GVFX is in the midst of a fall rush, according to John Gajdecki, the visual effects company’s president and ceo. Approximately 15 projects are currently in its Toronto shop, divided among features, commercials, mows and tv series. Gajdecki says gvfx’s standing in the worldwide industry has increased with some of the bigger projects it has recently taken on.

One of those is Eye of the Storm (working title), a Hollywood adventure drama directed by Mitch Davis and starring Christopher Gorham (Popular). The film, slated for a 2001 release, is produced by Academy Award-winner Jerry Molen (Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Rain Man).

Eye of the Storm recounts the story of a young missionary who ventures to the island nation of Tonga. gvfx will be bringing some extraordinarily nasty weather to life.

‘We’re doing some of the shots of a hurricane as well as a sequence where there’s a big storm at sea,’ Gajdecki says. ‘And then there’s the usual moon in the sky and the stars.’

Gajdecki serves as visual effects supervisor on the film, which took him to the tiny Pacific Island of Rarotonga for a month and a half of shooting, followed by one month in New Zealand. Some green screen and model work was handled back home at the GVFX Visual Studio, located separately from the main office.

Wreaking havoc

‘After the storm there’s a big ‘crane up’ devastation scene,’ Gajdecki explains. ‘It was the first shot we did and it was quite fun. What we decided to do was build a large-scale miniature 50 feet long to replace [the village location]. We shot in the studio parking lot for the natural light – build a big model, take it outside, film it and it looks real.’

Gajdecki acknowledges that the exchange rate on the u.s. dollar played a major role in gvfx landing the assignment with the American production. Although big-name filmmakers are involved, the feature is being produced without major studio backing, so cost was certainly a concern.

‘I know they talked to [George Lucas’s] Industrial Light and Magic and they usually do all their effects with ilm, but they seem very happy with the way our work is going,’ Gajdecki says. ‘They didn’t come to us specifically because we were cheap. They could have done the work cheaper in New Zealand.’

gvfx’s Toronto facility consists of 45 full-time artists and administrators, and when the model shop is busy, which Gajdecki says is half the time, freelancers bring that number up to 70. There have also been cases when the company has had more than 100 people at work.

gvfx also has a Vancouver facility with a full-time staff of 20. Current projects there include fourth-season episodes of mgm’s sci-fi series Stargate SG-1 and the Artisan Entertainment Jean-Claude Van Damme thriller Replicant, about geneticists who clone a serial killer in order to catch him. The feature required Tom Turnbull, gvfx senior effects supervisor, to be on set and to create such effects as a cg ‘stuntman.’

Highlights of the Toronto studio include the model shop and three motion-control systems. The latter equipment helped gvfx land the four-hour miniseries Haven, a $25-million production of Alliance Atlantis Communications’ Citadel Entertainment which shot in southern Ontario this summer.

Haven recounts the true story of Ruth Gruber, a young u.s. government official who helped 1,000 Jews escape the Holocaust in 1944 in a liberty ship bound for Oswego, New York. The program is expected to air on cbs in February 2001.

Gajdecki explains that most of the projects his company takes on, including Haven, are based in the real world. ‘We don’t do a lot of science fiction, but the technology behind the jobs is still really high.’

Turnbull had his hands full again on Haven, designing a shot on the deck of the ship with P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes whizzing overhead. He began by doing a pre-visualization of the shot in Alias|Wavefront Maya 3D software.

‘Then he took the data from the previz move, imported it into the motion-control system, went on location, shot the plate with the motion control to match the previz, and then gave the film to the 3D artists, who imported the original animation,’ Gajdecki says. ‘It all lined up, which should be commonplace, but it’s actually quite a feat.’

Another one of the bigger jobs gvfx is working on is Prince Charming, a Hallmark Entertainment cable movie currently shooting in Toronto with Christina Applegate and Martin Short. The shop’s challenge on the project, entrusted to visual effects supervisor Jon Campfens, is to build a photo-real talking cg frog and incorporate it into more than 200 live-action shots. Gajdecki is particularly happy about the job, since his company, although well-entrenched as a 3D house, is not often thought of as a character animation provider.

gvfx is utilizing newly acquired SynaMatch tracking software from Lowell, Massachusetts developer SynaPix to achieve the amphibian shots. Curt Rawley, president, ceo and founder of SynaPix, recently traveled to Toronto to monitor progress on the show and other SynaPix-related projects at the gvfx office.

‘We’ve been one of [SynaPix’s] beta sites and apparently they get the best feedback from us,’ Gajdecki says. ‘What it means to us is they’ve been able to take our suggestions and write them into the software. When we say ‘This is great, but we would love a button that does this,’ in a couple of weeks the button appears.’

Gajdecki says he favors SynaMatch over comparable software systems because it’s the first with which 3D artists can see all tracking points and edit and switch them easily.

‘Apparently it came out of research the French military did when they were making little robots to go into rooms and look for terrorists and bombs,’ he explains. ‘The computer has to understand what the 3D space is, which we do intuitively and instantly, but it doesn’t. So the government wrote software to extract 3D data from video images and it works really well.’

Wide array of gear

‘I’m a big fan of technology,’ Gajdecki proclaims. ‘It’s done a great deal for us.’

To that end he says much of gvfx’s profits go toward reinvestment in new gear. One recent addition is the installation of Backdraft, a virtual studio package from Montreal-headquartered developer Discreet. The solution simplifies archiving and data transfer among workstations, freeing up systems whose sole focus should be visual effects creation from these time-consuming tasks.

Gajdecki says acquisitions such as Backdraft and its one Avid system are part of a movement in the industry toward enabling post-production houses to offer more complete service.

‘We got the Avid to make our effects better, but also to see if we could start putting together this bigger package – here’s the Avid, here’s Backdraft, throw the tape in, do the conform, do the color correct.’

According to Gajdecki, Backdraft doesn’t yet support edit decision lists (text files which contain a record of a program’s edit points), but it will after a bug fix in the next release. One thing Gajdecki doesn’t enjoy is paperwork – since it takes him away from hands-on effects work – but the fact the Avid does presently support edls helps a lot in this regard.

‘We chose the Avid so the editor could send us an edl,’ he says. If we already have the tapes, we just load in the edl and boom! we have the new cut. I don’t have to bug them to get my in and out points, nor to cut my stuff in to see if it’s going to work.’

Although there is unquestionably a certain amount of cachet in getting Hollywood gigs as gvfx has, Gajdecki is equally proud of his company’s contributions to Canadian shows. A gander at this year’s best visual effects category for the Gemini Awards shows gvfx staff involved on half the nominated projects. The honored programs include episodes of Stargate SG-1 and aac’s Total Recall 2070 and the cbc mow Must Be Santa.

‘Getting so many Gemini nominations and awards in the past demonstrates that we really support the Canadian industry,’ Gajdecki comments. ‘It shows people we’re willing to take Canadian shows, knowing they don’t have as much money, we’re willing to put the best gear and people on them, and we’re willing to go the extra mile.’ *

-www.gvfx.com