Industrial Light & Magic arrived at this fully-rendered frame from the new Gore Verbinski film 'Rango' after several rounds of storyboarding, layouts, and interim animation.

SAN FRANCISCO--When he started making his new film "Rango," director Gore Verbinski knew he wanted it to look and feel much like many of the Westerns it evokes: gritty, dirty, and sweaty.

"He wanted to be able to smell the breath of the characters," said Kevin Martel, the film's associate animation supervisor. "The feeling was that if you were to take a deep breath, you'd inhale all that dust and dirt, and you'd probably start coughing."

All joking aside, creating the look of a traditional Western was one of the biggest challenges on "Rango," which opens March 4 and stars Johnny Depp. And despite a highly photo-realistic feel, the film is actually 100 percent digitally animated. Indeed, "Rango" is the first-ever fully animated movie for which Industrial Light & Magic, where Martel works, has done the visual effects.

In fact, Verbinski tasked ILM specifically with making "Rango" feel like a live-action film despite its being entirely computer generated. And for George Lucas' famous visual effects house, that direction actually meshed perfectly with its decades of experience.

"I've been calling it photographic," said Tim Alexander, the "Rango" visual effects supervisor at ILM. "That's the look of the film. It comes from our live-action background and it's a common language with [Verbinski]....Everything we talked about and did, we did like we were on a live-action set."

For most animated films, the actors record all their lines in otherwise empty sound studios. But in keeping with the desire to make "Rango" feel--to everyone concerned--as live-action as a digital film can be, Verbinski convinced his ensemble of actors to perform their roles on a physical, albeit, tinker-toy set based on the tiny fictional Mojave Desert town of Dirt, in which the movie takes place.

"It was like a little theater troupe full of talented actors," Martel recalls, "running around like cartoons...[Verbinski] could explore his ideas early and quickly this way...and the actors could nail their performances more fully, and we could study the actors' nuances, body language, and eyes.

If this all seems entirely too analog for a 100 percent digital film, that's because developing this sense of working on a normal film was crucial to Verbinski's vision, according to Martel and Alexander. But this was ILM behind the visual effects and animation, after all, and high-tech definitely played an important role in the making of "Rango."

Lens kit You wouldn't think that the director of an all-digital film would have something like a lens kit in his quiver of filmmaking tools, but Verbinski had just that.

According to Alexander, ILM outfitted Verbinski with a selection of "lenses," including an 18mm, a 27mm, and a 35mm. "Gore actually loves the 27mm," Amstrong said of the director, whose previous efforts include the monster hit "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.