We Don't Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy by Caseen Gaines Page B

the animators don’t have to do any extra work that, obviously, is time consuming and also costs money. It sort of requires you to make educated guesses.”
    After each editor put the scene he was working on together, Zemeckis and visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston of ILM, who had cut his teeth on the first two
Star Wars
films and the first two sequels to the
Star Trek
film series, would review the footage together. The primary goal was for the two of them to determine where the finishing touches would be added in each frame by the effects house. However, in true Zemeckis fashion, sometimes advice would come from a third party. The notoriously collaborative director believes no one has a monopoly on good ideas, allowing everyone on his set to bring suggestions forth to enhance the project. To that end, when Schmidt completed work on the Twin Pines sequence, the editor was given an opportunity to contribute his two cents into the effects process.Zemeckis asked Schmidt what he thought should happen visually as the DeLorean traveled through time to 1955. The editor hadn’t given it any thought whatsoever—after all, visual effects were out of his jurisdiction, and he assumed Ken Ralston and his team had the answer to that question all sorted out. Again Artie thought quickly on his feet. “Sparks?” He was trying to imagine it. “Wouldn’t there be sparks?” Zemeckis and Ralston agreed and sent the edited sequence to Wes Takahashi, one of ILM’s animators, with the instructions that sparks be integrated into the look of time travel.
    Yet when the finished footage arrived at the animator’s station, the director was still unclear as to exactly what he wanted time travel to look like. Before Takahashi was given the assignment of designing the time slice—the visual effects that appear as the DeLorean prepares to move from the future to the past and vice versa—visual director Phil Norwood had designed a visual look whereby the DeLorean would start to react like a popcorn kernel in a microwaved bag. Three-dimensional cubes would protrude out of the stainless-steel body until the vehicle exploded through time. But Zemeckis wasn’t too fond of the idea. He still didn’t know exactly what he wanted, but he did have one piece of advice for Takahashi: “I just want it to feel like there’s a Neanderthal sitting on the hood of the DeLorean, chipping away at the fabric of time with an ice pick.”
    “Well, that’s something we’ve never seen before.”
    “I need to have something—some huge event that would then be followed by an explosion and implosion!”
    With some clearer direction, the animator studied the DeLorean for clues as to where he might start. He looked at all of the vehicle’s add-ons and thought the ornamental molding around the car might be better if, during time travel, they gloweda cool blue hue. From there, the animator threw in the kitchen sink. There were comets that shot out and bounced off an invisible plane in front of the car, emitting more neon. He added light explosions and sparks that opened up the time slice until the DeLorean would finally pierce through. Electricity flew and smoke contrails seeped out. Tracks of fire would emerge from the wheels, and then, once eighty-eight miles per hour was hit, Zemeckis’s explosion and implosion would occur. Throughout the process, Takahashi walked the line, hoping to not provide so many effects that the sequence would appear cartoonish, while also not holding back so much that it would lack the excitement time travel would need. “With some directors it’s a lot more challenging,” he says. “You show them fifty or sixty different iterations, and by the time we’d get to sixty-one, they would say, ‘Okay, actually I like the second one best. Why don’t we go back?’ It’s all up to the director. Some you’re attuned with, and they’re a lot easier to please. I lucked out with Zemeckis. On the time-traveling scenes, we were on the same