The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2009
John Kilkenny
In Hollywood, the Best Is Always Yet to Comeby Eryn Burkhart and Ford Burkhart
photo by Max Gerber
On the walls of John Kilkenny’s office in Hollywood are cool posters for four of his projects: Fantastic Four II: Rise of the Silver Surfer, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Night at the Museum II: Battle of the Smithsonian, and Live Free or Die Hard. They’d go nicely with some popcorn while you wait for Avatar, quite possibly his grandest yet.
Kilkenny can enjoy the posters now. When it was crunch time and he was getting the visual effects just right, with an army of artists perfecting hundreds of scenes, on deadline, with millions of dollars at stake — well, it wasn’t always that much fun.
Kilkenny, a 1985 University of Arizona graduate who received an honorary doctorate in May 2009, works at the pinnacle of what is arguably America’s greatest contribution to global culture: the movie industry. As executive vice president for visual effects at 20th Century Fox, he oversees the effects for the movie Avatar (to be released Dec. 18), including 3-D technology that The New York Times predicts will “change filmmaking forever.” Kilkenny promises that future blockbusters will continue to dazzle even those of us familiar with the sinking oceanliner in Titanic (scenes he produced using a 45-foot partial model of the 800-foot-long cruise ship in a tank on a stage on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles) or his team’s computer-generated actor in I, Robot (the effect was nominated for an Oscar).
“Every movie we do gives us different technical challenges,” he said in an interview, “and that’s the good thing about digital effects — it’s always growing, it’s always changing, and you always have to try to outdo yourself. You have to do it bigger, better, faster, cheaper.”
As a surprise to the May 2009 UA media-arts graduates, he predicted that some technicians of the future will learn the ropes at the UA in visual-effects classes he is helping set up and in internships at 20th Century Fox. He said a UA visual-effects program would be the first at a major U.S. university.
“I see my competition,” he told a packed Centennial Hall in May 2009, to strong applause.
During breaks from his work on Avatar, written and directed by Academy Award winner James Cameron (Titanic), Kilkenny talked about the unlikely career path of a kid from Tempe, Ariz., who began work in television as a UA student intern at Tucson television stations KVOA and KGUN. He ran the ASUA concert division, booking Barry Manilow and Kenny Rogers. After college, he was a sportscaster in El Paso, then felt the pull of Hollywood, where he slept on a friend’s couch while getting his start. He became a freelance commercials producer, and recalls his first “great moment”: a Peter Pan peanut butter commercial. He hired on with Roger Corman doing low-budget movies before connecting with Digital Domain, co-owned by James Cameron, where he became a senior producer of commercials. He worked on visual effects at Digital Domain, where he landed that assignment on Titanic.
“It was the end part of Titanic when it completely goes underwater and the camera’s up overhead, and the actors are holding onto the railing,” Kilkenny recalls. “The big obstacle we had to battle was the water. Water doesn’t scale very well. We had to build a very large miniature of the back part of the ship, large enough so the water would look OK. A bubble or a ripple could blow the scale.”
And how do you shoot a scene when the main actor doesn’t exist, as in I, Robot?
“We had a lead character who was all digital effects. It was all computer generated, and yet it was a performance. If the performance didn’t work, the movie wouldn’t work.” As the visual-effects producer, Kilkenny inserted a robot into scenes where an actor, Alan Tudyk, had been on the set, filling the space and voicing the robot. “We would have Alan perform with whatever actor was in the scene. Then we would remove Alan and do it again without him in the shot.
“However, actors play better off of other actors, and almost all the best takes were the takes with him actually in the scene acting. So we had to remove him, and then digitally reproject the set back into the hole that we had cut out in removing him, and then digitally put in the robot.
“It was a challenge we didn’t plan on having,” Kilkenny says.
To perform the camera moves, he used a new process that lets the producers see (in a monitor) what will be added later in the digital set. “When we built the digital set, it matched perfectly.”
That process allows flexibility in the shooting schedule. “A director can choose to shoot a scene a certain way, knowing that objects can be edited in or out. Say there’s a crane in the shot. It would take too long to get someone to move the crane. So you go ahead and film it, and we’ll paint it out.”
A single movie these days can employ 10 to 12 visual-effects companies, each with its own specialty, with 250 to 800 digital artists working on 1,000 shots. “The movies are getting more elaborate and the schedules are getting shorter, so the only way to make them happen is to have many artists working on it at once. My department at Fox could have 15 films running through it at any one time.”
Kilkenny directs the work of several 20th Century Fox units — TCF, Fox 2000 Pictures, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and handles films shared with New Regency Productions. He makes up the budgets, then figures out how to do the movie. “Once we are a ‘go,’ I hand it over to the creative team we hired to do the movie,” he says. “I work with the director and the producer of the film to help him get his vision up on the screen.
“During the approval process, they present shots to me and I’ll make notes and share those with the director. I’m the liaison between the studio and the filmmakers to make sure that we’re all on the same page.”
Last year, Kilkenny began working on Avatar, a film he is overseeing as “the VFX executive” (VFX is short for visual effects). The New York Times describes it as the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body on a mythical planet, Pandora. Kilkenny predicts the film might be huge, on the scale of Titanic, which took in a record $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales.
That’s the one film Kilkenny isn’t talking about, for now.
Back to Fall 2009 contents