Billy Brooks

For me and probably a lot of other visual effects artists, it’s Star Wars of course. In 1977, as a kid of 11 I think or 10, I can’t remember. But going to the theater, seeing that movie, going back another 13 times after that and when I came out of the movie theater the very first time that I saw Star Wars, I said to my mom, that’s what I want to do for a living.

As a kid, I would build models, instead of playing with toys because the toys that came out for the Star Wars by Kenner I think, they were all disproportionate and looked completely wrong and I knew that as a kid and that attention to detail inspired me to actually get the model kits instead. So I’d build the model kits because they were actually proportioned correctly and play with those instead of the actual toys that you’d get in the store.

While I was in college at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, I met a friend whose brother was working at Industrial Light and Magic. He was the model shot supervisor for Star Trek First Contact, and he had just finished working on the Enterprise E, and he asked me if I wanted to come see it and I was like, yes, I do.

Yes, I talked about it for ten years, about coming to California, because I had never been to see him in northern California and I did and I ride to the airport, I’m like, oh my gosh, this is is so cool, San Francisco. We’re driving to [Inaudible: 02:28] County and we stop by ILM on a Sunday. I’m getting goosebumps talking about it. We get there, it’s just this industrial park, nondescript, kind of boring, and it was a Sunday. There was only one person working and he was building some kind of like rock sculptures in the parking lot, painting stuff.

The career highlight for me at ILM was my work with R2D2. I got the real R2D2 at my desk and he was there for about a month and I’m not talking this Sharper Image stuff. It was the real deal, sitting at my desk, for a month, and here we go again but he was there, and I needed reference. I was modeling so I was taking measurements and stuff, but he was sitting there at my desk for a month and every time everybody would come in in the morning, they’d rub R2D2’s head for luck. It was kind of a stupid thing but it’s R2D2 but I was able to own R2D2 for that whole movie.

I designed how he walked up stairs because that was something that came out of the blue. George said, we wanted to save the flying gag for the end of the movie because initially, he was supposed to fly over this bridge but George wanted him to walk up the stairs instead. To save the surprise for the end of the movie for the flying and I sat there for about two days playing with my toy, trying to figure out how R2D2 walks up stairs because he doesn’t really do that.

The core software that I like to play with is Nuke. I use that at work and I like using it outside of work too, to explore how to push the boundaries of 2D and 3D because Nuke has a lot of 3D functionality where you can put—you can have an actual camera and you can put cards and 3D space. You can do camera moves and without having to jump into an actual 3D package, you can do quick iterations by having it within your compositing software.