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This blog was submitted by Libbey Coghlan of www.artfxfilms.com (Thanks Libbey!)

Saturday June 23rd I attended "Behind the Curtain With ILM, A Talk With Dennis Muren"  followed by a special screening of A.I. Artificial Intelligence.  Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) is an SFX company started by George Lucas, the director of Star Wars. Dennis is the senior visual effects supervisor at ILM. In the late 1990's Kubrick collaborated  with Dennis on the special visual effects for the making of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. After Kubrick's death in 1999 the film was made by Steven Spielberg and was nominated for Academy Awards In Visual Effects and Best Original Score.

Dennis talked about Kubrick's intention of making a "creepier" film than Spielberg's "realistic" film.  A.I. is about about  David, who is 11 years old. He weighs 60 pounds. He is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. He has brown hair. His love is real. But he is not. Do not speak the seven-word activation code unless you mean it because, if you change your mind and no longer want him he must be destroyed. Kubrick intended on David appearing human in all but the close-ups. On close inspection the audience would see the woven mesh of his skin and intermittent quirky mecha movements.

Spielberg's David was a "real boy" played by Haley Joel Osment.  Spielberg's A.I. was a "Journey To A World Where Robots Dream And Desire". David went to the end of time plus 2000 years to earn the unconditional love of his "real" mother.

In the final scene, we hear the voice of the Narrator: Those were the years when the icecaps melted due to the greenhouse gases and the oceans had risen and drowned so many cities along all the shorelines of the world. Amsterdam, Venice, New York forever lost. Millions of people were displaced. Climate became chaotic. Hundreds of millions of people starved in poorer countries. Elsewhere a high degree of prosperity survived when most governments in the developed world introduced legal sanctions to license pregnancies. Which was why robots, who were never hungry and did not consume resources beyond those of their first manufacture were so essential an economic link in the chain mail society".

Libbey Coghlan
motion graphics artist/editor
www.artfxfilms.com