By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Summer 2017

At the 2013 Academy Awards, Bill Westenhofer, coveted visual effects supervisor (most recently of Wonder Woman) and former Boy Scout, had an unlikely brush with iconoclasm.

Westenhofer, MS ’95, had just won his second Oscar, this one for making a computer-generated tiger look like a real tiger in director Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. He got to the Dolby Theatre stage, fist-pumped the heavy golden statue a few times, briefly reveled in the applause of 3,400 peers and their plus-ones and started his 65-second acceptance speech. He knew it was 65 seconds because he timed it.

Westenhofer made his thank yous and demurred to the enablers of his success. He smiled and looked dashing in his tuxedo, goatee groomed and hair combed. Everything was cool for about 45 seconds, which is roughly the max thank-you time allotted to Oscar winners who aren’t actors or directors—he knew that because he timed those speeches, too—so he wasn’t surprised when the red light that means “wrap it up, not-famous guy” started flashing. When he didn’t finish, he got hit with the Jaws theme, played louder and louder, in lieu of the soft orchestral music typically used to hustle away the technical achievers.

Nineteen seconds of Jaws later, after Westenhofer brazenly persisted beyond the requisite thank yous to what he really wanted to say—what he felt he needed to say—his mic got cut.

“I saw him in the dark, screaming and waving,” says Lee, who was seated about seven rows back to the right and would go on to win best director that night. “He refused to come down.”

Thirteen days before Westenhofer accepted his Oscar on Feb. 24, 2013, the visual effects company he worked for, the U.S.-based Rhythm and Hues, filed for bankruptcy after years of slimming profit margins. Many foreign governments give effects companies subsidies that allow VFX studios abroad to underbid their unsubsidized American rivals, who have either shuttered, or opened outposts in places like Canada or the United Kingdom. Rhythm and Hues hazarded a Vancouver studio but couldn’t make it work. The subsidies, which can be as much as 30 percent, have set off a VFX diaspora, making itinerants of effects workers and shriveling Los Angeles from hub to husk.

“I know people who have quit the film industry entirely,” says Joe Fordham, an editor at Cinefex magazine, which has covered the visual effects industry since 1980. “They’ve gone to work in games or related technologies. They just don’t want to take part in what can be a young man’s or a young woman’s game or, most pointedly, a single person’s game because it’s not conducive to a stable living environment.”

What’s left of the L.A. effects industry, including a diminished and now foreign-owned Rhythm and Hues, handles mostly television shows and commercials. Founded in 1987, Rhythm and Hues did the effects for The Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games franchises as well as The Golden Compass (2007), for which Westenhofer won his first Academy Award.

It’s all so confusing.

Visual effects-centric movies were (and remain) Hollywood’s mint. According to Box Office Mojo, 30 films have made a billion dollars or more worldwide, and all of them rely CGI to some extent. But here was one of the industry’s most established effects companies dying as it, for a third time, claimed cinema’s greatest honor.

Westenhofer thought it might be worth a mention.

“It wasn’t going to be controversial,” says the 49-year-old Westenhofer three years later. He’s relaxed on a wraparound couch in his glassy Pasadena, Calif., home. “My point was that we were honoring visual effects, and the fact that there are so many visual effects in films today. But it’s ironic that at the same time, the visual effects companies responsible are going out of business, and we need to be careful. Don’t think of visual effects as a commodity, because we are artists, and with the practices going on, we’re risking losing the artistry that was being recognized that night. That was really it.”

Westenhofer doesn’t believe any dark cabal of Hollywood suits muzzled him. He’s too rational for that. He also says a high-ranking Academy official and friend assured him that was not the case. Lee dismisses the conspiracy theory explanation, too, saying that Westenhofer’s speech just “got long.” Still, the whole affair was odd.

The presenters of “Best Achievement in Visual Effects” even muffed the award’s introduction. The cast of The Avengers—a superhero team-up movie, the existence of which is predicated on sophisticated visual effects—handed out the best effects Oscar.

