When director Roland Emmerich got the green light to make The Day After Tomorrow, he knew exactly what talent he'd need. Before even writing the script, he called visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas. "People didn't go to The Day After Tomorrow because of the acting, directing, and writing," says Scott Ross, chair of effects house Digital Domain. "They went to see New York flooded and LA ripped apart by a twister."
Call it the Lucas effect. Since 1977's Star Wars, visual effects have come to dominate the Hollywood box office and bottom line. Of the 20 top-grossing movies of all time, three are totally animated, and the others include so many effects you can't tell the real from the fake. Over the past decade, studio sources say, the typical wide-release feature film has seen its effects budget skyrocket from an average of $5 million to $40 million. "Even five years ago, we shot one or two movies a year with a significant number of effects," says Hutch Parker, president of production at 20th Century Fox Film. "Today, 50 percent have significant effects. They're a character in the movie."
And the people who deliver these money shots are becoming stars in their own right – earning up to seven figures, walking the red carpet at the Academy Awards, and being courted as if they were Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts. Meet Hollywood's new A-list.
DENNIS MUREN
Credits: Nine Oscars, including Visual Effects awards for Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Abyss, Innerspace, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Return of the Jedi, E.T., and The Empire Strikes Back.
Specialty: Versatility. He masterminded everything from the miniature dogfighters in Star Wars to the fully CG larger-than-life Hulk.
Inspiration:: Hollywood effects magician John Fulton, who famously used Jell-O to part the Red Sea in 1923's The Ten Commandments.
Big break:: Hired by George Lucas in 1976 to work on Star Wars and help start his effects factory, Industrial Light & Magic.
**Highlight:s:**: E.T.'s flying bicycles, not to mention the first photorealistic CG character (the stained-glass knight in Young Sherlock Holmes) and feature film's first morph (the old woman turning into a tiger in Willow).
Turning point:: In 1989, Muren took a year off to learn to use a Macintosh and Photoshop. When he returned, he helped take ILM's compositing – a method of blending separate visual components into one shot – into the digital age. That made possible the morphing T-1000 in Terminator 2 and the fleet-footed dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
Up next:: War of the Worlds. "When I decided to make the movie," says Steven Spielberg, "Muren was one of the first people I called."
KAREN GOULEKAS
Credits: Two Emmys for her 3-D animation packages for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Grabbed attention for her f/x in True Lies, T2 3-D, Apollo 13, and Fifth Element.
Specialty: Extreme attention to detail – and extremely high standards. "I'm pickier than the director," she says.
Learned the ropes:: Doing effects for TV commercials, where "you have to do it all," she says, "model, light, animate, and composite."
Inspiration:: T2. After watching that movie, she moved to LA and a year later began work at James Cameron's production house, Digital Domain.
Moment of panic:: When Emmerich gave Goulekas the script for The Day After Tomorrow, she almost fainted. "I thought, 'Man, he has gone mad,'" she says. "The freight ship coming down Fifth Avenue sent me over the edge."
Highlight:: Day After Tomorrow's chilling shot of a storm smashing into New York. She cherry-picked the best elements from three f/x houses (Digital Domain, Hydraulx, and Tweak Films) before she was satisfied; it cost about $200,000. The production team scanned 13 city blocks into the computer and took more than 50,000 photographs. This became a digital backdrop against which they could flood and freeze downtown Manhattan.
JOHN DYKSTRA
Credits: Won two Oscars for shooting miniatures on the original Star Wars film. Photographed "supersonic" model jets for Firefox and mastered CG for Stuart Little and Spider-Man.
Specialty: Making small things look really big.
Big break:THROUGH: At age 27, Dykstra invented motion-control photography while working on Star Wars. "I came up with a means to mass-produce multiple elements in multiple shots each day on each stage. Before that, we had to accelerate, decelerate, pan, tilt, and track in six or seven axes of motion, independently and repeatedly."
Highlights:: Spidey's awesome swoops through the canyons of Manhattan in Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2.
Personal favorite:: The crushing fight on the side of a skyscraper as Spider-Man rescues his aunt from the metal clutches of Otto Octavius. "We all know that movies are surrogates for reality," Dykstra says. "We can do anything. It isn't, can you make it look real? It's, having done it, is it evocative of an emotion?"
Geek factor:: An adrenaline junkie, Dykstra has raced cars and motorcycles. "You have to get life experiences," he says. "A lot of digital-effects people don't bolt a camera to a motorcycle and ride across a desert to create a background plate. Exposing yourself to reality is critical to making the virtual real."
STEFEN FANGMEIER
Credits: A 15-year veteran of Industrial Light & Magic, with three Oscar nominations for Twister, The Perfect Storm, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.
Specialty: Water – producing particle systems and dynamic simulations, i.e., models of natural phenomena like rain.
Geek factor:: Before entering the movie business, Fangmeier logged hours as a computer systems programmer and image processor at the rocket R&D lab, the Aerospace Corporation.
Highlights:: A 200-foot tower of wind in Twister and the giant crashing waves in The Perfect Storm.
Big save:: Took over the visual effects on Master and Commander mid-production after the original f/x house fell behind. He finalized some 700 shots, which combined full-scale props, miniature and CG ships, storm-tossed seas, skies, sailors, and blazing cannon fire.
Career high:: Lemony Snicket's iron-jawed supertot Sunny. "It's 95 percent real baby and 5 percent CG," says Fangmeier, who filmed an infant, then animated her face from the eyes down and lip-synced her mouth. For her body movement, he took motion-capture footage of ILM employees' kids.
