How Space Jam Was One The Most Complex VFX Movies EVER!
1,019In 1996 the original Space Jam movie was released and it earned over three times its budget of $80 million. 25 years later Space Jam: A New Legacy was released with a budget of $150 million and it barely broke even. So what went wrong? They had the money to spend, they had a world-renowned NBA star, they had the hype of the 25th anniversary and they had the VFX expertise of ILM and Cinesite. As far as VFX goes both films are incredible.
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Space Jam.
The 1996 original Space Jam could not have been made five years earlier because Michael Jordan's movements would have had to have been precisely choreographed and filmed with a locked-down motion control camera.
Instead, they developed a technique that allowed them to do a free-moving camera style and this technique used a pioneering motion tracking process.
They had red dots positioned on their green screen backgrounds forming 4ft squares, the live-action plates picked up Jordan's movements with the basketball but also picked up the movement of these dots in the background.
The position of these dots was mapped and the CG background could then be "Anchored" to these red dots, each dot corresponding to a certain point in the CG environment, this meant that as the camera moved around Jordan so did the red dots and thusly so did the CG environment.
The red dots were then removed using another piece of Cinesite proprietary software, humorously named "BallBuster".
This technique also gave them a measurement for the speed the background would be moving at and therefore an idea of the amount of motion blur that would be occurring with each movement and that would need to be added to any element in the background.
As movies go, Space Jam had it all, models and miniatures, special effects, traditional and digital animation, digital coloring and compositing, and over 1000 VFX shots. This was at a time when having a few hundred was a lot! Independence Day, for example, had just half that amount.
To really put into context just how ambitious Space Jam was, all of these shots were created at a time when Cinesite's render farm, otherwise known as "Holly", and cost them around $1 million, consisted of just 256MB of RAM and 16 CPUs with only 4GB of memory between them, That's less computing power than most of us have on our cell phones.
Space Jam: A New Legacy.
In A New Legacy, they also pushed the limits of what is possible to achieve with visual effects.
Rather than just bringing Lebron into the Looney Tune World in a similar way to Jordan in the first film, they created a whole Warner Bros Universe where Lebron was transformed into a 2D cartoon character, the Looney tunes were transformed into 3D cartoon characters and professional basketball players were transformed into 3D CG creatures.
The Warner Bros Animation Group or WAG dealt with the 2D animation using new techniques to color and add tonal dimension to the 2D characters, but in order to bring these 2D characters into the realm of 3 dimensions, ILM would need a massive team spread over 3 different time zones.
ILM first had to research how the Looney Tunes characters had evolved since their creation back in the early 1930s right up to present day and then use that progression to help them take their evolution one step further.
Despite all this work A New Legacy received pretty bad reviews in general, many felt that instead of a movie they were watching a shameless 115-minute long advert for Warner Bros content with more cameos and stale catchphrases than storyline.
However, the 1996 Space Jam received similar reviews claiming it was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Michael Jordan, the Warner Bros cartoon characters, and a Nike commercial and yet it did well at the box office.
The original Space Jam knew the audience it was targeting were children and so it was made to capture the children's excitement and enthusiasm.
Space Jam 2 wanted everyone to be its audience and so it tried to cover all the bases but ended up spreading itself so thin that it failed to both excite or enthuse.
Back in 1996 everyone knew and loved both the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan,
In 2021, things have changed, while many people still love sports stars like Lebron James, not many people still know about the Looney Tunes or even understand or like them, and so after 90 years of zany characters, wacky gags, and classic catchphrases, it may finally be time for the Looney Tunes to truly say.
"That's All Folks!"
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