When Samuel L. Jackson appeared to ignore the teleprompter and the VFX praise typed within, Robert Downey Jr. corrected him. A great awkwardness ensued and Jackson announced the winner.

Westenhofer says Downey apologized as they walked off stage but the whole proceeding—the presentation flub, the cut sound, Westenhofer raving into a dead mic—smelled, albeit faintly, of conspiratorial suppression. And it all looked worse because of the hundreds of irate and union-less VFXers outside the Dolby Theatre that night protesting industry working conditions—18- hour days, constant relocation, no job stability.

“I think the interesting result is that by being cut off and played off,” Westenhofer says, “it got more resonance than it would have if I actually said it.”

The man on the grassy knoll. The Moon landing. William Charles Westenhofer at the 2013 Oscars.

Westenhofer did not become the face of aggrieved VFXers—that’s blogger Daniel Lay, known better as @VFXSoldier—and it’s unlikely that in coming years he’ll supplant Che Guevara on the black t-shirts of revolution-enamored youths. But friends say it did not surprise them that Westenhofer spoke up.

“I know he’d been thinking about it,” says Derek Spears, a former Rhythm and Hues colleague who served as the visual effects supervisor for X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) and currently works on Game of Thrones. “I think we even talked about it beforehand if he was going to say anything. He prepared.”

As an effects supervisor, Westenhofer has considerable influence on a film set. His job coils through every department and he spends most of a shoot seated at the right hand of the director.

He doesn’t have explicit veto power but people always listen when he explains the consequences of odd decisions. Ares, Greek god of war and the bad guy in Wonder Woman, for example, was nearly a literal big cloud. Basically, Westenhofer knew what he was talking about and he had the credibility to say it.

“You’re never going to slip anything by Bill Westenhofer,” says Bill Kroyer, another former Rhythm and Hues colleague, who now is the director of Chapman University’s digital arts program. “It’s never gonna happen. You just know that this is a guy who absolutely knows what’s going on.”

Westenhofer is a strange confluence of art and science. He drew flipbooks as a kid, aspired to be a Disney animator and learned storytelling from playing Dungeons and Dragons. He discovered computer programming as a teen, then computer graphics in high school, and at that moment, his art and science proclivities coalesced. He earned an engineering degree at Bucknell, studied computer science at GW and then coded satellite programs and other more top-secret things at GE Aerospace before decamping to Hollywood, inspired by the CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

Westenhofer is logical and methodical, respected and occasionally wooed, having been the visual effects supervisor on, notably, Warcraft (2016), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Elf (2003) and Men in Black II (2002). A studio executive, according to Kroyer, once offered to delay production on a movie costing hundreds of millions of dollars just so Westenhofer could oversee the visual effects.

At this point in his career, he doesn’t apply for jobs. Warner Bros. called him to work on this summer’s $149 million Wonder Woman. In a way, moviemaking is defined and perpetuated by its romance, and the visual effects field doesn’t have much.

Unlike directors, cinematographers, production designers, etc.—essential to filmmaking since its nascence—visual effects artists came to prominence only in 1993 after 50 or so VFX shots helped make Jurassic Park not just a seminal film but an un-killable franchise. Today, those making the visual effects tend to be seen more as machines than artisans, assumed to lurk in cubicles and button-clicking while everyone else makes art.

“I think it’s wrong,” Lee says. “That’s something I noticed right away. Most of them are artists but they never see directors, nobody talks to them, nobody treats them like artists. It’s so unfair. … They’re not visual effects; they’re visual art.”

Three years later, Westenhofer’s 2013 Oscar speech-interruptus is a blip remembered by those affected—the artists underrepresented and the companies bankrupted or sent overseas—but deep down everyone knows that green screens don’t self-composite and magic doesn’t make itself.

WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE

To tell an essential part of Wonder Woman’s backstory, Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins envisioned something like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—but alive.

