Make no mistake, ILM ruled the visual effects landscape for the better part of three decades. From its mid-1970s inception in Van Nuys, California, to its relocation to San Rafael in Marin County thereafter, ILM took the lead on nearly every important visual effects film from Star Wars to The Abyss to Terminator 2 to Jurassic Park and beyond. Surely, there were other effects companies, with former ILM keys John Dykstra and Richard Edlund forming Apogee and Boss Film Studios, respectively, to compete with ILM in the 1980s. Other firms such as Dream Quest Images joined the visual effects race and made their presence felt. By the 1990s, ILM faced competition from new vendors including Rhythm and Hues, Asylum, CafeFX and others who all got shows of various size facing new challenges. Reportedly, wanting to control more of his creative vision than he was able to achieve working with ILM, James Cameron formed Digital Domain to create the shots he had in mind for True Lies (ILM got the last laugh when they were one of 17 firms that Cameron needed to utilize to complete shots for Titanic that Digital Domain could not handle due to the volume and complexity of work required on that show).
However, by the end of the 1990s, the template for executing visual effects changed along with the climate of creating the work itself. More computer-generated work was implemented into films as traditional model and matte shots were phased out. Work began to travel overseas as smaller firms sprouted up. Peter Jackson created Weta Digital to handle the massive amount of shots that his Lord of the Rings trilogy, shot simultaneously, warranted. Film productions started to automatically divide bigger shows amongst multiple vendors to achieve the needs of large-scale projects. Questionable decisions were made in effects-laden films as to what kind of shots would be used, and political chaos ensued over what firms would be creating those shots. Witness films such as Mighty Joe Young (1998) and Godzilla (1998) whose productions built full-size and suit-performed articulated creatures, then took shots away from practical filming in favor of computer-generated animation, arguably for political purposes. In those cases, first, rumors of a Dream Quest Images sale to Disney might have motivated the production’s move to more CGI shots on Mighty Joe Young, and the fact that Centropolis Effects was a property of Godzilla’s director, possibly pushed that film in a more CGI-heavy direction. In both cases, those films were critical and commercial disappointments and fans complained of issues with reduced quality and overuse of computer graphics to realize their title characters.
How could Weta have succeeded where other firms had not? Were there in fact too many politics in stateside studio films to bring one unique vision to the screen? Did Weta’s remote New Zealand location free them of the interference of the opinion-by-committee of studio executives and producers? Surely, James Cameron believed in Weta when he sought to realize the unprecedented shots that his Avatar dreams entailed. Cameron had sold Digital Domain and was a free agent of sorts, choosing Weta due to their advances in translating capture data into photorealistic onscreen characters. When Avatar became the top-grossing film of all time, it did not hurt Cameron’s cause, Weta’s plight, or the concept of realizing films with a similar pipeline of producing computer-generated content. Of course, 90% of Avatar’s computer-generated character shots occur in a fully computer-generated fantasy environment. Could Weta work their magic in an earthbound setting?
Where does this situation leave the rest of the visual effects industry? Surely, there is plenty of work to distribute to firms in the US, England, and worldwide, as has been increasingly so over the past decade. With Centropolis Effects, CafeFX and Asylum shuttered, Dream Quest long absorbed and folded, and other smaller firms struggling and outsourcing, the field of visual effects is left with many uncertainties though there are always intriguing possibilities. However, unless Weta Digital’s template for creating meaningful characters is cloned and spread out widely among leading entities, it appears that they have now raised the bar for top visual effects facilities. What other firms will conjure in response remains to be seen.