The tech of ‘Terminator 2’ – an oral history

Illustration by Aidan Roberts. Ever since James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991, I’ve been reading about the many ways ILM, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, had to basically invent new ways to realise the CG ‘liquid metal’ T-1000 shots in that film, of which there are surprisingly few. Tools like ‘Make Sticky’ and ‘Body Sock’ are ones that I’d heard referenced several times, but I’ve always wanted to know more about how those pieces of software were made. So, over the past few months, leading up to the re-release of Terminator 2 in 3D, I’ve been chatting to the artists behind the technology who were there at the time. This was when ILM was based in San Rafael, and when its computer graphics department was still astonishingly small. Yet despite the obvious challenges in wrangling this nascent technology, the studio had been buoyed by the promising results on a few previous efforts, including Cameron’s The Abyss, and by the possibilities that digital visual effects could bring to modern-day filmmaking. For this special retro oral history, vfxblog goes back in time with more than a dozen ILMers (their original screen credits appear in parentheses) to discuss the development of key CGI tools and techniques for the VFX Oscar winning Terminator 2, how they worked with early animation packages like Alias, and how a selection of the most memorable shots in the film – forever etched into the history of visual effects – came to be. Gearing up the computer graphics department Tom Williams (computer graphics shot supervisor): I actually worked full-time for both Pixar and ILM for most of T2. Then I realised that was really dangerous. I would fall asleep, driving home once, and freaked myself out and realised you can’t really do that. So towards the end of T2 I went over to ILM full time. The way I got there originally was, I got invited by [visual effects producer] Janet Healy and [visual effects supervisor] Dennis Muren because I had worked at a company called Alias, which did modelling and animation tools. This still from the documentary ‘Industrial Light & Magic: Creating the Impossible’ shows ILM crew members at work on Terminator 2.

George Joblove (computer graphics shot supervisor): Each single gig at ILM was a small step above what we’d done before. And we were fighting with the limited computing resources we had at the time. We had done The Abyss which was a big step forward in a couple ways. First of all, in demonstrating what was possible and achieving it. Second of all, working for Cameron who had that great vision for how it could be used in The Abyss. With that film, had we not been able to pull it off, there would have been ways to work around it. But I don’t think there was any such opportunity in T2. Eric Enderton (computer graphics software developer): Terminator 2 was my first big movie. I saw The Abyss in the SIGGRAPH film show and thought: I want to work for those guys. Fortuitously the CG group had decided to hire their first tools writer. They had lots of software but it was all being written by the same people who were doing the shots. I was the first ‘software-only’ person in ILM computer graphics, which obviously was a huge learning experience and just an amazing time. Jay Riddle (computer graphics shot supervisor): I was working at ILM for several years and had learned how to animate by sitting with John Lasseter when he was in the Graphics Group, which was part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm at the time. They were using this vector graphics display that they used with their own in-house software that they’d written, and they had this frame buffer. They were still in our building, and then they moved out to one of the other Lucasfilm buildings while they were trying to spin off and get their own place, which they eventually did. And just as they left were doing The Abyss, and then they were kind of fully gone by the time T2 came around. Visual effects art director Doug Chiang, in addition to sketching many incarnations of the T-1000 at different stages, also performed digital manipulation fix-its to final shots. Image via ILM Facebook page. Michael Natkin (computer graphics software developer): I showed up at ILM in a suit, which was hilarious. I remember Eric Enderton and George Joblove and a few other folks took me up to the Ranch for lunch and showed me around and I was like, ‘Sure. Hell, yeah. I’ll do this.

