Doug Chiang.
Doug Chiang began his career as a stop motion animator on the TV series Pee Wee’s Playhouse. After attending UCLA film school, he became a commercial director for Rhythm and Hues. After joining ILM, he served as visual effects art director on films such as Terminator 2, Ghost, The Doors, The Mask, Forrest Gump, and Death Becomes Her. From 1995 through 2002, Chiang served as head of the Lucasfilm art department for the Star Wars prequels, after which he worked as a production designer on Robert Zemeckis' motion-capture features The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. From 2006 to 2011, Chiang served as executive vice president of The Walt Disney Company’s ImageMovers Digital, a digital film studio founded by Zemeckis. In 2013, Chiang returned to Lucasfilm to work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He currently serves as Lucasfilm's vice president and executive creative director.
"I first saw Star Wars when I was fifteen, and that set my whole career path because I was so intrigued by what I saw. A year after that I remember watching a documentary on the making of Star Wars, and that really opened my eyes [to the fact] that there were people doing this as a craft. I went to UCLA film school because I figured if I wanted to be in film I should study it, but the curious thing was that it was my art that got me in to the film industry. I started at ILM, George's visual effects house, back in '89, and I came in because I had a strong desire to do visual effects designs and loved to build things, and ILM was in its heyday of visual effects".
"I came in as the new kid in the art department and I learned how to draw and design for film. Because we were such a small company, you could wear many hats. I was very fortunate to be an art director for visual effects on films, and when you do that you can actually participate in everything: in designs, in storyboarding, in going on set to build the miniatures and help with the photography of it. They were all things that I grew up doing, because I used to make short films myself in the basement of my house where I grew up. Each project that I took on I always tried to learn and push myself as much as possible".
"I was fortunate to get into the visual effects industry when it was really transitioning from practical effects to digital effects. We were always trying to learn new techniques, to push the boundaries of what could be created. Computer graphics was an exotic new tool at the time, and it was very untested. Before I came to ILM one of my first jobs out of UCLA was at a company called Digital Production, where we were designing and directing computer generated TV commercials – flying logos and things like that. So when ILM started to make that transition, I was already familiar with how to design for computer graphics, and I felt very comfortable in that medium".
"The great thing about ILM at that time was that we had a great foundation of practical filmmakers who really understood the fundamentals of stage builds, and yet we had this new crew who were coming in to apply new digital tools while leveraging off the experience of the guys who were building things practically. The company at the time was really merging the two technologies, and so the films that I worked on at that time [T2, Jumanji, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump] were pushing those boundaries to see what could be accomplished. Each of those films always demanded new techniques".
"Each film was a little nerve-wracking. We signed on to a film and didn't quite know how we were going to execute it. Part of the thrill was learning that process and then taking that risk and finally succeeding. Death Becomes Her, for instance, was one of the very first times where we used computer graphic imagery to create and distort human bodies. Organic shapes at that time were extremely hard, and to do it seamlessly so that it worked for a story was the big challenge. And the funny thing is that all of that knowledge and all those techniques that we were learning really helped to inform the prequels. It was because of those films, because of Jurassic Park, that George realized that the tools had evolved enough for him to create a new Star Wars to fulfil the vision that he wanted".
"For T2 it was really about creating the T1000. Working at Digital Productions prior to ILM, we did a lot of chrome logos, but we never executed that look on a cinematic level, where you had to really believe it in a live action film. How do you create a computer generated character, have it move in these very exotic ways, and yet have it seamlessly fit in a live action reality? That was a big challenge. If something's not quite right, an audience would instinctively know, and it'd take them out of the experience. When we had the T1000 composited into a scene, it was about: OK, what would a liquid man look like in this lighting? And it's a hard thing, because you can make something look shiny but it has to be believable and it's something that no-one has ever seen before but you think you know what it should look like".
"It's fascinating for me that filmmakers learn very quickly about the new techniques. In some ways I enjoy working with filmmakers who don't come in with expectations. They know what works for the story and then it's up to us to figure out how to execute it. I think that's going to be the new breakthrough. The technology has matured enough that the possibilities of creating synthetic actors that seamlessly blend with live action actors is right there. It's one of those Pandora's Box moments. Once you have that ability you have to be very careful about what you do with it. I think the challenge is really going to be: how do you restrict yourself to do only what you need?"