Q: What was the most challenging thing you faced those first three years?
Mostly it was that I was the only full time artist so I worked around the clock for the first 5 years. It was exciting though, so I did not mind.
Q: What kind of hours were you working back then? How does that compare to now?
There was a time when I started keeping track of my hours as my dad was joking that I was working for minimum wage. About 90-110 hrs a week I was doing consistently.
He was pretty much right. But all that hard work I think of as ground work now, and it paid off down the road. I remember finishing shots at night and even driving them down to LA in the middle of the night to the film out place and then watching the shots in dailies with the director that afternoon. We did that kind of stuff to impress people of our quick turn around and enthusiasm.
Q: I love the visual effects on George Michael’s Freeek Video, what was that project like?
Oh boy, that one was like getting asked to jump out of the airplane with someone who had control of your chute cord. We polled our artists and asked if people wanted to do it. We accepted the project knowing the parameters and were optimistic that it would all work out. It did. Everything was being made up on the fly and we had to pull everything off within a month’s time, while the edit was being re-cut in 2 countries. It was still fun and the work was impressive. Somehow it all worked out.
(Image from the music video “Freeek” by George Michael)
Q: League is one of my favorite feature films. Effects wise, what shots did CafeFX do for this film?
We did the ‘hero’ and the majority of the invisible man shots. Also the 21 century industrial opening shot. For the invisible man shots we developed a facial motion capture technique along with eyetronics using a HD camera. That project was a lot of work due to the cg clothing and that we had to recreate the set since there was a lack of clean plates.
Q: I love the work you guys did on Gothika, I would think that fire would be one of the harder effects to do. Can you tell us how you tackled the effects on this film?
Yeah, that was a tough one. We developed our own in-house liquid based fire program, which was challenging due to the programming of and using simultaneously.
It works within LightWave. And we also composited some real fire strips in as well. The matchmoving was important for the skin burning layers we did. It all turned out amazing! The most realistic CG fire shots done for a film at the time.
Q: What are you most proud of with your work on Master and Commander?
I really like looking at the before and after. Robert Stromberg did a great job with the matte paintings. The footage was a little challenging to work with as it required a lot of roto and color correction. The footage was totally blown out on many shots. The finished result is a real piece of art.
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