Let’s make it happen.’ I knew a lot about computer graphics, but nothing about movies whatsoever, so there was quite a learning curve. Jonathan French (computer graphics animator): The process of even starting at [ILM] was kind of novel. I landed in SFO at 11am and after finding an airport car rental agency that would rent to someone 23 years old I drove straight to ILM in Marin. I think after I signed the NDA they immediately handed me the script to read, a small stapled booklet on ILM film terminology and tools, and then about ten people on the team kindly took me to lunch at an Afghan restaurant, which I am pretty sure was the only Afghan restaurant in Marin. The next morning in dailies I got introduced by Douglas Kay to the team in the screening theatre and everyone turned around and applauded. Three things go through your mind at that point: one, how supportive these people are, two, I better live up to my own expectations, and three, I better live up to theirs. It worked out ok. Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams (computer graphics animation supervisor): I was at Alias and had been pushing for VA – video animation – but Alias was into the ID which stood for industrial design. At the time, VA was this very small budding thing. Then ILM called and they had purchased a cut of Alias, and so they first thing they had me do was a ride they were doing at Epcot Center called Body Wars – it was a fly-through of the heart. Then James Cameron came to ILM with The Abyss and from there we went on to Terminator 2. “I’d point to a page and say, ‘Oh, well that looks interesting. How are you going to do that?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t know yet.’” – John Schlag Stefen Fangmeier (computer graphics shot supervisor): My role on T2 was as a technical director. Meaning that I would concentrate on rendering and compositing rather than modeling and animation. Back then, TDs really needed to have programming experience and since I have a computer science degree, these tasks were a natural fit for me. My tasks were to support the animators in technical areas which included writing C-shell scripts for frame to frame processing.

Many of the features for doing this are now included in commercial software packages, but back then, most of the procedural, frame-by-frame batch processing had to be created from scratch. Geofff Campbell (computer graphics animator): [I was at MPC] in the summer of 1990 when I received a phone call from ILM who wanted to set up a telephone interview regarding a new film they were starting work on. It turned out that Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams had reviewed my portfolio and had asked for the interview. The phone call came one morning at 2am and woke me out of my sleep catching me completely off guard. I remember slurring my speech while standing at the bottom of the landing freezing in my underwear. That was also before satellite phones and the static and delay of the transatlantic connection was almost comical. Everyone on the ILM side were asking me serious questions about my abilities, schooling etc. but every now and then Steve would chime in with a question asking me things like did I have any pets? I told him I had a cat back in Toronto, and his follow up question was getting into specifics like my cat’s name and what type of cat food I served him. A week later I got the job and started working on Terminator 2 on Halloween day. Looking back I realized that Steve was serving me up a short hand during my London interview. I had already gotten the job and the interview was just a formality. Storyboard example of ‘Head through bars’ shot, and the final result. Tom Williams: When I came onto the show, ILM had all the storyboards up because there’s some particularly tricky shots that they were mulling over. They were just stuck. They were all color-coded. I was looking at them, and was like, ‘Oh yeah, the greens, I could do those and the yellows, that would be fun. I think I know how to do that.’ Then there was the blacks. I was like, ‘Wow.’ There was ‘head through bars’, and some of the stuff where the surfaces would merge with each other like when the T-1000’s hook hand gets stuck in the car and then melts back into his shoe. And ‘head through floor’. They said, ‘We want you to help us with the black ones and all the things with a black dot on it.’

I was like, ‘Awesome.’ When someone says, ‘Yeah, we’re not sure how to do this,’ you can’t do worse. My failure was to meet their expectations, I think. John Schlag (computer graphics software developer): On my first day at work, I came in the door, they sat me down, and they showed me the storyboards, and they went through this binder. And I’d point to a page and say, ‘Oh, well that looks interesting. How are you going to do that?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t know yet.’ I’m like, ‘You people are batshit! You’ve got to be kidding me! You bid this job, and it came in, but you don’t know how to do the work?’ So that was a big wake-up call on my first day at work in real visual effects, to realise you know, you make this Hail Mary bid, and lo and behold it comes in, and you’re celebrating, and then terrified.’ From left: Steve ‘Spaz’ Williams, Stefen Fangmeier and Mark Dippe. Michael Natkin: Actually, I also remember on my first day on the job, George Joblove took me down to watch them blow up the practical warehouse for Backdraft, which was amazing. It was a really neat time at ILM because it was right as the transition was happening from everything practical and optical to everything digital. Jonathan French: The machine room which acted double duty as a night time render ‘farm’ was downstairs, near the Pit. The Pit is now a part of ILM folklore, but it was essentially Spaz’s space he shared with Mark Dippe and I think at various times Wade Howie, Jim Mitchell, and others. It was a fun place whenever I had reason to go down there, all 70’s scotch-stained shag carpet, hockey sticks and music posters, and sound proofed to the rest of the building. So you’d go in there and Stompin’ Tom Conners or Thin Lizzy would be on at full volume. I mean the kind of full volume where you open the door and your hair blows back. It was sort of as if the famous Horseshoe Tavern Bar in Toronto had been converted into a basement rec room. “