Foremost among Troopers' most ambitious and difficult images is a shot that begins inside the doomed Fourth Brigade Compound on Planet P, where the troopers' rescue effort ends in despair when they find their comrades massacred. Suddenly, a sergeant screams "Bugs!" and the camera travels with the troopers as they race to take their battle stations along the compound walls. The camera then booms up and over the wall and peers down to reveal over 1,000 bugs attacking. "That was the very first shot we did, and the most horrific," Tippett sighs. "The wind was blowing hard on location, and the boom arm was really long, so when it reached the end of its move, it was bouncing. We have a very good match-move department, but that procedure alone took weeks. Then we had to generate close to 1,000 bugs, mostly Warriors and some Tankers. A normal action shot would last maybe five seconds, but this shot needed to run a bit longer so you could figure out what the hell you were looking at. It probably ran 10 seconds because of the level of abstraction, and it took months to put together."
Forget the angst of animating that many bugs, even using procedural techniques: once the animation was finished, this highly detailed shot then had to be rendered. "I think we had some really bad days where it took something like 60 hours to render a frame," Tippett admits. That means that this 10-second shot which, at 24fps, ran 240 frames took several months to render. "Once we started getting into it, the management of our resources became extremely critical. We had to put a great deal of effort into finding time-, labor- and render-efficient ways of generating the bugs that ultimately got those horrible 60-hour-per-frame renders down to reasonable 25- to 30-hour renders."
To worsen matters, the Planet P compound sequence occurs in broad daylight, which caused further complications in making the bugs look totally photorealistic. "It's a difficult trick to get the lighting to look right," Tippett agrees. "That's where most computer graphics stuff falls apart. Julie Newdoll, our technical director, was in charge of all the computer graphics lighting. Computer graphics creatures often get overlit in daylight situations, which makes them look a bit flat. There was a great deal of controversy as to how we should go about lighting these things in an efficient manner, and it took a while to get the hang of it. I've really got to hand it to Craig and his art department. They built these things and maintained the integrity of form and surface and color. They were very careful to give the surface qualities of the bugs lots of texture, highlight and sheen. They also made them bright enough to have nice shadows but good detail, which allowed them to feel believable in daylight. They certainly went through a design metamorphosis, but by the time we started putting out finals, I was quite shocked; I couldn't have been more pleased."
Tippett credits Amalgamated Dynamics, Inc. (ADI) for fashioning the full-scale mechanical bugs that thrashed the troopers in close-ups, as well as the dozens of dead bugs that peppered the alien landscapes. Additionally, his animators received tremendous support from editor Mark Goldblatt and his team. "It's difficult for an editor to put effects sequences together, because there's nothing in them!" Tippett explains. "There are close to 200 shots in which there was literally nothing going on before we got to them. It's an organizational nightmare fitting all of this together and trying to imagine how long each shot should last."
While the battle sequences were roughly accurate to the director's original storyboards, events conspired to prevent the Troopers crew from moving from various locations to the set. Thus, the final sequence, in which our heroes confront the dreaded Brain Bug, required a great deal of improvisation. "The Brain Bug is a pulpy, horrible creature that Paul always thought of as a God-king, Cthulhu-type thing," Tippett laughs, referring to H.P. Lovecraft's demon god. "He does the nasty job of sucking people's brains out, so there are some human sacrifices happening."
"Paul wanted it to look like a queen termite," adds designer Hayes. "He's into biology, so the Brain Bug looks a bit like a pus sack with flesh-colored, undulating sides that resemble a big intestine. Then there are the Chariot Bugs, the Brain Bug's entourage, which are 4' long cockroach-like things that band together to form a moving carpet which supports him. They're like comic relief."
There was nothing amusing about animating the nasty bug leader, however. "He's a very complicated character," Tippett states. "While all of the other bugs had conventional exoskeletons, the pulpy nature of the Brain Bug necessitated a very complicated flow of shapes. We had some pretty close shots, which took a great deal of time."
Despite co-helming nearly 250 shots for Troopers over the past three years, Tippett has yet to conquer his fear of insects: "It's interesting how the world is divided between people who are either terrified by insects or terrified by reptiles. I never was subject to the fear of reptiles, but insects always gave me the creeps. Making this film was no catharsis."
