Culled from the, well…legacy of the Stan Winston School, the appropriately named Legacy FX is one of Hollywood’s leading practical effects company, responsible for some of the most remarkable and beloved film effects of all time. Jurassic Park? Yes. Terminator? Yep. Pacific Rim? You bet. Iron Man, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Avengers: Age of Ultron, the list goes on. They even had a hand in designing Avatar

For their Comic-Con Panel, Legacy team members Alan Scott, John Cherevka, Scott Patton, John Rosengrant, Dave Merritt and Trever Hensley headed up a panel, representing the myriad departments of effects creation, from paint to design to creature creation, and discussed the state of practical effects today in an intimate, small-scale panel that allowed for an open back and forth between the panelists and audience.

This was one of those great panels that reminds you why Comic-Con can be a magical place for nerds. Outside the massive-scale advertising and star fuckery, it can be a wonderful shared experience for people who love the shit out of geeky things and get the rare chance to rub elbows with their idols. Check out the full panel recap below.

Footage

The panel kicked off with a video reel chronicling the steps it takes to build a single animatronic dinosaur for Jurassic World. It’s an informative video that’s essentially a recipe for making a dino, and you can check it our for yourself above.

The Jurassic World video was followed by a similar reel for the work they just put into Terminator: Genisys. This one’s not online yet, but the most interesting part was the process they went through to create the full-body shell of the 1984 T-800 that Sarah Conner lugs around throughout the film. To make a full-scale Arnold dummy, the team worked directly from a body scan Schwarzenegger did for T3, then sculpted the model by hand, added mechanical joints so the body would move appropriately, hand painted the entire model, and inserted a full head of hair, one follicle at a time. It’s a pretty fascinating look into just how much work goes into one fx element, and while they didn’t say exactly when the video would be online, I’d keep an eye out for it.

Panel Highlights

Following the presentation reels, the group engaged in a pretty free-style Q&A fielding questions from the moderator and the crowd. Here are some highlights.

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    Image via Universal Pictures
    Except for Patton, who’s the young gun of the group, the entire team has more than 25 years of experience in the effects industry and all worked personally with the legendary effects guru Stan Winston. The aim of Legacy is to carry over the tradition of his work into the 21st century.
  • Legacy is actively embracing new technology to keep practical effects alive and cutting edge. As was stressed repeatedly throughout the panel, practical effects can only survive if they keep up and integrate new technology.
  • If there’s one theme that was repeated consistently throughout the panel, it’s that effects now must be done in the quickest, most efficient way possible. There’s no room for slow work any more. As a measurement, Rosengrant said they spent a year building the dinosaurs for Jurassic Park and had only 3 months for Jurassic World. Similarly, it took them 3 months to sculpt the first Terminator, but they completed all their work on Terminator: Genysis in the same timeframe.
  • They further reiterated that the timeframe for a completed project has reduced greatly, pointing to the old saying that there was a triangle of production with - fast, cheap, and good - making up the sides. The old belief was that you could have two of those things at the same time - fast and cheap, but not good, good and cheep, but not fast or good and fast, but not cheap - now they are required to deliver all three. In order to prevent sacrificing artistry for speed, they have to constantly embrace new technologies and develop new effects to produce things better and faster.
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    Image via Paramount
    It takes between 75-120 artisans to complete a given job.
  • Patton kicked off his career as a makeup effects artist, but about ten years ago he realized the climate of the industry changed so much athtat speed and effectiveness were the order of the day. What people expected was on such a short time frame that he began rendering 3D designs to present fully realized artwork on the first meeting. Sketches aren’t enough any more.
  • A funny moment - Patton launched into a story about how quickly he rendered the crystal skulls for Steven Spielberg on the last Indiana Jones movie. He cuts himself off, "We're sorry about that, by the way." And multiple people from the audience shout back, "Not your fault!" in unison.
  • What's the best advice for someone who wants to get into effects? Be specific about what you want to do. Learn a particular skill very well - mechanical engieneering, design, painting, sculpting - and learn to embrace the digital arts as well as you do the practical.
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    Image via Universal Pictures
    They also singled out communication as a vital skill to making it in the fx world. You can't just have great ideas, you have to be able to vocalize them and work with a team to bring them to fruition.
  • Like all of filmmaking, effects work is all team work. It isn't a one man show, it's working as a team to produce one element of a much larger film.
  • One of the ideals they like to hold up from Stan Winston is that they're not doing "special effects", a phrase he didn't like very much, they're creating characters. They want to create memorable film characters that they can take pride in.
  • When asked about their greatest epic fail, Rosengrant singled out the famous story of T-Rex in the rain on the first Jurassic Park. The dinosaur was not designed to hold water, so when the scene ended up being filmed in the last act torrential downpour, the Rex got a bad case of the shakes. They had teams at night drying her out with blowdryers and towels so they could make it through the next days shoot. The moral of that story, they said, is that there is no room for an epic fail. There's too much money on the line in filmmaking and if something goes wrong, you have to problem solve an make it work.
  • They ended the panel with an important sentiment - practical effects and digital effects are not diametrically opposed. It's not a battle between the two, it's about how they dovetail to make the best work.
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Image via Legacy Effects