“Now,” Jenkins says, “you think about the steps that need to happen to do that because that painting doesn’t exist. So you have to get the painting. You have to hire the artists who can do the painting and then you have to get the painting in 3-D. Then you have to separate all the layers, then you have to animate them. It’s incredibly complicated.”

If pulled off, this living CGI fresco would be an agile way of unloading otherwise dense exposition while having the feel of a mural a boy wizard might pass on his way to make love potion No. 9.

“Getting a real painting to come to life and move the way it did,” Jenkins says, “that was something that nobody had done, to that extent.”

The sequence, which is used to teach a young Wonder Woman (and us) about the history of her Amazon people and the movie’s deicidal villain, took a year and a half to produce. The process, involving about 40 U.S. and Polish artists creating a CGI painting, started before principal filming and ended a few weeks before Wonder Woman’s June 2 opening.

The inspiration for it, in part, came from the Polish effects company Platige, which in 2012 animated a 19th-century oil painting, Jan Matejko’s “The Battle of Grunwald.” Platige helped create the CGI painting in Wonder Woman. The result is a high-art motion comic, and Jenkins, inexperienced in expensive visual effects-driven movies, leaned hard on VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer to make it happen.

“Bill was a massive part of that—and also doing something that had never been done before,” Jenkins says. “And he succeeded at it.”

Before Wonder Woman, Jenkins, who spent the last decade working primarily in television, had directed only one other movie: 2003’s Monster, which starred an Oscar-winning Charlize Theron. The film, about a prostitute-turned-serial killer, had a budget of about $8 million and little need of digital effects. Wonder Woman, however, cost nearly 19 times that and included more than 1,700 effects shots. Some were as big as the almost-entirely-CGI last-act super fight between Wonder Woman and Ares. Others were as small as removing a modern street sign in the background of what was supposed to be 1918 London or getting rid of a belly button indentation on Wonder Woman’s training cuirass that studio types, upon later review, decided wasn’t a good look.

Westenhofer says it cost about $1,000 per navel erasure, each installment part of a roughly $30 million effects budget.

There also was a lot of pressure on this movie to not stink. It is the first woman-led superhero movie during the current superhero-movie boom and it is the rare big-budget film directed by a woman. It also had been charged with redeeming and righting Warner Bros.’ critically despised efforts to mimic Marvel’s lauded interconnected superhero cinematic universe.

The first entries in a new series of movies featuring the Warner Bros.-owned DC Comics characters, Man of Steel (2013), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Suicide Squad (2016), averaged a “rotten” 36 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a website that aggregates movie reviews. A rating of 60 percent or better is considered “fresh.” Wonder Woman has a 92 percent rating and as of late July had made more than $786 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing installment in the DC Extended Universe as well as the highest-grossing film directed by a woman.

Jenkins says Westenhofer, who prepared for Wonder Woman in part by reading comics and looking for classic/iconic poses, counseled her on directing a visual effects-heavy movie, helping her use a tool that is easy to abuse and spectators are quick to excoriate.

Wonder Woman is Westenhofer’s 18th film as a visual effects supervisor. His next is to be determined but his options include Wonder Woman 2 (which recently got a December 2019 release date) and a yet-to-be-greenlit Ang Lee project that would involve making a run at conquesting the uncanny valley, the theory that human replicas are never human enough and thus really creepy to actual humans. His first outing as a VFX supervisor was Babe: Pig in the City in 1998.

When Rhythm and Hues—which hired Westenhofer at an industry conference in Orlando, Fla., when he was 26 and still working at GE—was approached about doing the visual effects on the Babe sequel, Westenhofer says, the other supervisors were occupied on other projects. So, after some on-set serendipity, Westenhofer ended up as the VFX supervisor. By then, he had worked in varying capacities on five movies, starting with Batman Forever in 1995.

