In the early 1990s, had you asked physical effects artists about computer-generated effects, most would have plaintively questioned whether their craft could survive the onslaught of this new digital discipline.

‘That’s what everybody was telling me 10 years ago, that we were going to disappear and our trade was going to be old-fashioned,’ says Louis Craig, owner of Montreal mechanical effects shop Intrigue Productions.

But much has changed in the last decade.

The common wisdom today is that practical and visual [cg] effects, used in concert, are moving the whole business to previously unattainable heights.

While some traditional artists still see the day when computers delete physical effects from the production process, most have embraced the wonders of cg, and some have even begun to move their traditional businesses toward the digital domain.

In Vancouver, Thomas Special Effects, one of the city’s oldest and largest practical effects shops, recently split its 20,000-square-foot facility in half in order to create a green/blue screen insert stage to help ease the flow between real and virtual effects.

‘We now have the ability to offer [producers] mechanical and practical effects,’ says gm Stewart Bradley, ‘and walk next door to aid and abet them doing motion control.’

Bradley, who has been involved in practical effects since the early 1980s, says this co-operation extends to a close working relationship with visual effects behemoth Rainmaker Digital Pictures, one of Canada’s largest and busiest cg producers.

‘We’re integrating from both sides,’ he says. ‘We’ll always need live action, but there is stuff that is scripted in this day and age that I can’t personally figure out how to do practically. ‘The cg guys step in and the asteroid can impact Manhattan.’

Not only does cg raise practical effects to a new plateau, it also simplifies many otherwise complicated effects such as attaching cables to stuntmen or creating realistic creature puppets.

In Toronto, Ron Stefaniuk, owner of Stefaniuk FX Studios, says cg allows puppeteers such as himself to create creature effects simply with rods and triggers outside the puppet body because digital artists can remove the rods in post-production.

‘Instead of making a hugely complicated self-contained animatronic rig,’ he says, ‘it’s always simpler the closer you can get a puppeteer’s hands to [the contraption].’

This was the case last year when Stefaniuk went to South Africa with a $30,000 pair of animatronic photorealistic vultures to shoot a spot for Nestea. The puppets, despite sets of protruding rods, were so life-like, director Kevin Donovan opted for the fakes over a real vulture which was brought in for the shoot.

Stefaniuk says another advantage to practical effects is the ability to be spontaneous. When using 3D creatures, productions lose the ability to react to certain situations and to experiment with different scenarios. Experimenting can run up costs in the animation suite, but remains relatively inexpensive on set once a puppet is built, he says.

On the other hand, 3D artists can add organic elements which are sometimes difficult through animatronics, such as the dilation of a pupil or the blink of an eye. ‘Not only is it a blink, but it’s an organic blink. It’s not like a mechanical shutter,’ Stefaniuk says. ‘That is an example of where [3D] could do it extremely well and cost effectively…where it would [otherwise] be very complicated.’

Of course, cg can add a great deal more to practical effects. Last year, Intrigue Productions’ Louis Craig had the opportunity to see just how far the two genres could take each other.

Montreal-based Intrigue was awarded the physical effects work for the Filmline International series The Secret Adventures Of Jules Verne, an effects-heavy production shot in hdtv.

Shot in a studio in east Montreal, the Verne project had the cgi team working in the facility where much of the live action was shot. This allowed Craig to supervise effects and view the cg-composited results instantaneously.

‘We were able to test it in the studio, verify it in the editing room, and come back into the studio and correct whatever mistake, or whatever problem, was occurring,’ he says.

Working so closely with cg artists has been a learning experience, he says, for both himself and the cg artists. Craig says that while cg can still be prohibitively expensive in certain cases, it has also dominated other areas which were once the bread and butter of mechanical effects producers such as himself.

‘We don’t do as much flying as we used to do,’ he says. On the other hand, Intrigue has been asked ‘to design and create new gimbals and rigs to give [cg artists] some sort of movement or some kind of start to create the movement.’

‘At this point, I can say they’ve taken some of our work, but at the same time, it’s been giving us lots more work. It’s a new way of approaching the job.’

But does the practical effects community still see the day when cg will run them out of town?

‘Right now [cg] is still time-restrictive and financially restrictive, but I’m sure, like anything, there will come a time when they can do it fast enough and inexpensively enough that it will be the better alternative,’ says Stefaniuk.

The evolution of practical effects is no different, he says, than the changes in effects makeup, a discipline which no longer uses tissue and glue on actors’ faces, in favor of prosthetic foams and gels.

‘Everything changes as time goes by,’ he says. ‘It’s just more color in the palette. That’s all.’