The ones stalking his new War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise, are arguably the most artistically realized. But there's no argument about size; at 150 feet tall these are the largest. (Except for the 18-inch posable model built for reference by ILM's John Goodson.)

First Spielberg's people gave George Lucas's art department written descriptions — no pictures or drawings to go by. Then ILM's visual effects art director, Christian Alzmann, started drawing on paper, as did ILM designer/concept artists Ryan Church and Eric Tiemens, until they had lots and lots of versions for review.

War of the Worlds' tripods were created in Softimage and Maya.

The "tripods" are alien war machines perched atop sets of three impossibly tall legs. The war machines have "big, bright, buggy eye-lights," lethal, articulate tentacles and weapons too. But one new tripod feature is unexpected: rust. The war machines look a little beaten-up and oxidized, Alzmann says, because they were buried in place eons ago, before modern man paved over the United States, waiting to be activated by their implacable alien masters.

ON DUTY START TO FINISH

ILM's award-winning VFX team, led by senior visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren and visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, worked with Alzmann throughout the project's duration. And the duration was relatively short –— Spielberg himself eventually expressed wonderment that they completed the effects-heavy extravaganza in less than a year. "That was the real big trick this time, to get that speed," Alzmann says.

Initially, artists were shown only small sections of Spielberg's closely guarded script, but "we were real excited because it was such a great story," Alzmann says, "and we started designing these big machines, everybody taking stabs at some of the looks of the machines." Alzmann says that he, Church, Tiemens, Carlos Huante and Sang Jun Lee worked up numerous sketches and sent "really thick packets" of paper downstate to Spielberg and company. In conference calls, the director would tell the team which designs were working for him.

Both iView and CineSync were used for remote approvals.

To create these art prints, Alzmann's team would scan drawings into the computer for Photoshop retouching and Corel Painter. After a few weeks the artists got their approval and Alzmann could then nail down the look of the war machines and storyboard how they would behave in various action sequences to minimize any wasted effort on the CG side. "When this 150-foot-tall machine comes up out of the ground, we had to do a lot of design for that," he says. "What does that look like when pavement gets broken up on that scale?"

Alzmann kind of switches teams from the graphic artists to the CG artists: "Since we designed it, who better to make sure that the design gets followed through?"

Design approval means you must next get down to more real-world functional issues like "how is this thing going to move?" and "that joint needs to look like it really works." Randy Dutra was the animation supervisor on War.