Federal Network Visual Effects
and Computer Graphics

STARSHIP TROOPERS
Nominee, Academy Award for Best Visual Effects
About Our Work

Multimedia

Our Credits

Resources

About Our Work
BFTR was asked to come on board the production partway into principal photography, when things weren't working out the way director Paul Verhoeven wanted with the existing graphics work. The Rodger Young bridge shoot was looming, and we had literally two weeks to create dozens of screen displays to play back on set. There were something like thirteen separate screens on the set that needed distinct graphics, and in each of a dozen scenes, different specific things had to be happening on those screens --Carmen logging on the her station, backing out of drydock, plotting courses, checking courses, avoiding collisions and plasma bursts, checking damage, normal mode, red alert mode and so forth-- and almost all of these were specifically what the scenes were about.

Screenwriter and Associate Producer Ed Neumeier was in charge of making sure that Paul got what he wanted, and would come over and discuss the graphics with Van, who would then design and execute the work in Macromedia Director. At first, the conversations all centered around what would just work for the scene and not look too bogus, since it was shooting the next day. As soon as he and Paul started seeing things he liked, the conversations turned to how to make them really cool, and Ed started asking us to "see if we could put a little Thomas Jefferson reference into this graphic." They were able to start getting what they originally envisioned, rather than just having to settle for what they could get.

Pretty soon Ed stopped coming over at all, because he and Paul knew that all they had to do was tell us when the scene was shooting and we'd have something there that was both visually interesting and helped tell the story. The good news was that we were giving the production what they wanted, and we were starting to get ahead of the curve in delivering the graphics; the bad news was that as they realized they could get what they really wanted, they kept adding and featuring more and more graphics in the scenes.

BFTR ended up creating or redesigning virtually every graphic seen in the film, from the laser tattoo parlor, the psychic card game and the KIA wall to the "Tragedy in Buenos Aires" newscast and the interactive interface for the "Johnny kissing Carmen" cartoon seen in the classroom scene (the cartoon itself was created by Playhouse Pictures and delivered to BFTR as an element). We were designing, building and animating graphics around the clock, with digital artist Allen Manning creating the required 3D elements, Casey doing Mac-to-PC file conversions and Tech Coordinator John Lima carrying our work off to the set every morning on his hard drive to supervise their use on set.

One of the tougher aspects of the work was that the graphics had to be interactive for the actors --they had to look like they were manipulating the screens, even though the interaction was actually done by people off-camera. The on-set playback guys were running PCs, so we were bouncing files back and forth in Director from Mac to PC. But most of the graphics became so intricate that they either couldn't play back smoothly or interact quickly enough on set in Director, so we broke each graphic down into separate narrative components and scripted them to play back using aaplayhi, an old Autodesk Animator player program that only worked in DOS! Doing so gave us the ability to have a segment looping onscreen until someone hit a key, when the next linear section could play through to another segment, which would then loop until another key was pressed. It was important for us to make sure that the graphics would perform perfectly on the set, since another company was doing the playback on set and we wanted to make their job easier and be sure that there would not be any problems with the graphics themselves. In the end, BFTR designed and created over a hundred screens and variations for STARSHIP TROOPERS.

Based on our work for the screen graphics and knowing that we were starting to do visual effects on SPAWN, the production asked BFTR to design and create the graphics for the Fed Net sequences which bracket the film. This included not only the basic point-and-click interface of the Federal Network and the bold 3D flying text overlays ("Join Up Now!"), but also the "You Are Here" galaxy map and several animated versions of the Fed Net logo itself, to reflect to mood of the broadcasts --triumphant, mournful, militant, etc. Paul Verhoeven wanted the Fed Net broadcasts to be a cross between old World War Two propaganda films, 1950s sensationalist movie trailers and a high-tech fascist internet display, with the same campy, almost absurdly earnest style as the "Media Break" newscasts that he and Ed Neumeier had achieved in ROBOCOP. Effects house Compound Eye's Mark Sullivan, who was doing the various matte paintings and miniatures for the Fed Council, Port Joe Smith and the Camp Currie troops in formation, had done a text rendering that Paul liked, with a 3D beveled metal look, and we took that as a point of departure in creating an in-your-face style for the text.

Since film editors Mark Goldblatt and Caroline Ross were cutting the film on the Avid Film Composer and we had our own Film Composer in-house, we were able to trade both digital files and videotapes back and forth, matching frame counts and timing for the various graphics and turning around changes quickly as the scenes were re-edited. Lead digital artist Sage Greco worked closely with Van to create and execute the video-resolution previsualizations for approval before recreating the final designs at 2K film resolution. Built and animated entirely on the Macintosh using such programs as ElectricImage, Adobe AfterEffects and Adobe Photoshop (with a couple sneaked in through Strata Studio Pro, courtesy of Sage), these film elements with holdout mattes were then delivered to the other effects houses for compositing.

Coordinator Gail Wise had the task of distributing the BFTR elements in the appropriate digital formats to Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Phil Tippett Studios, Industrial Light and Magic, Compound Eye and Visual Concepts Engineering, who would then overlay our elements on top of their own effects shots. This process was complicated not only by the fact that some effects shots were still being assigned, but by the fact that so many houses were involved in what was essentially one continuous shot for each Fed Net sequence. For example, the opening Fed Net sequence had a 22-second single Tippett composite in which an ILM shot with a BFTR overlay wipes via another BFTR graphic to a Sony ImageWorks shot with a BFTR overlay, which then transitions to a full-screen BFTR shot. In addition to these complexities, considerations had to be made for the home video release, in which the graphic titles were in danger of being cut off by a 1.33 pan&scan video transfer, necessitating separated elements and textless versions of shots by the various houses.

In all, BFTR created nearly four dozen film-resolution graphic elements and shots for the eight Fed Net sequences seen in the film, as well as several other graphics and film overlays for Johnny and Carmen's letters and other scenes.


Multimedia

Some of our work as it appears in STARSHIP TROOPERS

Screen Shots

The flaming version of the FedNet logo

The dramatic announcement of war

The starchart depicting Klendathu's relative position

A fullscreen version of a 'collision alert' screen graphic

A home page from the classroom sequence

Another home page that contains the Jefferson reference

Quicktime Movies

A montage of our visual effects work on the film (Quicktime, 500K, no audio)

A full screen version of our graphics for 'Jupiter Plot' (Quicktime, 300K, no audio)

A montage of our graphics work on STARSHIP TROOPERS (Quicktime, 1.6MB, no audio)

The theatrical trailer for STARSHIP TROOPERS (Quicktime, 6.2MB)

STARSHIP TROOPERS ©1997 TriStar Pictures


Our Credits

STARSHIP TROOPERS
Federal Network Visual Effects and Computer Graphics Imagery by
BANNED FROM THE RANCH ENTERTAINMENT

Visual Effects Supervisor
VAN LING

Visual Effects Producer
CASEY CANNON

Lead Digital Artist
SAGE GRECO

Digital Artists
ALLEN MANNING
ERICH IPPEN

Technical Supervisor
JOHN LIMA

Visual Effects Coordinator
GAIL WISE

Visual Effects Editor
LAURYL DUPLECHAN


Resources


Banned From The Ranch Entertainment Home Page
General Information: info@bftr.com