THE VISUAL EFFECTS

Academy Award-winning Visual Effects Supervisor John Nelson ("Gladiator") supervised over 1,000 visual effects shots from pre-visualization through post-production. Nelson and his second-in-command, Digital Visual Effects Supervisor John Berton ("The Mummy," "Men In Black 2"), began with a team of 20 at the start of production in Vancouver. Ultimately, the department swelled to thousands, occupying several effects houses for approximately eight months of post-production, a relatively short period for the volume and sophistication of the shots rendered. Digital Domain, WETA Digital, Image Engine, Rainmaker and Pixel Magic were among the visual effects houses on the film.

The department's tasks were three-fold: create a credible, emotional performance from Sonny, establish a world integrated with robots in the year 2035, and make the huge, high-tech action sequences look seamless and believable.

"Sonny must look real for audiences to buy it," says John Nelson. "Visual effects take the nuances and emotional energy that Alan Tudyk creates on the set and brings it through in the CG robot. The level of detail that an actor can create is amazing. Alan Tudyk gave us an incredibly high standard to work towards."

"You do care about Sonny because he is an incredible character," adds Nelson. "He's a robot that can feel and improvise. He becomes a reflection of us and that becomes a very powerful and potent storytelling possibility. So we must have complete realism."

Will Smith embraced the idea of working with a digital character. "This is a very revolutionary process," he says. "As an actor, it makes it so much easier to really capture the emotional depth and comedy of the individual scenes, because I actually get to play the scene looking into someone's eyes rather than, like in the past, a tennis ball!"

"This is on the cutting edge of what we're trying to do with computer graphics characters - finding better ways of making them interact with the other characters and drawing on real acting performances," adds John Berton.

Visual effects house Digital Domain won the coveted assignment of creating the robots and specifically, breathing life and emotion into Sonny. The Digital Domain team was led by supervisor Erik Nash ("Titanic," "Apollo 13,") and Animation Supervisor Andrew Jones.

I, ROBOT defines the world of Chicago in 2035 by filling it with robots of every description and futuristic landscapes and skylines. "I, ROBOT has the most complex and sophisticated CG work in movie history," says Wyck Godfrey. "Not only are we creating a photo-real CG character, but that character is set against a CG background."

Award-winning New Zealand-based visual effects powerhouse WETA ("The Lord of the Rings") was charged with creating the broad sweeping shots that establish the future world and the colossal sequences involving robots fighting, as well as robots and humans fighting.

Two-time Oscar®-winner Joe Letteri ("The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King") and Brian Van't Hul at WETA oversaw the grand spectacle 'David Lean'-type moments of the film. "Only our 'cast of thousands' involves thousands and thousands of humans and digital robots interacting," says John Nelson.

The visual effects team made the action sequences come alive on screen in a believable manner. Epic battles, escapes from collapsing buildings, and chase sequences through tunnels involving a variety of futuristic vehicles make up just a few of the film's action set pieces.

"We can provide those high octane moments where movie-goers feel like they're on a ride at Disneyland. But, when we're the most successful, we're providing those moments in support of good storytelling and good character development," says producer John Davis.

To pull off these large-scale sequences, the filmmakers first had to define the rules governing the robot behavior. "We have action that people have not seen before, because we're doing things with robots you could never do with humans," says Nelson. "But their capabilities are not limitless. The real issue is that there are rules in the world. Gravity, for example: it's not just a good idea, it's the law."

"We wanted to say the old robots are this powerful and the new robots are that powerful," adds Berton. "We decided that the old NS-4s are roughly as powerful as a human, but the new NS-5s have about four times more power."

With the help of impressive technological advances, the I, ROBOT visual effects artists developed a new level of photo-realism that will seamlessly integrate the CG images with practical sets and human characters. These state-of-the-art effects tools included Global Illumination Lighting Models (aka "Balls & Bots"), HDR (High Dynamic Range), Robo-Tile and Encodacam.

The visual effects team required four passes to create each CG shot. The 'with' pass used robot proxies, which allowed Proyas to give direction and frame the shot. The 'with' pass takes the process out of the synthetic world and places it in the real world.

For the 'without' pass, the camera movement in the "with" pass is repeated, with the actors but minus the proxies. The "clean" pass is shooting the same action without actors or robots. For the "reference" pass, also know to the crew as the "Balls & Bots" pass, a chrome ball, a gray ball, and the human-sized lighting dummy (known as "Ozzie") were pushed or walked through the frame to provide critical lighting references.

I, ROBOT employs the latest research in light dynamics and image-based rendering. "The level to which we are lighting these creatures is very complex," says Nelson. "We are capturing more info about lighting on our set than ever before… not just about placement of lights and what that light does to an object, as was done in the past. Now, we are also recording how bright those lights are."

The production used a special camera from Digital Domain called Robo-Tile, which takes multiple pictures that range from extreme underexposure to extreme overexposure, meaning that these pictures will read everything from the deepest shadow to the brightest sun. Through high dynamic range lighting, those images were then applied to light the environments and characters that were created digitally.

Another creative tool, Encodacam, combined the physical set with the digital set in real time, as cameras rolled, to enable Proyas to direct both the virtual and the real worlds simultaneously. The technology, developed by General Lift in Los Angeles, was created for possible use on the "Matrix" sequels, but was actually first used on the set of I, ROBOT. It is the latest method to bring the computer graphics world onto the soundstages.

For some scenes, like an action set piece that has Spooner fleeing a house that's being demolished around him by a "demo-bot," the filmmakers used every trick of the trade, combining location and studio live action, green screen, computer graphics, miniatures, and models. "Alex loves to make shots that are detailed and complex and give a lot to the viewer," says John Nelson.

Vancouver-based visual effects house Rainmaker created the digital and miniatures work for that sequence. Model builders spent several months constructing 1/4 and 1/6-scale miniatures of Lanning's house; each was destroyed in about three seconds. Approximately 30,000 man-hours were necessary to get that few seconds of film.

The miniature house was constructed of 30,000 individual bricks, which were cast in Toronto and matched to the exact color of the bricks that were in the actual house built on location in Vancouver. A quarter scale 'demo-bot' model was also constructed to interact with the miniature of Lanning's house.