Vancouver: The West Coast’s burgeoning special effects community is a wary scene. Or was, until special effects director John Gajdecki brought his diplomatic talents to bear.

Gajdecki, who splits his time between Vancouver and Toronto, has created a new sense of community for the effects houses here who have historically competed with a provincial flair.

By divvying up the work for the fantasy Warriors of Virtue ­ which at us$36 million is the largest and most complex feature ever posted in Vancouver ­ Gajdecki has in a single gesture identified niche supply companies and forced a collaboration that all regard as successful. And as the six months of effects work wraps about the time this article is published, the collaborators look forward to more big features coming their collective way.

It’s a case where piecework becomes peace work.

‘Dealing with so many vendors stresses out the producers and the director,’ says Gajdecki from his Toronto studio where he is orchestrating the levitation of the movie’s evil warlord Komodo and the filming of the 15-foot-long model fortress.

‘It means I sweat a lot and get the ulcers. It means I get a lot of frequent flyer points,’ he jokes. ‘But we’ve been really successful in putting cool images up on the screen.’

The Warriors project

Gajdecki felt the burden of the movie’s fate when director Ronny Yu went home to Australia and, as his departing words, said: ‘Well, it’s your movie now.’

Gajdecki was handed the $1.5 million effects budget for Warriors of Virtue by Yu and producers the Law Brothers of Denver. The feature, which was shot in Beijing with Oscar-winning designer Eugenio Zanetti (Restoration), required 130 visual effects in shots averaging between three and seven seconds and 60 wire-removal shots.

Gajdecki ­ who got his start with Friday the 13th and was most recently effects supervisor on the television series The Outer Limits ­ looked at the special effects budget (that was half of his original request), the timeline (a May release by distributor mgm) and the trends in post work.

He decided to use many suppliers to speed up the process, exploit the particular expertise and equipment, and maximize his budget.

That the producers wanted to post the work in Canada to take advantage of the dollar exchange and hungry, less expensive ‘vendors’ meant choosing Vancouver effects houses which had forged their reputations in television posting and had little or no experience working in features.

The result, after a thorough search and bidding process, was that Warriors’ special effects and post work was divided up among Gajdecki Visual Effects, Rainmaker Digital, Northwest Imaging & fx and Prospero Imaging of Vancouver, AsiaCine in Hong Kong and the l.a. office of Montreal-based Buzz Effects. The lab, Imagica, is in Tokyo.

(Topix Digital of Vancouver also had special effects work until its scenes were cut in November after focus groups were conducted in l.a.)

Five years ago, by comparison, this feature would have been done entirely at a company like Industrial Light & Magic or Digital Domain.

The story of Warriors of Virtue chronicles the adventure of a teenager who travels to the mystical land of Tao where good and evil battle for control.

Evil Komodo seeks to rob the world’s vital Lifesprings of their precious Zubrium, and only one spring remains. The Warriors ­ who guard each of the virtues of benevolence, righteousness, order, wisdom and loyalty ­ are ‘masters of the Earth’s powerful elements’ and are dispatched to protect the last oasis. The teen hero joins them with a manuscript from his world that contains enormous power that can save the Lifespring, or in the wrong hands, be a tool of destruction.

Integral to the story, of course, are the various special effects. Positive and negative energies ­ called kungs ­ emanate from the warriors and Komodo, respectively. Crystal swords sparkle. Fireflies dance. Actors emote in front of blue and green screens. There are explosions, miniature fortresses and clones, and a host of other magical effects that require creation on computer screens before they are cut into the 35mm film.

The challenge

‘Vancouver is not considered a center where you finish off large films,’ says line producer Ogden Gavanski of Vancouver’s Milestone Productions. So that makes the landing of Warriors on the in trays of the local effects companies big news that has rippled through other post-production businesses. Known action movie editor David Wu is cutting the film in Vancouver; Warriors is also completing its sound design here with local Cal Shumiatcher.

‘The vendors are good, however you have to be on your t’es,’ says Gavanski. ‘The logistics have been a nightmare. Everybody has had to learn something new.’

The challenge today, Gajdecki agrees, is the coordination and planning required to keep details and the various suppliers on the straight and narrow.

As effects director, Gajdecki has the vision. Maintaining it means having a steely grip over the initial planning so that managing the various suppliers and thousands of details is possible. (Vancouver associate James Tichenor is vital in maintaining the huge electronic database of information that tracks shots and progress, he adds.) It means understanding what effects houses have in equipment and talent. And it means conducting spot checks and sitting in on sessions.

