CGSociety

An ILM 'Iron Man 2' artist ignites his career, turning down a job as a firefighter to become a visual effects artist.

CGSociety :: Artist Profile
15 June 2010, by Barbara Robertson

In little more than five and a half years, Chris Balog has worked as digital artist at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) on nine films including Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End,Rush Hour 3, Iron Man, Star Trek, and Iron Man 2. Not bad for the first security guard hired by Pixar Animation Studios.

It’s true. Balog’s first job, right after he graduated from Arizona State in 2000 with a criminal justice major, was as a security officer for Pixar. He worked there for five years, becoming a security coordinator, onsite EMT, and onsite paramedic in the process. In fact, he was on his way toward becoming a firefighter when he decided to become an artist. Now, instead of fighting real-world fires, he’s puzzling together images of explosions, smoke, fire, and other elements to construct final frames for blockbuster movies.

“I know animators who say they love animation and they don’t know how we [compositors] do what we do,” Balog says. “But, to each his own. This is a lot of fun. For Iron Man 2, I got to blow up a bridge, destroy a bunch of cars, and have guys flying through it all. This is a great job.”

It seems a mysterious path -- criminal justice to visual effects -- but four key elements along the way provide clues that, together, show why it worked for him.

First, the spark was always there. His family loved movies and photography. His uncle Jim Balog is a famous nature photographer. His sister is a USC film school graduate. His older brother is a creature supervisor at ILM. “And my dad was really big into photography,” Balog says. “His thing was covered bridges. I think I’ve seen every covered bridge from the Mississippi to Maine.”

So, even though he majored in criminal justice at Arizona State, a place as far away from 17 winters in New Hampshire as he could get, he slipped in a side adventure: He took animation, Photoshop, computer science and web design classes, and tossed in a screenwriting class, as well. And, while in school, he composited his first image by pulling characters out of one image and putting them onto another. “It fascinated me, but I had already decided on my career path,” he says. “I kept it in the back of my mind."

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

JAPANESE GARDEN:
We asked Chris Balog about a shot he composited for Iron Man 2. The shot takes place in the Japanese Garden near the end the film with Iron Man firing everything he’s got against Whiplash.

CB: This started with a plate that had foreground elements shot in daylight and bluescreen behind. Everything came in pieces. The characters, rendered elements, the geometry from layout. We had to make it look like a war zone.

CGS: You’re working in Nuke?

CB: Yeah, there are things you can do in a 3D space that you really can’t do in Shake. For example, in this shot, I would have the geometry for the gun, so I could track muzzle flashes to the axis point of the barrel. The 2D elements would move with the barrel. I had other shots where I had to blow up pillars and cars and in Shake you’re really guessing about how to track things into the plate. In Nuke, I can grab geometry from the characters, put 2D elements on it, and the elements move with the geometry in space. It’s much faster.

CGS: So, other than muzzle flashes, what did you do to turn the garden into a war zone?

CB: Well, they gave us some concept art from our art department, but they also gave us freedom to do what we want to do. The other compositors and I thought it would be great to put some fire in the shot, so I found some elements with trees on fire. And then I started putting in smoke plumes and added embers flying around from the burning trees. Someone put ash on the ground. And if you look, Iron Man is standing in a river, so I added water splashes. I color corrected the interactive lighting to match the color of the sparks and timed the lighting to go off at the same time the sparks went off, and the muzzle flashes to go off at different times.

CGS: You have a lot of motion here that needs to make sense. Do you storyboard shots like this?

CB: No, you just kinda go with it and do a lot of iterations. I’ll put together a first pass with all the elements. Sometimes we get directions. A lot of times I do something that I think is good on my own. I put embers on the dead drone that was on set and they liked that. They loved the muzzle flashes and the sparks. Ben Snow, the vfx supervisor, was like, “I want sparks on every frame.” And, when it went to Jon Favreau, he said, “I want more sparks. I want more embers falling down.” At the end, when the whip slashes across the camera, I added a lens flare and Ben said, “That’s great. You’re done.”

CGS: It sounds like fun.

CB: Oh, it’s great. You get asked to have this guy fire a bunch of guns with tracers and sparks popping off and whips flying around, and you go, “Oh. That’s cool.”