“It turned out the supervisor that they had [on Babe] was kind of overwhelmed, and I really took over and got this job by filling the vacuum,” Westenhofer says. “So I really completely lucked out. The opportunity presented itself, and I didn’t [mess] it up.”

The break that led to Westenhofer’s highest-profile achievement came seven years later on 2005’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Buoyed by his work on Cats and Dogs (2001), he got picked to create Aslan, the god lion in C.S. Lewis’s seven-book Narnia series. Aslan begot Life of Pi and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

NEVER TOO OLD TO BEGIN THE TRAINING

Over two May days in lush Pasadena with Bill Westenhofer, plus a few phone calls, Star Wars came up a lot. First, in his apartment, where his two Academy Awards keep a golden vigil beneath a wall-bound flatscreen, there was discussion of The Force Awakens.

As any critically thinking Star Wars buff might, Westenhofer has questions about Episode VII:

★ The part where ersatz Darth Vader Kylo Ren can’t muster enough Force to figure out that he’s close enough to Han Solo to smell the wookiee dander on his pants.

“So this guy can sense Han from a billion miles away but he can’t tell when he’s 20 feet away?”

★ The lightsaber fight in which recent Force-initiate Rey mops the planet-turned-death ray with the professionally Force-trained (or so we’re told) Kylo Ren.

“You have a girl who can hold her own against a Sith lord, when it took Luke three movies to get there.”

Maybe Kylo Ren’s not very good? And he’d also just been shot by Chewie.

“That’s true. Could be. Maybe he sucks. Maybe the reason he doesn’t want anymore Jedis to exist is because he realized he’s terrible and he’s embarrassed.”

Next, at an outdoor lunch on a gray day at an Old Town Pasadena restaurant, Westenhofer talked about the early days of visual effects, specifically those of the original Star Wars.

When it hit theaters in the summer of 1977, Westenhofer, then 9 years old, already had a thing for outer space. He drew Saturn V rockets and contemplated a not-so-sci-fi future in which mankind subdues the galaxy. His mother tells him he watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 (he was 1 ½ at the time), and in April 1981, he skipped school to see the first Space Shuttle launch. His love of space persists today—he can’t wait for commercial spaceflight—and his mind remains thoroughly blown by Star Wars.

He saw it in suburban Cleveland after taking a solo plane ride (his first) to visit a friend who moved there after first grade from their native Brookfield, Conn.

“I went out there and was just flabbergasted,” he says.

Westenhofer promptly got all the toys and made primitive stop-motion films with them, recreating sequences from the movie and devising his own. He has been less successful recreating what he felt the first time he saw Star Wars, now known as Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. To this day, all he remembers about 1977 is Elvis died and Star Wars debuted.

“Every time I go back to see a new Star Wars… I keep going in with this secret desire that there may be something that feels anything like that experience of seeing the first Star Wars,” Westenhofer says. “And nothing has happened yet.”

Star Wars lit off modern geek culture and today stands forebear to the visual effects-dependent movies that dominate American summers and the space beneath our Christmas trees. It also calcified Westenhofer’s interest in movie-made illusion. After seeing Star Wars, he, too, wanted to purvey wonder.

TIGER, TIGER BURNING BRIGHT

When Ang Lee decided to adapt into a movie Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s 2001 novel about a boy shipwrecked with a Bengal tiger, he knew he needed visual effects to make it happen. He also knew he wanted those visual effects to be 3-D.

What Lee didn’t want was the standard effects fare: destroying by alien invasion/natural calamity a major U.S. city; shooting a laser beam into a sky hole; superheroes engaging in escalating feats of collateral damage.

One of the most versatile and liberating moviemaking tools to evolve since George Méliès eye-poked the moon with a rocket ship, visual effects, according to Lee, have not been used to their maximum artistic potential.

“Visual effects has been very expensive and is being mostly used in blowing cars up and to make monsters,” Lee says.

Lee sought elegance and he sought art. He found Bill Westenhofer.