Inspiration:: The Pre-Raphaelite painters. "They captured the emotion of what we feel when we look at a scene," Fangmeier says. "CG does the same thing. You can't model every pore. You have to approximate, reduce complexity to create a visual illusion for a particular viewing angle."
KEN RALSTON
Credits: Five Oscars, for Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Cocoon, Death Becomes Her, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump.
Specialty: Taking risks. He's still recovering from his performance-capture experiment with director Robert Zemeckis on their ninth film together, Polar Express. "I'm usually pretty scared going into it."
Highlight:: The gruesome brain-munching earwigs in 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Ralston equipped rod puppets with a mechanism in their jaws made from a tea strainer he found in a coffee shop. "I bent it, cut it, and then stitched it into the monsters' little mouths."
Geek factor:: Pyro. "My nature is to be on set, blowing things up."
Inspiration:: Stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen, whose 9-inch-tall bronze skeleton from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the Highlight: of Ralston's action-figure collection.
Personal favorite:: Forrest Gump. When Tom Hanks walked into JFK's office, Ralston says, "we wanted to show how easy it is to manipulate people into believing the unbelievable."
Worst misfire: Polar Express. The New York Times panned the characters as being "creepily unlifelike," but Ralston counters that "the movie isn't trying to be real. The children aren't real. So relax."
ERIK NASH
Credits: Spent seven years on TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation doing motion-control photography. He joined Digital Domain for Apollo 13 and Titanic.
Specialty: Manipulating the camera. For the shot of Kate and Leo on the bow of the Titanic, Nash devised an algorithm to produce the elaborate sweeping camera effect. While the two actors stood on a motion-controlled turntable atop a full-scale ship model against a green screen, the camera flew past at 12 feet per second, and then swung around them again. The final shot took a year to perfect.
Big break:: Talk about serendipity: His best friend's stepfather, effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey), gave Nash a summer job where he met f/x guru Bob Shepherd, who hired him as a camera assistant on 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Highlight:: Sonny, the computer-generated protagonist in I, Robot. Nash adopted the Gollum approach: take motion-capture for Sonny's body and face and then use the actor's performance as reference to animate the face entirely by hand. To make it look like the robot was really talking, he gave it teeth and a tongue.
Geek factor:: Covets the computing muscle at Lord of the Rings powerhouse Weta Digital yet still prefers to shoot on film. "So much more information is captured on a color negative."
Up next:: Stealth. Director Rob Cohen, who loved Nash's f/x on XXX, brought him in to film miniature airplanes for this 2005 adventure movie.
GREG AND COLIN STRAUSE
Credits: The brothers, 30 and 28 respectively, delivered effects for The X-Files movie, The Stupids, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. They also animate TV ads (Nike's Clio-winning Stickman football) and music videos (J.Lo, Linkin Park).
Specialty: Resourcefulness and speed. Their three-year-old company, Hydraulx, has a rep for finishing shots faster than rivals. "When there's a new tech upgrade," Greg says, "we jump on it."
Geek factor:: When they were kids, their IBM sysadmin father gave them a PC and later a Commodore Amiga. Autodidacts, they re-created scenes from T2 and The Mask for their demo reels. Within three weeks of arriving in LA, they landed work on The X-Files TV series.
Highlight:: The longest ever CG flyover shot for the opening ice shelf scene in The Day After Tomorrow.
Up next:: Stoking the fires of hell in Constantine.
JOHN MONOS
Credits: The 27-year-old was lead lighting artist on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Spider-Man, and Spider-Man 2.
Specialty: Lighting and shading. For the Spider-Man movies, Monos integrated the digital human characters into the films in a lifelike way. "On the first film, Green Goblin and Spider-Man wore masks," Monos notes, "which conveniently hid the complexities of human modeling." That was not the case in the second movie. "Skin, hair, and cloth are the holy grail," he says. "Bringing them all together completes the impression of realism."
Learned the ropes:: "Making cereal boxes dance" in TV commercials.
Highlights:: Imbuing Final Fantasy with that strange green glow; convincingly combining the real and CG Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2.
Inspiration:: Rembrandt. Monos looked to the master for the lighting of Doc Ock's eyes, which "you couldn't capture in a photograph."
JONATHAN ROTHBART
Credits: Rothbart, 34, rendered the space battles in Star Trek: First Contact and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace; the headquarters in Men in Black; and the last look at New York in Sleepy Hollow. He also engineered the hellhole machine in Hellboy, and the parachute finale of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
Specialty: Hardware.
Learned the ropes:: As a graphic designer in advertising and gaming, moved to animatics (animated storyboards and CG previsualizations) at ILM, where he started the Rebel Mac Unit, a small group that compiled all the elements for each individual shot.
Big break:AWAY: In 1999, he left Lucas & Co. to found the Orphanage production house.
Geek factor:: Devotes an entire hard drive to his digital stills collection of clouds and sunsets.
Up next:: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Anne Thompson (ak.thompson@comcast.net) is deputy film editor at The Hollywood Reporter.
Dennis Muren Art Streiber
Karen Goulekas Art Streiber
John Dykstra Art Streiber
Stefen Fangmeier Art Streiber
Ken Ralston Art Streiber
Erik Nash Art Streiber
From left, Greg and Colin Strause, John Monos, Jonathan Rothbart Art Streiber
