Special effects animator Mario Marengo is sitting at an sgi workstation conjuring up the Shadowbuilder demon who materializes as decaying bones, demented dogs, and fiendish wasps – these cg elements spewing forth amid smoky shadow treatments and dark distortions that bring the diabolical setting to life.

The darkly gothic virtual set created onscreen stands in striking contrast to Waveform Digital Productions’ bright Toronto digs, where the last of 36 effects shots for the AppleCreek Communications’ horror flick, Bram Stoker’s Shadowbuilder, are wrapping.

In fact, the shop is more akin to a walk through an Ikea showroom – spacious, minimalist decor, a transparent bubble chair, a pastel-toned painting of a toaster on the wall, and a tidy row of white veneer workstations.

To top it off, there’s even a shelf full of shiny chrome kettles, blenders and toasters! When asked about his fetish for kitchen appliances, shop owner and animator Dave Geldart explains that working in the Queen and Bathurst Street district – crammed full of arty antique stores – ‘I just can’t resist picking up these things on my way to work.’

‘It’s been a push, a bit of a blur, a lot of sleepless nights,’ says Marengo of the three-and-a-half-month Shadowbuilder job, but you wouldn’t know it looking around the incredibly neat shop. No stash of test tapes piled high or three-week-old coffee cups tossed in a corner to suggest the frenzied late-night schedules of Marengo and junior animators Nordin Rahali and Michael Hatton who have been working full time on roughly four minutes worth of Shadowbuilder effects since January.

Geldart’s been burning the candle at both ends. Waveform’s slate is divided between commercial and feature effects, their specialty being creature animation and lightning and energy cgi, and Geldart’s been manning the commercial jobs as well as overseeing the feature work.

On Shadowbuilder, the main task for the small, tight team has been to take numerous live-shot objects, skeletal remains and animals, turn them convincingly into smoky cg shadows, and animate them as menacing supernatural incarnations of the originals. The work has also been chockfull of color treatments to bring a dark suspense-horror feel to the picture.

A hefty number of the shots slated for effects work couldn’t be filmed on blue screen, requiring unrestricted camera movement and location settings. This meant the more time-consuming and detailed process of matting and rig removal before effects could be integrated, rather than straight compositing.

Houdini 1.1 test site

But some high-end gear at the shop helped lighten the f/x load. Waveform is a beta test site for Houdini’s latest animation software, version 1.1, and the new package generated most of the Shadowbuilder effects, such as the mad dog scene Marengo is putting final touches on.

For this scene, roughly 125 frames of a puppet dog, shot live as it was crushed between two cars, were raised and the rig painted out and cg smoke integrated in its place. Next, a 3D animated demented canine replica materializes, modeled with elliptical metaballs – the new inverse kinematics feature of Houdini 1.1’s optional character tools which allow for chains of bones within the limbs.

But it’s the swarming wasp effect where 1.1 software really saved the day. Generating thousands of moving wasps that attack the town sheriff, played by Dinner at Fred’s director Shawn Thompson, was achieved with the aid of Houdini’s latest innovation – particle geometry instancing.

Copying a wasp to each point would not only have been a time-consuming task but also taxing on the computer, since the effect required the creation of thousands of cg wasps. Instead, with the new tool, one virtual wasp was instanced to each particle point and tracked to the actor’s every move as he runs wildly, flailing his arms.

To make all these virtual animals and insects look menacing – and not incredibly corny – was a daunting task for the effects animators. Attention to every nitty-gritty detail is how Geldart says they pulled off effects worthy of a horror flick. Painstaking seamless integration of live shots with cg elements was crucial to make the effects fly, he says. Elaborate mattes integrated the sheriff’s wildly flying arms with the swarming wasps, and the sharp, clean cg insects were rendered on Houdini’s mantra to simulate motion blur, matching perfectly with the natural fuzz of the on-location footage.

The effect wasn’t wrapped there – intense hours of color matching set the cg wasps into the live setting where strobing red, blue and white lights from the sheriff’s patrol car pan the footage.

Hours of color treatment and image distortion come to some impressive results on test runs for the animated underground sewer system. Viewed from the demon’s twisted pov, the underground caverns were distorted and displaced with monochrome mattes using Flint’s turbulent noise function and color treatmented to generate fiery streams of bright red and yellow, resembling molten lava searing through a volcano.

‘Some of the effects have been a trick and a half,’ says the soft-spoken, unassuming Marengo, who’s been in the cg animation biz a mere three years. But this guy is definitely modest, and it’s from the praise of his cohorts that it becomes clear the animator is making waves on the effects front.

l.a.-based effects house Hammerhead had been involved in the Shadowbuilder project from the development stages, but AppleCreek president/producer Andy Emelio says he was struck by Marengo’s work and that was one of the key reasons he sent half the effects work Waveform’s way.

And from Geldart it’s learned that this animation whiz was schooled as a musician and composer, playing the classical cello. Marengo became fascinated with computer animation, but without any training on paper, couldn’t land work in the field until he approached Geldart three years ago.

‘I set him down with Prisms and he sucked it up like a sponge,’ says Geldart. ‘There’s a real relationship between music and this kind of work – both are time-based mediums.’

Marengo also writes custom-code software. He developed a function that creates arcing effects for lightning bolts, which came in handy on Waveform’s recent effects work for Producers Network Associates’ action/sci-fi features Deadly Wake and The Cusp. ‘This arcing is next to impossible to do with commercial 3D software,’ says Geldart.

Diverse reel

Geldart also came to computer animation by way of an alternate path. He points to the toaster painting on the wall, explaining he drew that himself.

With a certificate in illustration from the Ontario College of Art, Geldart taught himself cg animation and programming, and tested out the cg waters as a freelance animator in 1987. He made the plunge into high-end animation effects in 1990, building a diverse reel of commercials, broadcast openers and character animation.

He set up shop at the current location a year and a half ago, investing in four sgi workstations that run Houdini and Prisms. A fifth station dedicated to Flint also serves as an in-house editing suite, hooked up to a realtime disc array for editing and compositing commercial jobs. The shop also runs Amazon 3D paint software and Pandemonium.

Shadowbuilder marks a first-time collaboration between AppleCreek, a five-year-old Toronto feature film production house, and Waveform. It’s also a first for Hammerhead animator Jamie Dixon, who cut his teeth as a director on the film, which stars Andrew Jackson as the Shadowbuilder and 11-year-old Kevin Zegers as the innocent soul the demon seeks as its final human sacrifice. The feature is slated for release by Canadian distributor cfp this summer.

AppleCreek and Waveform may be teaming up again in the near future. Geldart’s interest is piqued by Hyperdrive, a special-effects driven thriller the production company will shoot in April. The story is told from the perspective of a character being driven crazy and requires cgi effects of a psychological bent to separate the surreal visions taking place in the hero’s mind from his reality-based life.

This is exactly the vein of effects work Geldart wants Waveform to grow towards, and with Shadowbuilder as a stepping stone, he has big plans for his little appliance-laden shop. ‘I don’t want to do effects that scream cg,’ he says. ‘I want to take on bigger and more challenging projects that integrate special effects with live action to enhance storylines and take viewers a step beyond reality.’