‘He is forever looking for sundogs ­ little rainbows way up in the sky in the early morning, streaks of two or three colors, and wherever you see them that’s where the wind is going to come from the next day.’

Indeed, one could spend forever looking for the sundogs of SunDog Films, ensconced as they are in a graffiti-mauled warehouse tucked between Richmond and Queen Streets in downtown Toronto, which one enters through a small unmarked entrance off an alley littered with skulking figures who disappear into doorways.

Ascending a pair of unremarkable staircases, one discovers the sundogs working in the visually stunning interior of their 160-year-old office, and notwithstanding the quote from Alec Wilkinson’s The River Keeper, which inspired the shop’s name, it’s not wind but explosions, spaceships and other less perceptible things that come from here.

Inside the shop, under the guidance of owner and visual effects supervisor Wayne Trickett, work is currently being carried out on digital effects for Producers Network Associates’ The Cusp, a $2.5 million sci-fi feature which shot in Toronto this summer.

The film marks the third time the Toronto-based genre film producer and SunDog have paired up to bring an action-oriented vision of the future to the screen. In addition to pna’s financing savvy, teaming up with SunDog provided the production company an additional means of cranking out its high volume of product, with SunDog delivering high-end special effects cost-effectively and quickly.

For SunDog, The Cusp represents about 20 minutes worth of cgi, or about 200 shots, much of which entails the creation of the gigantic spaceship central to the story, an even bigger asteroid, and the creation of scenes with astro-actors carrying out the film’s plot against the backdrop of star fields and the ship’s outer hull. About 50% of the effects action in the film was accomplished with blue-screen shots.

SunDog was born early this year of an association between Toronto effects shop Stargate Studios and New York-based Color Wheel.

Stargate had been in the effects business for over 25 years and has been equipped with digital post capacity for the last 10 years. The company accumulated broad expertise in motion control and on-set supervision of effects work for feature films as well as commercials.

The facility’s broad production, post and effects stable includes an extensive complement of portable motion-control gear, Discreet Logic Flint/Flame and Quantel Harry suites, Silicon Graphics, Mac and nt hardware running Alias/Wavefront, Electrogig and Lightwave as well as an actual little sun dog appropriately named Sonny, who, in that instinctive doggie recognition of the alpha male, tends to pay close attention to Trickett’s every move.

Facilitating move

into features

With plans to move more aggressively into feature film work, the formation of a partnership with Color Wheel allowed Stargate to expand its technological and creative purview, and with Color Wheel’s Domino film system, added high-resolution film finishing to its production and computer graphics services.

The two shops share work and equipment on projects, facilitated by isdn connections. Trickett says his shop is looking at a Sprint Drums’ high-speed network to pave the way for expansion into l.a., with plans to open an office there in the next three months.

The Cusp, set in the year 2051, stars Michael Pare (Eddie and the Cruisers) as Boden, an officer aboard The Spirit of Forty-Nine, a spacecraft employed in the mission of guiding a huge asteroid into the orbit of a resource-starved earth, which happens to be under siege by Lopez, an environmental terrorist.

As a result of the machinations of Lopez, all life on earth is in jeopardy from the asteroid ­ which is now spiraling out of control ­ and Boden is left to battle Lopez with the help of his wife, played by Heidi Von Palleske, and son, played by Herbie Terry.

‘Big things for little money’

The film is the directorial debut for Daniel D’or, pna cofounder and possibly one of the busiest men in show business, having completed five sci-fi films in a two-year time span.

Cusp producer is pna cofounder Philip Jackson and the film was written by Peter Horton.

About 20 animators and artists work in the SunDog facility, which is a graceful counterpoint to the hyper-cool offices of many of their kind. A huge wooden sign on the main floor reading Mander & Company Japanners is a reminder of the building’s past life as home to hand-painted furniture makers.

Work on The Cusp was all about figuring out ways to do big things for little money, says editor Tony Coleman. Toward that end, the film’s cg work was done at a lower, D1 resolution, and once completed was sent to the Domino for up-resing, thereby reducing rendering time by more than two-thirds.