“With any head of a department, the quality I value the most is they talk to me about filmmaking and drama, not their specialty, not the job requirement,” Lee says. “That’s the kind of filmmaker I like. Bill is that type. We talked about movies, philosophies. He’s a filmmaker, not just a technical adviser. So that’s the quality I really cherish.”

Lee says he selected Westenhofer and his then-studio Rhythm & Hues (Westenhofer turned freelancer after the 2013 bankruptcy) out of a pool of four or five competitors. He picked Westenhofer for his aforementioned cineaste sensibilities, his experience creating CGI animals and his eagerness to render a real-to-life tiger in three dimensions.

“Everyone was very intimidated by 3-D,” Lee says. “That was pretty new at the time for live pictures, to do a believable tiger—a realistic tiger, to the degree I’m describing. And I [wasn’t] even sure it was feasible in 2-D—and I wanted 3-D. That scared most of them.”

As a test, Lee asked Westenhofer to take footage of Aslan from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and “dimensionalize” it. Make it 3-D, essentially. Lee had strict rules, though. Westenhofer was not to enhance or improve the lion. Lee wanted it converted, as is, to get a baseline. Westenhofer, brave soul, obliged.

“We put them side by side and screened it, and the 3-D was actually more believable,” Lee says.

Life of Pi gave Westenhofer a chance to do something new and blow minds as Star Wars once blew his. Everyone’s seen talking animal movies. Westenhofer’s made four of them. The appeal of Pi was that this tiger had no anthropomorphic tendencies. Richard Parker was just supposed to be a regular, non-talking Bengal tiger.

By 2012, the year Life of Pi came out, that had not been done to the extent Lee wanted to do it. Realistic CGI animals had supplementary parts. They were background, not talent. Less than 30 shots in Life of Pi feature a real tiger, and good luck to you and your sanity picking them out.

Westenhofer says the key that allowed for the creation of a believable digital tiger was, first, computing power. It took 15,000 processors and more than four terabytes of storage, or about 4.1 million megabytes. Our typical civilian laptops have just one processor and 64 gigabytes of storage (64,000 megabytes).

The second part was a more eloquent understanding of how light interacts with a surface. Objects are not opaque. Light penetrates, bounces around inside and then comes out, giving things, tigers and us a dim, dim glow. There also is ambient light to consider and how, for example, the color of a watery sunset will tint a tiger’s pelage.

To conquer the animal uncanny valley, Westenhofer says he and his artists studied tigers for eight months. There were four of them, all Bengal, brought from northern France to the set in Taiwan by a breeder.

“We’d done a lot of animal work,” Westenhofer says, “but Aslan talks, so obviously someone is going to watch this and know … there’s some sort of trickery involved. But we were going to have to make a real tiger that was just going to be a tiger, so if there’s ever a chance to fool somebody, this was it.”

DIRECT MAGIC?

Bill Westenhofer’s home office is too clean to be that interesting. It’s a big white square with multiple fancy computer monitors, a flatscreen, and California sunshine through one giant window.

Hanging in a corner are prop swords from movies he’s worked on and there’s a V-shaped shelf that wraps around not quite half of the room. It holds textbooks and comics, and toys branded off his movies.

He’s showing the 10-minute visual effects Wonder Woman highlight video that he will obligatorily submit to the Academy for Oscar consideration. It’s early May and the movie is about a month from being released, so he’s ruining the ending. But that’s fine. He doesn’t think Wonder Woman will win. Superhero movies are not Academy darlings, he says. But, you know, what the hell.

“Gemini Man, if we were to pull it off, that might be something that had a chance,” says Westenhofer, referring to the in-the-works Ang Lee project. The film is about a struggle between a man and his clone, which means the visual effects would have to traverse the uncanny valley. This was most recently attempted in Rogue One (2016), which digitally resurrected Peter Cushing from the dark beyond.

“You can’t think about it,” Westenhofer continues about winning an Oscar, “because it’s such a luck-of-the-moment thing.”

