Just imagine Mel Gibson and Humphrey Bogart starring together in a new feature film. Hang on, isn’t one of them dead? Well yes, but through the marvels of new special-effects technology such a concept is no longer inconceivable, nor solely the domain of Hollywood. West Coast post facilities now have these capabilities too.

Alex Tkach, general manager of Vancouver’s Northwest Imaging & FX, says there’s been an explosion in computer hardware and software developments over the last year, providing exponential growth in special-effects technology. Computer programs have become so sophisticated, it’s just a matter of learning how to use them.

‘Up until now there hasn’t been an excitement factor,’ says Tkach. ‘It’s just been cuts, dissolves, ado moves, anything you can do in an electronics suite. But now you can do literally thousands of layers, and you can start to finesse every single frame. It’s this finessing that’s allowing us to try almost anything.’

With this explosion in new technology, production companies are now asking for effects that post houses have never tried before.

For a recent episode of Universal’s new sci-fi series m.a.n.t.i.s., Tkach says the producers determined that it would cost $250,000 to do the required special effects conventionally. Universal said that was too steep and asked Northwest what it could do using the same script but creating the effects in a different manner. Northwest cut the effects budget by 50%.

‘To create a lightning effect,’ Tkach explains, ‘it used to have to be done painstakingly on a Paintbox type of system; now we can do lightning effects by just identifying key frames of where the lightning should begin and end. Because it is an abstract algorithm, the computer figures out how the lightning should look, with all the flashes and effects.

‘So what used to take four hours to create frame-by-frame in a $500-an-hour room can now be done without the expensive room in only 20 minutes.

Not surprisingly, new special effects technology is also replacing many of the more costly and time-consuming physical fx.

On another episode of m.a.n.t.i.s., the lead character was required to jump three storeys from the ground to the roof of a building.

Traditionally, to achieve this effect there were two routes: either hire a crane, put the actor on wires and pull him up so he appears to jump onto the building, or gradually lower him by crane from the top of the building and reverse the footage. Both methods are extremely expensive, to say nothing of the man-hours involved and the cost of insurance to do the stunt in the first place.

For the m.a.n.t.i.s. jump scene, the producers opted to do the effects on computer. A 3D m.a.n.t.i.s. character was created on the computer. They cut from the live-action running scene to the cgi computer graphic imagery for the jump onto the roof and then cut back to the live-action actor for a close-up. The effect was so successful, says Tkach, nobody could guess how it was done.

The deadlines and tight delivery dates of episodic tv have a considerable influence on the choice of computerized special effects, says Tkach. ‘Physical or practical effects require models or apparatus that need to be constructed. When we create things inside the computer, like bullets or a car, we can build those in a matter of hours, or in the case of a car, two days. A carpentry team would have difficulty competing with us for that.’

Northwest also recently purchased Flame software run on a Silicon Graphics Onyx system. Tkach explains its advantages: ‘If you shoot a woman walking down the street and she spins her head around but the props people forgot to put earrings on her, we can physically go and find a pixel in her earlobe, then, via computer, attach a 3D computerized earring image. She can shake her head all she wants and it will look real. This process can then be watched by a producer in real time, which could never be done before.’

Visual effects are no longer just the obvious things you can see like a car blowing up or someone falling off a building. ‘More often it’s about adding in shadows or extending part of a shot. We do a lot of cleaning up or finessing,’ says Tkach.

In one particular episode of m.a.n.t.i.s., Tkach says Northwest added in 149 effects. ‘That’s pretty amazing when you consider there were only 400 shots in the whole show.’

Another important shift in the nature of the special effects business is in the area of personnel. Tkach estimates that eight years ago 100% of Northwest’s staff came through the ranks of engineering, vtr, camera operation – all very technical backgrounds. Today, 80% have art degrees.

‘Now we’re hiring cel animators and artists instead of technicians because they’re used to working with motion. It would be great if we could just buy this box and it would solve all of our problems, but it doesn’t. We have to have people who know how to make the effects look like they belong, because now the way you rotoscope, the way you choose colors and shade objects requires an artist.’

This factor alone has presented a major challenge for post houses. Tkach says he has spent the last three months searching the globe for people who have this kind of expertise.

In addition, Northwest has established an internal apprenticeship program where three people are currently being mentored by individuals with 10 to 15 years experience who have been brought into the company.

Rainmaker Imaging, a new associated company of Gastown Post and Transfer, recently started competing internationally with the purchase of Kodak’s Cineon system.

The system, one of only half a dozen in the world, consists of two super computers, several workstations with additional software capabilities linked together by a fiber-optic network, and a high-resolution film scanner capable of 4,000 lines of resolution.

The Cineon is considered by many in the post industry to be the turbo Bentley of digital effects systems. Rainmaker president Bob Scarabelli says the system has opened up a whole new plateau of special effects post capabilities in Vancouver.

‘We can now scan and digitize film images at film resolution, then we can manipulate those images and record them back onto film, yet still maintain the film quality resolution throughout. This is what is giving us the tremendous kind of flexibility to do new kinds of effects,’ says Scarabelli.

Whatever producers were used to doing in the video realm, Scarabelli says the Cineon system can now do on film. For example, slow-motion special effects.

When a film is done optically, the frames are emulated to produce double the amount of frames. Digitally, the frames can now be interpolated, thereby creating a middle frame that is halfway between one and two. The result is slow-motion effects that are much smoother and steadier.

Another important area of development is color correction. ‘We used to only be able to do primary color correction, now we can do secondary color correction and regional correction such as stripping,’ says Scarabelli.

Other more challenging post special effects that hadn’t been done in Vancouver prior to the installation of Cineon include blue-screen shooting.

Scarabelli explains this kind of effect was used in the Sylvester Stallone film Cliffhanger, where Stallone was not in fact hanging from a helicopter or on the edge of a cliff but instead working in a blue-screen environment. The background scenes of the mountains were shot separately and the two composited digitally. Ironically, although the producers originally scouted Vancouver for the film, they decided to shoot elsewhere because digital compositing was not available on the West Coast at the time.

Scarabelli agrees many of the new wave of special effects will no longer be obvious, but rather, subtle imagery.

What these new systems will allow producers to do are creative things that could not be done efficiently before. For example, in the film Forrest Gump, a feather floated through 16 different scenes, maintaining a continuous motion throughout. Many of these effects are so subtle an audience doesn’t notice or identify them as digital effects, but they do make movies just a little more magic.

The more outrageous variety of effects, like the three-foot tongue coming out of the character’s mouth in the film The Mask, become that much more potent in their heightened realism, thanks to the new technologies.

Scarabelli says the designing of a script ‘will also change as writers become more aware of the new kinds of effects we are capable of creating now.’

The kinds of things the Cineon can do, says Curtis Staples, vice-president of marketing for Gastown and Rainmaker, ‘are like when Brandon Lee died before The Crow was finished. They used a body double and wrapped Brandon Lee’s face around it. Now you can insert dead guys in scenes and can marry computer-generated worlds with actors.

‘You can also do a scene like in True Lies where the cars are racing down the causeway, there’s a helicopter overhead, and there are jet planes blowing out the bridge. Many of those scenes were created with 12 layers of compositing. Some of it is computer-generated, some real some stock footage, some models and miniatures. And by the time it’s put together you see a car that is going down a bridge that is being blown up by fighter jets, but the bridge is actually 30 feet long and two feet high and it’s being blown up with firecrackers.

‘And to be able to do that kind of work at film resolution for this part of the world is new and very exciting.’