Minnesotan designs vehicles for 'Avatar' ST. CLOUD, Minn. (AP) - St. Cloud native TyRuben Ellingson is no stranger to working at the forefront of pioneering film technology.
After working as virtual effects art director on the Steven Spielberg-directed "Jurassic Park," a film featuring pace-setting computer generated imagery, Ellingson thought he'd never work on a film like it again.
Then, film producer John Landau called him in to be a concept designer and lead vehicle designer for James Cameron's "Avatar" starring Sigourney Weaver, Michelle Rodriguez, Sam Worthington and Stephen Lang.
"I remember looking at ('Jurassic Park') and thinking, 'This is going to freak everyone in the world out,'" Ellingson recalled. "When I got involved in 'Avatar,' it started to feel the same way. It started to feel like what Jim was proposing was so huge and so out of control and so dynamic, it started to make me think, 'Whoa.' This is going to make an impact on culture."
"Avatar" is the first narrative film from Cameron since 1997's "Titanic," a film that racked up 11 Academy Awards and a record $1.8 billion worldwide at the box office.
"Avatar" was a grand idea in Cameron's mind before "Titanic," but the technology of the time wasn't ready. He waited a decade before starting production on his action-adventure, interstellar love story.
What puts the film on the cutting edge is the way it mixes live action and computer animation to create an eye-popping, vivid alien world.
"It's going to be so memorable and so relevant to conversations for the next six months to a year," Ellingson said shortly before the film opened. "But I'm going to say something very risky. I think two weeks after the movie comes out, people are going to stop talking about it in terms of the technology, visual effects and CGI. I don't think that's where the heart of the movie lies."
Ellingson relates "Avatar" to "Titanic," which had viewers "falling in love with being in love." It wasn't about the digital effects Cameron used to bring the Titanic back to life - it was about the story.
"I think that's what's going to happen with 'Avatar.' It's going to go beyond the spectacle of what it is," Ellingson said. "It's about going to another planet and experiencing it first person for yourself in a totality. And then it's about the story. The story is one that's going to speak to every individual."
But for those first few weeks, you can guarantee the main things people will be talking about are the graphics and animation.
Ellingson was one of the first of a handful of designers hired for "Avatar" and the only hired solely to create vehicles. Other artists were later brought in to work under him.
Ellingson first met Cameron in the early 1990s while working at Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic, a post-production visual effects company that worked on Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and "Jurassic Park."
In 2002, Cameron brought Ellingson in to do some conceptual drawings for a science fiction film that has been put on hold.
He began work on "Avatar" in earnest in 2005 and was full-time on the job for about two years starting in 2006 at Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment production company.
"Jim's approach to making films is sort of like a battle. He created a pretty tight infrastructure of people around him, and I was the lead vehicle guy," Ellingson said. Ellingson worked one-on-one with Cameron to conceptualize the vehicles and was the point person in designing them, with the exception of two - the Morning Star and the Valkyrie, which were Cameron's designs.
"Once they're on the planet's surface, all the machinery that's used by the military - the ground vehicles, the flying vehicles, the AMP suit and all the mining equipment - I was the lead designer on," Ellingson said.
Since Cameron has a background in design and is a skilled artist, Ellingson said his main creative job was embellishing Cameron's visionary ideas.
"Then there were some that were an open slate for someone like me to go crazy and do what I felt took advantage of my visionary skills as a designer," Ellingson said.
Ellingson's designs also were transferred to Ubisoft to be used in the video game parallel of "Avatar."
He created other vehicles that were specific only to the game and at least two of those designs ended up working their way back into the film.
"I just got the game this week, and it's fun to see them because I never drove any of the stuff I've built before," he said.
Ellingson grew up surrounded by art.
"My sense of design stems from having had a father who was a printmaker who was dealing with primitive print processes like wood block printing and engraving," Ellingson said. His father, Bill Ellingson, also was an art professor at St. Cloud State University.
Bill Ellingson worked primarily with binary material, blocky designs and compositions based on shapes. TyRuben still uses those fundamental concepts in his movie designs.
"As a designer, I address it first as what is the shape," Ellingson said. He tries to establish shapes with strong silhouettes that are memorable and familiar. "It's like a memorable melody."
His approach to drafting also is fundamental. He starts with pen and paper before transferring his designs to computer and working with 3-D shapes digitally.
An army of illustrators and fabricators was brought in to bring the designs to life.
Ellingson said that knowing the film was going to be made in 3-D had little effect on his designs.
"Jim's not really using it in this picture as something that's meant to be shocking. His take on it is it's like looking in on a universe through a window," Ellingson said.
The biggest challenge for Ellingson was conceptualizing the A.M.P. (MK-6 Armored Mobility Platform) suit, which took about 15 months to design.
"There was a lot of complexities in how Jim saw it operating," Ellingson said of the armored suit that is similar to Weaver's power suit in "Aliens."
"It's an A.M.P. suit because it amplifies the human operator's physicality," Ellingson said. "It's not a lumbering gun tower. This thing is really fast, really big and really heavy."
The most technically demanding aspect of the design was creating the interior mechanics of the suit and the joints.
Often, a simple ball joint is used in similar animated designs.
"What Jim envisioned was something that mimicked exactly the human shoulder," Ellingson said. "It was just technically demanding to figure it all out. The end result was that after you got all that figured out, you had to make it look cool."
Working under Cameron was an awe-inspiring experience, Ellingson said.
"He's a bona fide renaissance genius," he said. "It was as hard as I've ever worked, and it was under really tough circumstances because Jim is a genius and he demands nothing but the very best that you have. He's not afraid to say, 'I want stuff that comes from you that no one else has seen.'"
From here, Ellingson is working on getting his Lone Grove Pictures production company off the ground with director Marc Antidormi. He also hopes to start writing and directing his own films if he can find the time.
He already has more concept design work lined up for two movies in 2010.
"To be sought out and to work at that level, it makes it pretty hard for you to have insecurities," Ellingson said. "I am ecstatic about what I am able to do for a living. That two years on 'Avatar' was bliss."
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