Holographic Artist: Philip Metschan

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Holographic Artist: Philip Metschan

July 16, 2002

From Web Design to Star Wars

Star Wars is a mostly paperless galaxy. When characters want to convey visual or text information, they don’t unfold a map or scribble something down on a steno pad. Instead, they turn to advanced display systems that project their information in lines of colored light.

Episode II has more holographic readout displays than any previous Star Wars film, and creating those images fell to Philip Metschan, a graphic artist working at Industrial Light & Magic’s art department.

Metschan followed a winding career path that landed him, quite unexpectedly, in a role creating images for the big screen. Having studied art at Oregon State University, Metschan hit the professional scene as a web designer, working in New York for prestigious clients like Gucci and Armani. “I noticed that ILM had a graphic designer position, which doesn’t open up very often. I sent in my portfolio, and was out in the area for a conference and had an interview. Two weeks later, I was on a plane, moving to California,” recalls Metschan.

Metschan began working on the web redesign and launch of the official sites for ILM and Skywalker Sound. “It was really busy here at that time,” he explains. “They needed someone to animate the A.I. logo, with the boy walking out of the logo, and everybody was so busy that they gave it to me. I quickly brushed up on a lot of animation programs, and worked with Joe Latteri to put that together.”

From web design to pinch-hitting logo animation, Metschan graduated to Star Wars. “We started getting all the graphic requirements from the Ranch, which, basically is animated graphic design,” says Metschan. “They said, ‘Hey, Phil can handle this.’ And a few years later, 95 percent of the screens you see in Episode II, I did.”

Starting in Photoshop or Illustrator, Metschan use a variety of animation and compositing tools to create the end effects, including AfterEffects, Lightwave, Maya and Commotion. “For the initial designs, I worked much like a traditional graphic designer, but you have to figure out how you’re going to animate them.”

All of the animated on-screen graphics seen in Episode II were added later in postproduction. On set, the actors would occasionally have a backlit colored sheet of plastic film called translights with a design printed on it to aide in effects lighting. “John Knoll [Visual Effects Supervisor] had asked [Production Designer] Gavin Bocquet and his crew to throw in some quick stuff into the set pieces. When actors are interacting with the screens, the screen lights cast different colors on people’s hands or on different parts of the set,” explains Metschan.

While the translights didn’t necessarily dictate Metschan’s finished designs, they did provide some performance cues that needed to be matched. “Ewan McGregor would just point at it. I had to design the screen so that his finger-points fell near something that looked similar to what he was saying, in this case, ‘just south of the Rishi Maze.’ Then Jocasta Nu comes up and, if you’ll notice, she presses the console three times. I told the compositor that I was really careful about timing something that happened on screen with her. They did a great job of timing it up, because if you watch the movie you know that she’ll hit it three times, and these three highlights appear on that screen and then it zooms up to the close-up version.”

In one case, a practical display that was intended as final was replaced entirely by Metschan’s computer-generated one. A background device in the Lars Homestead got a digital touch-up thanks to Metschan’s displays.

“A few times, I was worried about stepping on people’s toes, because these guys had done some pretty cool designs to throw into the sets,” he admits. “I’m a big Star Wars fan, and I noticed right away that it didn’t quite match the graphics from the very first movie. So I took some quick shots, made little movies from the originals, and in a roundabout way, I did my own version to present to George Lucas. I showed him the originals from ’77, then what was on set, and what I was proposing, and he said, ‘Great, that’s right.'”

The recreation of 1970s-era graphical technology was a continuing challenge for Metschan. “You can’t think like a graphic designer that has all the tools that we have at our disposal. You have to think back to what those guys had to deal with back in 1977,” he notes. “They’d use oscilloscopes and other video effects, like kicking the TV three times and turning it on. Being a fan, I really wanted to stay true to that. It did become an even bigger challenge, though, when there were specific storypoints that George wanted to hit. It can’t be ultra-simple if it needs to convey complicated information. If he wants a flying spaceship with a big target on it, you do it, but you can stylize it with color and whatnot to make it look rougher and older.”

Those rough edges also help convey attitude about character, in some cases. For the Slave I, a ship with display screens that hadn’t been seen in the previous films, Metschan used color to suggest character. “You always got a sense that Boba Fett and Jango Fett were these mean, gritty guys. The ship has a look as well that it’s been tossed together. So, I made the displays all in red so it had a sinister look to it.”

Making the Ultimate Weapon

Also in the evil and red department is a cameo appearance that sent a shiver of recognition to many a surprised fan. The Separatists are seen conspiring to build a very familiar and iconic battle station from the original trilogy, identified in Episode II only as an “ultimate weapon.”
“The Death Star hologram and the war room had to be the most challenging,” says Metschan. “Without telling anyone what I did, I stayed late a couple of nights and did my own version that I thought was a little truer to what Joe Johnston and all the original guys had done. I slipped it into [Visual Effects Supervisor] Pablo Helman’s email, and said, ‘Hey, take a look at this; let me know what you think. Maybe I’m overstepping my bounds, but I think this looks more like the Death Star, and maybe it’ll read better.'”

