The Oscar nominations were announced this moment, and in one of several bizarre oversights, Pacific Rim was not included alongside fellow blockbusters Gravity, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Iron Man 3 and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug in the Best Visual Effects category. (Lest you worry, The Lone Ranger got a nod.)
In the above video, the design team responsible for *Pac Rim'*s enormous jaeger fighters at Industrial Light and Magic – including a senior visual effects art director whose name is actually Alex Jaeger, for crying out loud – explain the enormous amount of precision and detail that go into making a movie teeming with gargantuan warrior-robots.
"Mechanical designs are always the hardest to construct and rig and animate," says ILM animation director Hal Hickel, about the film he worked on that somehow was deemed less visually worthy than Johnny Depp playing a caricature of a Native American. "They're harder than soft creatures. With a hard pieces of a robot or any kind of machine, you really have to think about how the pieces fit together, and what they're going to do when they move so they don't just pass into each other. We had not just the outer armor to deal with but all kinds of mechanisms underneath, particularly in the shoulder area and the hips, where the legs join the body. There was a lot of complex machinery in there, and it wasn't something that you could just build something that looked cool, it also had to function."
