Xtreme Teams

Fifteen minutes after Lopez arrives, a group of about 20 artists and animators gather in the darkened cinema at the ILM complex. They are reviewing scenes before shipping them to director Barry Sonnenfeld, who worked with both Lopez and visual-effects supervisor Eric Brevig on Sonnenfeld's previous film, "Men in Black." As the group members noisily take their seats, their wisecracks belie the serious purpose of the session: This is a test. If the scenes don't pass Brevig's critique, the artists will have to spend hours fine-tuning shots that they've already been working on for weeks. The lights go down, and the film starts rolling. The reel includes a half-dozen three- or four-second scenes that speed by without sound. After each snippet, Brevig backs up the reel and views each scene several more times.

One scene shows Will Smith dismounting his horse in front of the White House. The White House, its lawn, and a wrought-iron gate have all been digitally created. The only "real" parts of the scene are Smith and his horse, which were shot together against a blue screen and later superimposed on a digital background. The result is flawless -- or, rather, it appears to be when it flies by the first time. But Brevig slows the reel and calls attention to Smith's foot as it swings over the horse's back. When viewed in slow motion, the edges of Smith's shoe stand out starkly against the background. The foot looks as if it has been pasted in.

"Can you do anything about that?" he asks. Brevig, 42, who is a 10-year ILM veteran, knows how to fix the shot. But he keeps the answer to himself.

"I'll go back in and try a radial blur," one animator responds. "Great," Brevig says.

This exchange demonstrates one of the team's unwritten rules: Never tell people how to do their jobs. Instead, present them with a challenge, and then let them choose the best way to attack it.

"Even when I have an idea or a plan, I try to invite people to be part of the problem solving," Brevig says. "That way, they feel like part of the team -- and they usually come up with a better idea than mine."

Dan Taylor, the team's animation supervisor, puts it this way: "You can't turn people into just a pair of hands. It's always a mistake to dictate how a shot should be done. Doing so completely devalues people and their creative abilities. How can people get excited about being part of that kind of a team?"

That kind of hands-off management is the perfect strategy to push a team to become extreme, says Jean Lipman-Blumen. "You want to create an environment that allows people to think for themselves and to take chances," she says. "And that means loosening controls, rather than tightening them. It means organizing not more but less. Check people's work, but leave how they do that work to their discretion. Don't get involved in the details of execution."

The ILM team's just-delegate-it approach worked particularly well during its creation of the 90-foot-tall mechanical tarantula -- an invention of the film's villain, Dr. Loveless (played by Kenneth Branagh). Unlike most visual-effects mechanisms, the spider wasn't built in full scale or in model form. Instead, one leg was constructed, and the rest was drawn digitally. To learn how to mimic the movements of a real spider, the animation team spent hours watching documentaries on arachnids. Studying those documentaries enabled the team to make sure that the digital spider's movements would be realistic. The final digital creation has more than 150 moving parts, including pulleys and cables that appear to pull taut and then to go slack as the tarantula moves. Not only did the animation team deliver a realistic, evil-looking, soot-belching machine, but it did so on time -- with only half as many animators as Brevig originally thought he would need. "There was no way that anyone could have told the team how to build that thing," Taylor says simply. "That had never been done before."

Digital painter Bridget Goodman, 34, created the look of the spider's tarnished, soot-smeared exterior. She did so by building a vast database of thousands of colors and textures, and by studying old "Star Wars" films to get a sense of how to shade the contraption realistically. Her task was nerve-racking. The movie's success hinged on her ability to make the spider look real, and she had to bring rough drafts of her work to daily critiquing sessions. "It's hard for people to understand what you're visualizing in your head when all they're seeing is the beginning of a painting that looks nothing like your end idea. But they hung in there with me," Goodman says. "Jacqui [Lopez] trusted me as an artist, and that was a pretty amazing feeling."