How does a Winnipeg-based special effects company land a gig involving the likes of John Travolta, Halle Berry, Joel Silver and Dominic Sena?

According to Frantic Films president Chris Bond, it’s simple: ‘Blood, sweat, tears and Air Miles.’

Frantic, which has 17 2D and 3D effects artists, was given the opportunity to do the pre-visualization on what became known as the ‘Ventura Bank Sequence’ in the Warner Bros. summer blockbuster Swordfish.

Founded in 1997, Frantic is an Emmy-nominated producer of animation and F/X for film and TV whose client roster includes Vancouver Television, the Women’s Television Network, Procter & Gamble, Regent Entertainment and ABC Television.

One of the things that separates Frantic from other shops is the fact it uses Digital Fusion from Toronto-based manufacturer eyeon Software for F/X compositing work. It became attached to this lesser-known product in the first year of the software company’s operation.

‘eyeon did not have a demo version at the time, so they sent us a full copy of their software to work with,’ says Bond. ‘It did the job very well, and their support was phenomenal.’

Digital Fusion, which runs on Windows 2000, became the cornerstone of the Swordfish sequence for Frantic, and Bond admits, ‘Without that tool, I have no idea how we could have composited such a massive shot.’

Massive might be an understatement. Referred to as the ‘largest bullet-time shot ever’ by director Dominic Sena, nearly all of the 42-second shot is synthetic and the product of the Frantic crew.

Creating the illusion of a camera flying around an explosion in slow motion required a mammoth effort in terms of roto, tracking and frame-to-frame color correction, most of which was done on 6k vistavision plates.

Once the source material was cleaned up, Frantic implemented paint fixes and problem-solving element replacement with 3D objects such as missing cameras and blocked shots. Including smoke and debris elements, the creation of 11 3D stuntmen and the compositing of all these layers in Digital Fusion at 4k in 16-bit color per channel, Frantic ended up with more than 500 layers, with only 35 of those being photographed elements.

The difficult shot was achieved not only through the skill of the Frantic artists, but also thanks to eyeon’s commitment to its customers, according to Ken Zorniak, Frantic VP. ‘We have always been impressed with the responsiveness of eyeon and the talents of its programmer in building a superior compositing tool,’ he says.

Bond declares that the desktop revolution is in full swing, which offers companies such as his that use systems such as Digital Fusion a chance to take on the big boys. ‘The level of resolution, size of file and color depth we used on Swordfish proved that we could do this kind of work on a large scale with consistent results,’ says Bond.

Frantic currently utilizes 85 processors, 2.5 terabytes of storage and gargantuan amounts of RAM. It also employs an 8way IBM Server to keep Digital Fusion at full operational status. Bond says that with this setup, Fusion’s compositing speed and processing power rival that of some of the high-end and highly expensive solutions from Discreet.

Being able to assign multiple artists to a shot, all working on different elements of the composite on multiple copies of Digital Fusion, provides the company with true flexibility. The only other alternative is one Inferno suite with one artist doing the job, which Zorniak says is too time-consuming.

Good technology is one thing. Good effects artists is another. ‘None of this would have been possible without our seemingly inexhaustible staff,’ says Zorniak. *

-www.franticfilms.com