Says Gajdecki: ‘Sixty percent of the budget g’es to the 90% of the project that runs smoothly while 40% of the budget g’es to the 10% of the project that g’es wrong.

‘Effects have this horrible reputation for going over budget,’ he adds, explaining that there is added pressure on his business profile to keep the dollars in line. About 10% of the time, Gajdecki says, he has to crack the whip and use the big voice in managing the suppliers.

The benefits

While Gajdecki is the first to admit the piecework effects production is ‘logistically, a pain in the butt,’ he clearly enjoys the benefits of more brains on a project. Occasionally, suppliers will improve his ideas or take his vision to a new, better place.

For the producers, meanwhile, the benefits come from time and expense.

One house doing all the effects will take longer than many houses sharing the workload. And while that gets the movie out faster, it also reflects itself on the balance sheet. ‘There is a lot of money spent on interest (on the movie’s financing),’ says Gajdecki. ‘If we can get the job out one or two months early, we’re laughin’.’

Giving suppliers specific sequences to focus on means each company has a longer time to do better work at a less hectic pace. It’s the same philosophy that dictates that good, fast and cheap are never available at the same time in one contractor. So the result, says Gajdecki, is that the suppliers have contributed to a richer looking film.

In splitting up the Warriors effects work, Gajdecki looked at what was available technically and creatively. Some companies use Flame software, for example, while one works on Cineon. In parceling out Outer Limits effects in a similar way, he learned which individuals had strengths in particular areas.

His own company, Gajdecki Visual Effects, was assigned one-quarter of the work including the climactic Komodo ‘cleansing’ involving effects that make the character shimmer with fire. Gajdecki’s firm also created the look for the positive ‘kung’ energy.

Brian Moylan, senior Flame artist at Northwest, says his half-dozen Warriors shots are the first time the company has done full effects for film, an evolution that has led to the purchase of an Inferno system that is faster and able to handle high-resolution images.

In a scene where Komodo emerges from an explosion divided into five copies of himself, Northwest had to marry five live-action, green-screen copies of the actor with depth fading, smoke and other layers.

Moylan also designed the ‘crystal’ sword effect involving a rainbow of colors.

Vancouver’s big post house, Rainmaker Digital, is handling all the digital inputting and outputting. The 35mm film footage that requires special effects is digitized, manipulated by the suppliers and then rephotographed before being edited into the final cut.

Creative director Gary Walker oversaw the design of the Death Chute, a computer graphic effect involving a tunnel with rotating knives. Warriors represents the biggest feature ever posted at Rainmaker, says president Bob Scarabelli.

Christopher Chen at year-old Prospero Imaging in North Vancouver is working with Rainmaker on Komodo’s negative ‘kung’ energy, which, he says, proved to be a challenge because of the approval process. The final look was okayed only weeks before it was due, and while frustrating, the process has been rewarding, he adds. Also, Prospero created the decorative fireflies that appear throughout the picture.

Buzz Effects in l.a. handled the matte paintings and Asia Cine Digital in Hong Kong handled wire removal.

What Warriors means for Vancouver

The suppliers are unanimous in hoping that the successful completion of Warriors will show other big-budget producers that Vancouver has the capacity to handle more work. They also remark on the new detente.

‘I hope the same thing happens with film as happened with television,’ says Northwest’s Moylan, explaining that volumes picked up once the first series were successfully posted in town. ‘It always starts with the first one. It’s one thing to say you are capable of doing film. It’s quite another to say you have done film.

‘There is a new spirit of cooperation,’ observes Moylan. ‘We’re trading images and going to other offices for screenings. At times you need help and it’s good to know we can call someone who might be able to help us out. It’s good for the community.’

‘It’s the first time this level of cooperation and consultation has taken place,’ agrees Rainmaker’s Scarabelli. Competition is still high, but instead of constantly jockeying for position, companies are beginning to strengthen their niches, he says.

Adds colleague Walker: ‘John has played the houses not against each other, but with each other.’

Prospero’s Chen says the new spirit of cooperation is healthy for the post community and fosters a team approach to ‘make the shots better.’

‘John has brought us the first project that rethinks competition and cooperation between effects companies. I’m a very small house and I would have never worked on a picture the size of Warriors any other way. This is a way for Vancouver to become a post city.’