vancouver: The creative team at Vancouver’s Image Engine feels like it has been on its own trip through the galaxy now that it has wrapped the biggest project ever to walk in the door.

The computer animation company delivered in mid-March a five-minute preshow that warms up audiences prior to them entering Mars, an interactive ride by Toronto-based SimEx. The project required a whirlwind six-week turnaround that involved round-the-clock work and the expansion of the company’s capacity, says Image Engine co-owner Robin Hackl.

‘I have no desire to visit Mars,’ he says, jokingly. ‘I’ve seen enough of it already.’

In the preshow, futuristic live-action characters tour a space station and explain to audiences how earthlings have come to inhabit Mars. Local actors used in the production include the storyteller Ric Reid, captain Blu Mankuma and payload specialist Donna Yamamoto. For audiences, the presentation gives them a sneak peak at what to expect in the main event and starts their immersion into the fantasy world so that they heighten their experience.

Because the warm-up preshow – or ‘Act One’ as SimEx likes to call it – involves the synchronization of laser discs on three large monitors, the workload became intense, says Hackl, especially when Image Engine was coming into the project when there were only rough storyboards from which to work.

While the storyteller remains mostly on the center screen, he points to aspects of the 3D animated walkway in other screens. And there are times when elements cross from one screen to the next.

As a result, Image Engine had to create about 7,500 frames and composit images up to eight layers deep. Because of the demand, the company doubled its number of Silicon Graphics workstations to six, stretched the Alias software past its own limitations, and began working with Avid’s hot new software Illusions, which was used in Twister and the rereleases of the Star Wars trilogy.

The team, including Hackl, co-owner Craig Vandenbiggelar and Christopher Mossman, brought in freelancers to help push the work through. While a few sequences were borrowed from the actual ride footage, Image Engine created most of the images from scratch.

Randy Ormston, senior producer at the Vancouver office of SimEx, says Imagine Engine understood what he and director Scott Weber were after.

‘With three monitors this project becomes a mathematical nightmare,’ says Ormston. ‘We’ve given them some headaches because we have been demanding. But we’ve been impressed.’

The Mars ride was produced in the Los Angeles studio of SimEx, which has been producing simulated rides since 1984. Ormston and Weber had been working for SimEx on a contract basis prior to the company opening the local office in Vancouver a year ago.

The preshow is a likely precursor to Vancouver getting whole ridefilm projects – from Act One through to the development of the attraction itself. Mars is a part of a series called Virtual Voyages. SimEx, says Ormston, has 26 theaters throughout the world and expects to have 100 opening by 2000. Few cities (they include l.a. and Brussels) do simulation ride production. And with the increase in demand for these kinds of attractions, Ormston says it makes sense that Vancouver eventually get some more attraction work.

He adds that it is premature to claim that Vancouver already has a toehold in the business even though Image Engine and Mainframe (through its ReBoot franchise) are busy with simulator rides.

‘Doing simulator production is a whole other dimension,’ says Ormston. ‘They are planned very differently [from traditional film projects]. It takes a lot of experience.’

Image Engine’s work went to dts sound mixing on March 15 and premiers in Dublin, Ireland by March 26. The show will open Vancouver’s Pacific Space Centre – the revitalized H.R. MacMillan Planetarium – when it reopens in September, the month Vancouver hosts a conference on large-format, imax-style productions.

Image Engine is a subsidiary of Vancouver post-production company Finale Editworks and, in more traditional film and tv work, has done compositing for The Outer Limits and Poltergeist.

Recently, Finale has worked on programs such as entertainment magazine Metro Cafe (BTV Productions), 13-part series Let’s Sing Again (Tony Gilbert/ Vision), three episodes of cbc’s Life & Times, 13 episodes of Life on the Internet (Cochrane Entertainment), three Lamb Chop specials (Paragon), Witness documentary Phantom of the Oceans (Gerry Thompson/cbc) and The Rafe Mair Show (kvos).

Image Engine employs three and Finale employs 15 full time.