Previsualization - Origins

Origins

Visualization is a central topic in Ansel Adams' writings about photography, where he defines it as "the ability to anticipate a finished image before making the exposure". The term previsualization has been attributed to Minor White who divided visualization into previsualization, referring to visualization while studying the subject; and postvisualization, referring to remembering the visualized image at printing time. However, White himself said that he learned the idea, which he called a "psychological concept" from Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Though the term previsualization was and continues to be used by many noteworthy photographers, and had become part of the vernacular, it is often regarded as redundant.

The earliest planning technique, storyboards, have been used in one form or another since the silent era. The term “storyboard” first came into use at Disney Studios between 1928 and the early 1930s where the typical practice was to present drawn panels of basic action and gags, usually three to six sketches per vertical page. By the 1930s, storyboarding for live action films was common and a regular part of studio art departments.

Disney Studios also created what became known as the Leica reel by filming storyboards and editing them to a soundtrack of the completed film. This technique was essentially the predecessor of modern computer previsualization. Other prototyping techniques used in the 1930s were miniature sets often viewed with a “periscope”, a small optical device with deep depth of field that a director could insert into a miniature set to explore camera angles. Set designers were also using a scenic technique called camera angle projection to create perspective drawings from a plan and elevation blueprint. This allowed them to accurately depict the set as seen by a lens of a specific focal length and film format.

In the 1970s, with the arrival of cost-effective video cameras and editing equipment, most notably, Sony’s ¾-inch video and U-Matic editing systems, animatics came into regular use at ad agencies as sales tool for television commercials and as a guide to the actual production of the work. An animatic is a video recorded version of a hand-drawn storyboard with very limited motion added to convey camera movement or action, accompanied by a soundtrack. Similar to the Leica reel, animatics were primarily used for live action commercials.

The making of the first three Star Wars films, beginning in the mid-'70s, introduced low-cost innovations in pre-planning to refine complex visual effects sequences. George Lucas, working with visual effects artists from the newly established Industrial Light & Magic, used footage of aerial dogfights shots from World War II Hollywood movies to cut together a template for the X-wing space battles in the first Star Wars film. Another innovation included shooting video of toy figures attached to rods; these were hand-manipulated in a miniature set to previsualize the chase through the forest on speeder bikes in Return of the Jedi.

The most comprehensive and revolutionary use of new technology to plan movie sequences came from Francis Ford Coppola, who in making his 1982 musical feature One From the Heart, developed the process he called “electronic cinema”. Through electronic cinema Coppola sought to provide the filmmaker with on-set composing tools that would function as an extension of his thought processes. For the first time, an animatic would be the basis for an entire feature film. The process began with actors performing a dramatic "radio-style" voice recording of the entire script. Storyboard artists then drew more than 1800 individual storyboard frames. These drawings were then recorded onto analog videodisks and edited according to the voice recordings. Once production began, video taken from the video tap of the 35 mm camera(s) shooting the actual movie was used to gradually replace storyboarded stills to give the director a more complete vision of the film’s progress.

Instead of working with the actors on set, Coppola directed while viewing video monitors in the "Silverfish" (nickname) Airstream trailer, outfitted with then state-of-the-art video editing equipment. Video feeds from the five stages at the Hollywood General Studios were fed into the trailer, which also included an off-line editing system, switcher, disk-based still store, and Ultimatte keyers. The setup allowed live and/or taped scenes to be composited with both full size and miniature sets.

Before desktop computers were widely available, pre-visualization was rare and crude, yet still effective. For example, Dennis Muren of Industrial Light and Magic used toy action figures and a lipstick camera to film a miniature version of the Return of the Jedi speeder bike chase. This allowed the film's producers to see a rough version of the sequence before the costly full-scale production started.

3D computer graphics was relatively unheard of until the release of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park in 1993. It included revolutionary visual effects work by Industrial Light and Magic (winning them an Oscar), one of the few companies in the world at the time to use digital technology to create imagery. As a result, computer graphics lent themselves to the design process, when visual effects supervisor (and Photoshop creator) John Knoll asked artist David Dozoretz to do one of the first ever previsualizations for an entire sequence (rather than just the odd shot here and there) in Paramount Pictures' Mission: Impossible.

Producer Rick McCallum showed this sequence to George Lucas, who hired Dozoretz in 1995 for work on the new Star Wars prequels. This represented an early but significant change as it was the first time that previsualization artists reported to the film's director rather than visual effects supervisor.

Since then, previsualization has become an essential tool for large scale film productions, and have been essential for Matrix trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars Episode II and III, War of the Worlds, X-Men, and others. One of the largest recent films to rely heavily on the technique is Superman Returns, which used a large crew of artists to create elaborate pre-visualizations.

In this new era of previz today, a synergy of cutting edge technology has come to fruition using effective classic previs concepts along with real-time and motion capture technology. The forefront of this technology is constantly evolving.

While visual effects companies can offer previsualization services, today many studios hire companies which cater solely to previsualization for large projects. Often, common software packages are used for previs, such as Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder and Softimage XSI. Some directors prefer to do previsualization themselves using inexpensive and user-friendly programs such as StoryBoard Quick, FrameForge 3D Studio, Poser, DAZ Studio, Vue, and Real3d.