Joe Johnston Hates Pre-Visualization

Joe Johnston, director of Jurassic Park 3, The Rocketeer, and the upcoming Captain America, has published an editorial on 30ninjas.com in which he describes his dislike for previsualization (or previz for short), which is usually a cheap animated version of story boarding of scenes to be shot later on set. The idea is to be able to give the cast, crew, and post-production workers an idea of what the finished sequence will look like. But as Johnston writes, the process also has a way of killing the creativity on set.

I hate previz. I’ve never used it, and I will never use it. I didn’t use it on The Wolfman, and I won’t use it on Captain America. Hate it. Previz tells the crew this is exactly what you want, and I think it’s much more of a crutch than anything else. It sends a message to the crew that you’ve worked out all of your problems, you’ve had your meetings and you’ve figured out exactly what you want to do, and here’s the movie, take a look. But nothing could be further from the truth. It’s a sequence that was created in a computer, and it has no relation to what it’s going to be when you’re really out there, on location, on a stage, with real actors who are hitting their marks and saying their lines. It’s completely useless. There are visual effects people who will say, “Gee, we’d better previz this so we know exactly what we’re doing,” and I tell them to go ahead and waste money on previz because you need it to understand the elements of the sequence — for instance, identifying at what point you’re going to duplicate the army or create set extensions — but don’t show it to anybody and say this is what the director wants. Never.

It's ironic to hear this from Johnston, since he is a protege of George Lucas, who has been a champion of previsualization and used it quite extensively on the Star Wars prequels. But Johnston's objections to the process do help to explain the flatness and lack of visual flair of many computer-generated action scenes.