The film’s producers had originally intended to make more extensive use of models to help create The Spirit of Forty-Nine and other effects sequences. Although models were constructed for the film by Brian Cole Models, Trickett says he recommended an all-cg approach instead. Using models would have proven too restricting for the shots required, says Trickett, and would have required more shooting and blue-screen work and thus more clean-up, rig removal and the like.

‘There was no way to reach the dramatic effects necessary by using models,’ says Trickett.

An all-digital approach meant more resources were available to effects people; Tony says SunDog used cd-rom sources like Pyromaniac from VCE California, which contains explosion sequences, to complement the facility’s own cg creations.

Some models were used in the film in miniature shots, and explosion sequences were created with Alias as well as on set at Cinevillage.

Trickett says SunDog’s extensive production background allows the facility to participate in the creative process from the beginning of production through shooting.

‘If you don’t know both ends of the production process it’s difficult to deliver results cost-effectively,’ he says.

Toiling in separate offices, SunDog’s animators work on different segments of the production. To create The Spirit of Forty-Nine, a ship which is supposed to be 1,000 feet across and has over 300 working lights, SunDog animators used Lightwave and Alias/Wavefront software.

Based on an original design by Cusp production designer Jim Plaxton, the ship took about a month to model and went through a number of modifications before the final design was established.

The film’s other outsized star, a five-by-three-by-10-mile asteroid, was also fully computer-generated and created in multiple platforms.

In the Harry suite, against the aural backdrop of classical music, several scenes are being completed featuring Pare in full astronaut regalia floating outside the ship, with a backdrop of all-cg asteroid and star fields.

90% of ad work

is foreign

While schooled in ‘big’ effects for space movies, SunDog is also in the process of delivering effects for two earthbound features, Dinner at Fred’s and The Assistant, both from Toronto-based Paragon. In addition, the facility has an impressive reel of commercial work, including spots for McDonald’s, Nintendo and Kodak. Trickett says about 90% of the shop’s ad business comes from outside Canada, with South America, Latin America and the southern u.s. generating a large volume of work.

For its part, pna has completed four movies in the last 12 months, with an additional three in the works for 1997. pna launched in 1993 and the following year made the sci-fi feature Replikator, which traveled well on the festival circuit and garnered a gold award at the 1994 Charleston Film Festival.

In the last year, the company has completed another Pare vehicle, Carver’s Gate, as well as Deadly Wake with Malcolm McDowell, and Future Fear, an additional pair of low-budget futuristic action fantasies for which Stargate/SunDog contributed effects work.

D’or’s ‘realistic’

vision

For The Cusp, D’or says he had a specific, realistic vision of the future to deliver. ‘I knew how I wanted space to look,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t going for a cheesy, action-picture look. The effects look very realistic.’

Given the large number of effects shots, relative to the budget of the film, and the volume of blue-screen work, it was a challenge to pull everything together, says D’or, who credits SunDog for helping to deliver a ‘much bigger picture than we actually spent.’

Managing to deliver multiple pictures to screens requires some monetary dexterity, and D’or says each of the films is uniquely financed and each was completed without Telefilm Canada participation.

For The Cusp, pna secured Cineplex Odeon as the Canadian distributor, with b-movie mogul Roger Corman’s Concord New Horizons handling the u.s. and l.a.-based Cinequanon Pictures international distribution. In addition, the federal tax rebate was used.

D’or says as Canadian producers, difficulty arose for pna when it came to banking pictures, with one institution, the Royal Bank, formerly doing all the deals.

‘What we’ve done in the last while is to get new banks into the game,’ says D’or, citing the Canadian division of the Republic National Bank of New York and the Bank of Nova Scotia, which first dipped their beaks into the film pool via a pna production. The company has also done business with Alliance Equicap.

pna’s 1997 slate includes Titan, a higher budget feature about a prison colony in space for which D’or says final negotiations are in progress to secure a major u.s. star, with SunDog again handling effects. Scheduled to begin shooting next month is Shepherd, followed by Photo Finish, a mob love story set in the ’60s.