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

His goal after graduation was to join the secret service, but first, he needed real-world experience. So at his brother’s suggestion, he moved to California and interviewed for a corporate security position at ILM. That didn’t work out -- company policy prohibited security officers from working alongside family members. And then, as if Balog’s eventual career in computer graphics were predestined, a security officer he interviewed with at ILM moved to Pixar and hired him.

Fourth, although he pushed into paramedics and beyond at Pixar until he pushed so far he decided to stop, he developed a new skill along the way, and that skill, surprisingly, provided his entre’ into visual effects: He created and managed databases for key distribution, parking information, and so forth, working in Linux. Knowing this, when Balog decided to leave Pixar, a friend suggested he interview for a resource assistant (RA) job at ILM. And this time, it didn’t matter that his brother worked there.

Once at ILM, Balog committed fully to his new career. The former security officer, who counts among his hobbies running, rock climbing, tennis, and working out, poured all that physical and mental energy into becoming a compositor.

Iron Man 2 . credit: © MVL Film Finance LLC & Marvel Entertainment LLC.

“When I came here [to ILM], they asked if I wanted to do what my brother was doing,” Balog says. “I said I wanted to do something different. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved puzzle solving, model building, and putting things together and to me, compositing is the ultimate kind of puzzle solving. You’re the person at the end who takes all the great stuff people have done before you and create the final product. That sounded really fascinating.”

As an RA, Balog placed the data, that is, the resources for a show online – the reference photography, principal photography, information from the clients, and so forth. And, he managed the disk space for the often 50 terabytes or more of information generated during the post production process.

“It was a very entry level job,” Balog says, “but you can advance if you work really hard. So I spent 18 months working really hard and it paid off.”

In fact, the steps Balog took could be a field manual for moving up the artistic ladder. For example, while he was an RA, he realized that he could access all the ongoing work. “I’d pull up the work from shows and just watch it to see how the shots would progress over several weeks,” he says. “I wanted to train my eye to see what they did, what techniques they were using. I’d open up the compositing scripts to see what they’d done and sometimes, I’d ask people how they did something.” He also took advantage of ILM’s online training for software programs. He began learning Shake and then later, Nuke. And the artists at ILM noticed.

Soon, he moved from managing the database into managing the work coming in from outside the studio for the 3D re-issue of Nightmare Before Christmas. From that, he stepped into reviewing work for Pirates 3.“I had done a little roto and paint work on Nightmare,” Balog says, “and I had some great mentors.”

Award winning compositor Eddie Pasquarello began helping him, and Dave Gottlieb became his first compositing mentor. “They started teaching me what to look for,” Balog says. “So when the work came in, I’d make sure the shots had the proper grain. And, I could see where the roto wasn’t correct. For example, they might have done shapes for every individual frame instead of making a shape track for the object throughout the shot, which causes motion blur issues. Stuff like that.”

By the time ILM had finished working on Pirates 3, Balog was a junior compositor doing entry level shots. “I’d put Davey Jones on a plate where he wasn’t crossing anything,” he says. “I just had to make sure he matched the environment. It’s simple A over B work, but you’re the last one touching the shot.”

When post-production work began on Star Trek, ILM was ready for a deeper commitment, and assigned a dedicated mentor to work with Balog. "Conny Fauser sat with me for the whole show,” Balog says. “There are many ways to do a composite, but she made sure what I was doing was technically correct. That gave me a great foundation.”

'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'. credit: Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

He’s learning about other parts of the pipeline, as well, through ILM’s web classes and training programs. “One of the things about being in this industry is that you constantly have to learn,” Balog says. “New software, new techniques. I’ve done paint, roto, and compositing and I know some things about layout. I want to know more about layout and I want to know lighting. If you’re a well-rounded artist you can do new challenges.”

What sort of new challenges? “I tell myself that one thing I would like to do is a shot all by myself from layout to animation to final,” he says. “That probably won’t ever happen; to learn all that would be very difficult. Maybe someday I’ll be a compositing supervisor. But right now, I like doing the shots. People ask me why I work such crazy hours. It’s because I like my job. You get a shot and hear, ‘Here’s the plate. We need a city behind, guys flying through, a bridge on top, explosions going on,’ and you go, ‘Yeah!’ It’s fun. I love it.”

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