1999 Filmography

Storm Of The Century


February 14, 1999

The Thirteenth Floor

May 30, 1999
Centropolis Entertainment head Roland Emmerich produced this virtual noir whodunit under the Sony picture deal they signed during Godzilla. This Josef Rusnak directed sci-fi film had a series of digital effects in it to transform reality into the virual realm. From tunnel effects to monitor replacements to futuristic compositing shots we had to create some fairly mindless effects for this film. The original visual effects house on the movie was supposed to be a German based facility that had put up some of the money for the film. Oddly enough the money ran out and the effects then fell to the production companies sister company Centropolis Effects.
When the shots were first pitched to us there really wasn't that much for us to go on outside of some generalistic terms that the post production supervisor had sent to us. After several attempts at trying to deliver them something that might work Roland himself came by and gave us these words of wisdom on what to do... "Make it look Digital." Ah, yes, it all becomes clear now.


LA Times: Motion Capture

For this little theatrical commercial/advertisement, Vision Art basically turned around a full motion capture spot in a little less than 2 weeks. From a simple 2-D hand drawn sketch we had to create a fully animated character.

House on Haunted Hill

October 29, 1999
A millionaire offers a group of diverse people $1,000,000 to spend the night in a haunted house with a horrifying past. Directed by William Malone with Visual Effects supervised by Robert Skotak.
You will see a common trend among my diatribes laying out the unmitigated brilliance that comes with visual effects. For instance one of the more direct and informative comments we got as to what the evil creature that stalks the cast looks like was "give the creature a diaphenous clothlike edge to its tendrils" or "make the mist an undifferentiated tonal waft in the scene." Uhhhhh... yeah.


Anna and the King

December 17, 1999
Andy Tenant whose past claim to fame was the entertaining live action Drew Barrymore fairy tale Ever After directed this 20th Century Fox  1800's period piece based on the true life diaries of English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens (Jodie Foster)  who traveled to Siam to teach the children of the King (Chow  Yun-Fat) the ways of the Western world.   Visual Effects Supervisor Rich Thorne asked Vision Art to supply the full scale rocket battle that takes place between two opposing armies.  Well... actually just one army.  You'd have to see the film to understand the concept and I don't want to spoil it.  The work on this was fairly tricky.  When they originally shot the plates for this sequence they used several practical pyrotechnics mounted atop poles to simulate where the rockets were exploding.  Of course after seeing the cut, they realized that to create the image of danger and fear to the opposing army there would have to be wave after wave of rockets assaulting the opposing army.   Enter the previsualization phase.  What we had to do was attempt to match the look of the practical explosion's smoke and then previs the entire battle from start to finish plotting out the course of every rocket launched.  The R&D teams for this project consisted of Pete Shinners -- Vision Art's in-house software contact to FutureLight software team and Carl Hooper -- CG Supervisor for the show.  The two of them together with Vision Art's in-house particle software Sparky generated a fully realistic photoreal smoke trail that easily met and exceeded Rich's expectations.  Once the look of the smoke was defined, it was then up to Carl, Joe Jackman and myself to previs the battle's 40 some shots.
During the previsualization phase of this project Rich Thorne, the Visual Effects Supervisor on the project, stuck around through the thick of it.  During the entire previs process Rich firmly planted himself in our office and basically forced us to watch the film Armageddon over and over and over again threatening to replay the movie again if we didn't work harder.   Michael Bay tends to be a good motivator. Vision Art as a whole completed 42 previs shots with realistic CG smoke in 3 days.
After delivering the first pass tape to Rich, it was now up to us to correct all the mistakes and take the process from just R&D concepts to a full production pipeline.  Smoke, from a digital standpoint, is a very difficult thing to photorealistcally create.  Single frames have a tendency to look incredibly real but put together you can get anything from blurred fog to hyper crisp noise like energy effects.  Plus, values used to define the expansion rate and fluid viscosity in one shot would look horrible fake in other shot.  Iteration after iteration of smoke trails followed and hundreds of renders later we delivered a fairly realistic looking rocket battle to 20th Century Fox.
When Digital Domain was first raping and pillaging the industry for talent way back in 1994, there was apparently some heavy recruiting from all the post houses in the industry.  One of those companies raided was Digital Magic, which at the time was owned by Rich Thorne.  Having worked with these people for several years at DD and hearing the name Rich used over and over again it never dawned on me that the VFX on this film and the previous owner of DM were one and the same.   Such a small world.