After 18 turns as a visual effects supervisor and two Academy Awards, Westenhofer is asked if he ever wants to do anything other than visual effects. He mentions, at various points during several conversations, that he’s always been intrigued by video game design. He is a gamer and a virtual reality enthusiast and believes the next big thing in movies will be real-time compositing, meaning that backgrounds and sets will be filled in as the movie’s filmed.

He helped innovate something similar on Warcraft, which, for the first time, let a person see, in camera, the motion-capture actor as a low-res version of the digital character he or she is playing. Westenhofer estimates that real-time compositing technology sophisticated enough to carry a big movie is still five or so years away.

Westenhofer is then asked if he would ever direct. Considering that visual effects are so essential to a certain kind of filmmaking today, it’s logical that more directors would come from that realm. A few have made the switch. Among the most successful is Andrew Adamson who directed Shrek and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Gareth Edwards, who directed Rogue One and 2014’s Godzilla, is another VFX alum.

Westenhofer finds the prospect of directing intriguing but he admits that, without some very strenuous lobbying on his part, it would be difficult to get a shot at the kind of movie he’s accustomed to doing. It’s more likely, he says, that he’d start on something cheaper, like a TV show, where he could experiment with the real-time rendering. He’s also not sure if he’s temperamentally equipped to deal with actors. Helping them visualize what, eventually, is going to be on the big, blank, green wall behind them is one thing. But cosseting their often multimillion-dollar self-esteem, that’s, well, dispiriting.

“As the [visual effects] supervisor,” Westenhofer says, “you’re sitting in the chair by the director the entire time, and you suggest camera moves, and I know from watching that I’d be able to put together a visual sequence, but dealing with actors’ personalities, I don’t know that I have the patience for that, especially those with the more idiotic egos. I’ve watched some directors do the dance to appease them and it’s like, ‘Oh, god, really?’”

Also potentially impeding the move is brain-wiring.

Bill Kroyer, one of Westenhofer’s former fellow visual effects supervisors at Rhythm and Hues, says effects people can have trouble grasping story and character well enough to direct, getting stuck on technicalities while lapsing on mood and feeling. (For example, Edwards’s films are not often praised for their dynamic characters.)

Kroyer says Westenhofer on occasion has been guilty of this. When the pair worked on Cats and Dogs, a movie about talking cats and dogs, Kroyer says, Westenhofer got hung up on perfectly syncing syllables with a talking animal’s mouth. People, Kroyer contends, do not speak that way and he fought for some elision.

“[Westenhofer] was so technically precise that he wanted you to hit every last thing,” says Kroyer, a former Disney animator who worked on Tron (1982) before becoming a director. He’s now a professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. “He felt that that made the character more believable if they were really articulate in their dialogue. … I’d say, ‘Well, the feeling is there and you don’t want to get that precise,’ and he’d go, ‘No, I want to get that precise.’

“To this day, I still enjoy seeing live-action characters say things without moving their lips.”

It’s a small criticism—it’s a his-biggest-weakness-is-he-cares-too-much-type thing—and despite it, Kroyer says Westenhofer has earned his directorial shot, one justified by his technical acumen, his organization and the fact that people just seem to like working with him, a man all-enamored by his craft.

“The best moment,” Westenhofer says, “is when you’ve thought about something in your head and spent weeks and weeks—months—shooting something and the effects team goes off and works on it and finally you see it for the first time. All by myself, I’ll just sit and play it.

“There’s a scene in Warcraft where they come to this town, to this cornfield area, which is completely synthetic and we spent some time designing it, but when I first had the sequence put together, I think I didn’t go to sleep until 3 in the morning because I was just watching it.”

Westenhofer is lukewarm on the prospect of directing. He gives himself a one-in-three chance at making the switch, but everyone, of course, thinks about what could be. Right now, it’s clear that he likes where he is and what he does too much. He likes pulling art from science to engineer wonder. He likes making magic.

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