world, but of the imagination of the programmer. One might say that these are the projections of mental imagination, images from the mind shaped through the combination of numbers. Here we have to consider whether these images are not merely copies of the fixed camera images, proposing the language of a trite understanding of reality, or whether they are the fantastic design of a new (and maybe free or freeing) view of the world.
This can be denied in the case of “Terminator 2 ”, for its aesthetics are too integrated in to an understanding of realism that characterizes the whole movie as an average mass media production. We must admit that striking effects, which we would not have expected to have been technically feasible, have been achieved. However, they do not represent (in the traditional sense - perhaps) “artistic moments”. It is illusion, momentarily impressive, artful but not art.
Nevertheless, we are being enticed by these effects, for they point towards a new aesthetic that does not operate mimetically or materially, but comes from pure Imagination. If Kandinsky distinguished the “Great Real” from the “Great Abstraet” which he established, and if the world of art has ever since been split into these two areas, Computer animation now goes beyond this polarity and transforms itself into all possible kinds of representation, into a pananimism of the here-and-now. The fixed existence of a film or photo image gives way to the magnetism o f pixels that are here and there at the speed of light.
Holography has already shown us that its entity can be understood only in motion, but in Computer animation, motion itself is the given datum. Maybe this is the reason why Computer graphics still images look so sterile, they have been fixed too early or to late as the “picture” they have to be. Opposed to that, the continuous flow of transformation of the image, the transition of one image into another in Computer animation is the radiation of the monitor, always there and yet always different. I f movie and video images were images of motion and time, Computer animation adds the non-exterior, the projection of the programmer. Deleuze referred to the artistically interesting Contemporary film as a “mental image ”. Now, Computer animation transforms this into the mental image of mental images. But then, a mental image does require a movie philosophy or a movie mind, an intermedia state-of-mind, as we may call it. Quality products do not develop out of the management, out of success, but out of a well founded intent, out of an attitude, an engagement of expressing oneself within a media even in a critical relation to that media.
We cannot discover this attitude in the Computer animations of “Terminator 2 ”, but what we see is the creators’ desire to showcase the technological state-of-the-art, which underlines the programmers’ capabilities, but does not permit us to speak of Art.

Dennis Muren (USA) is the Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at the Industrial Light & Magic. Recipient of six Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, Muren is actively involved in the evolution o f the Company, design, and development of new techniques and equipment, and responsible for the visual effects for the following films: “The Abyss”, “Ghostbusters I I ” (1989), “Willow” (1988), “Indiana Jones” (1984), “ET: The Extraterrestrial” (1982).

Mark A. Z. Dippé (USA), 1988 — present: Industrial Light & Magic, Assistant Visual Effects Supervisor; 1988-1990: U.C. Berkeley, Lecturer in Computer Graphics. Visual effects for “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), “Back to the Future I I ”, “The Abyss” {1989) and others; several commercials andpublications.

Steve Williams (CDN), obtained his degree in classical animation from Sheridan College in 1984. In 1986 he worked for Alias Research Inc. in Toronto as an animator. In 1988, Williams joined Industrial Light & Magic in the Computer graphics department. Since then, he has created and supervised animation for several feature films and commercials, including “The Hunt for Red October” (1989).