Intelligent Creatures has just finished work on two Hollywood blockbusters and has begun more FX on two prestigious American indie films, but the damper that the Screen Actors Guild negotiations are having on service work in Canada is stinging.

‘The timing of the SAG issue is brutal, especially in a recession that people are trying to deal with right now,’ says Lon Molnar, IC CEO and FX supervisor on Warner Bros.’s Watchmen (IC created the continuously changing inkblot concealing the face of Watchmen’s vigilante hero, Rorschach), which is now in theaters.

With the loonie down, Canadian post and FX service work would normally be rising, but shops say the SAG issue has Hollywood on hold.

‘We’re hungry like everyone else and need to get work in the pipe,’ Molnar admits. ‘We’re just waiting for Hollywood to start making movies again.’

The renowned FX shop was ‘extremely busy from fall to Christmas,’ delivering 326 shots on Watchmen and 86 shots for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, which hit screens in January. ‘But we’re feeling the same thing that everyone else is – that there’s not a whole lot of work out there to go around right now,’ Molnar continues.

IC is currently working on boutique pictures Snowmen (MPower Pictures) and Everybody’s Fine, starring Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell (slated for a fall release by Miramax). However, Molnar notes that ‘they’re smaller contracts. What it seems to be right now is smaller films being made, with fewer blockbusters in Hollywood being greenlit, and that’s having an impact right now.’

Nonetheless, Molnar affirms that Watchmen was the company’s ‘largest project to date. It was very challenging. We moved into a new building at the time [last autumn] and we were getting that infrastructure up to speed. It was also challenging to find the [highly specialized FX] talent – we used a lot of people from Ontario, Montreal and Vancouver, but we still had to bring people in from L.A., Spain and Iceland. It was hard to find good people for 3D tracking purposes, a hyper-specialized skill set, and trying to find senior compositors.’

Simultaneously, IC was busy building a virtual vampire fortress for Underworld.

‘It was a lot of environmental work such as set extensions, matte paintings, et cetera,’ explains Molnar. ‘Building the asset of the castle and integrating it into every shot was an epic for the director [Patrick Tatopoulos],’ in his feature debut. Tatopoulos had previously worked with Canadians in his role as a production designer.