The following week, to Metschan’s pleasant surprise, Helman incorporated it into a shot for Lucas to review. “I was really excited, because I had done it on my own time, and it could have been a total waste of time. But they ended up going with it, and it became a big part of the end of the movie.”

Though the Death Star is key to the scene, the war room is dominated by an expansive holographic map of the battle, with Republic gunships swarming the ground war like buzzing insects. “A lot of the stuff in the middle of the table I did with a couple of the guys in Animatics. They rendered out quick models for me, but I was allowed to art direct the placement of the elements. You’re talking about holograms that have all these really fine lines in them, and you get them on film and they just blow out, so visually and creatively that sequence was probably the most challenging of all of them.”

In addition to a 1970s motif, there is a pre-existing iconography when it comes to alien text. Many fans are familiar with Aurebesh, a Star Wars language developed in the books based off of screen displays in Return of the Jedi. While the Aurebesh, as it has appeared in spin-off products, does appear in the film, Episode II resurrected an original alphabet expressly designed for the classic trilogy.

“The actual font set hadn’t been used since the first Star Wars, and we found Joe Johnston’s original design of the font in the Archives. I took that, turned it into a font, and used it in a lot of different places,” says Metschan. This classic font, dubbed “Star Wars 76” was joined by two new typefaces — “Mandalorian” for the Slave I, and one for the Geonosians. Eagle-eyed fans looking to translate alien phrases into English won’t find that task an easy one.

“Some of the fonts don’t have 26 letters. Some of them only have 19 or 20. I’d be lying to you if I didn’t tell you that, every once in awhile, there’s someone’s initials I know, somewhere in there, if you hold a mirror up and stand upside down and look at it. But George is very, very keen about noticing things that look like English, because he’s very against any kind of English looking characters in any of the screens or signs.”

Of course, careful scrutinizing of the graphics is still rewarding for those well versed in the little details that help tie the saga together. “In Zam’s binoculars I did put something from the original Star Wars in there,” reveals Metschan. “These two grids, and those are from the original Millennium Falcon, when the TIE fighters are attacking when they leave the Death Star. I threw a lot of stuff like that in, just little original things.”

Coruscant Graphics

Even the placement of the luminous Rishi Maze on the Jedi Archive map has provided some conversation fodder for fans, perhaps shedding some light on just what astronomical phenomena Luke and Leia were looking at at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. “I thought about all that stuff,” he says. “Being such a big fan, I do consider who the people that really look into the details of those things. If you’re one of those fans, you want stuff in there that is rewarding.”

Adding to the Star Wars cultural tapestry is the sometimes gaudy but always colorful floating advertisements of Coruscant. Together with Warren Fu, Metschan worked on these luminous examples of corporate branding. One eye-catching sample was a barber-pole like stack of rotating ads delineating a district border during the twisting speeder chase.

“The sequence where Zam turns the corner was supposed to be in the financial district. In [Concept Design Co-Supervisor] Erik Tiemen’s paintings, which we were going off of, there were these glass buildings that were really blue with lots of pinks. It was really grandiose, with a lot of light reflection going on in there. Later on in the process, they decided that things were getting down to the wire and we weren’t going to have the time to spend on that sequence right there. What happened is this really bright sign ended up being put in this dimly lit area, so it just glowed and glowed and glowed!”

The need to populate Coruscant with little details like this was a fun exercise for Metschan, who handled a number of strange requests when it came to providing on-screen entertainment to the patrons of the Coruscant nightclub.

“John Knoll and George had a bunch of funny ideas, like racing chickens, a Podrace on Hoth and nunaball. They threw some stuff together in CG and then passed it down to me to jazz it up,” he recounts. Metschan watched a lot of CNN and ESPN to try to determine the kind of graphical treatment coverage of remote entertainment and sporting events receive. “I ended up recutting the CG, to make it a little more active,” he notes. For example, the Podrace graphic freeze-frames on the winning racer, and then a display notes which Pod placed first, second and third.

For nunaball, wherein a team of droids tackle each other while trying to hold onto a scrappy live nuna, Metschan provided a rotating schematic showing the droid quarterback that got sacked. “It’s fun. You just make up all this stuff. I had originally planned to do a little graphic that pointed out the nuna running away, but I didn’t have time.”

For the odupiendo racing, Metschan added a crucial element missing from the graphic. “We didn’t have a finish line! I put that in. Without it, there’s really nothing. They just run by the camera. It’s all just really silly,” he smiles. “You can have a lot of fun with it, but you have to be responsible and be careful not to put too much stuff in there. At any one time I had two or three screens that I had to do, and I can’t get carried away because I had deadlines to meet the next day.”

Whether crucial to the story or whimsical set dressing, Metschan’s work is necessary to the feel of Episode II. “I really started feeling like an integral part of the production,” he says. “I would never have imagined two years ago that I would, firstly, be working here, and secondly be able to work on Star Wars, and thirdly, be able to work on it from beginning to the very end. Everything just fell in line at the right time.”