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Master of illusion
Computer generated imagery is where the future of film-making might lie. It’s all very high-tech and full of dollars. Pakistan has finally joined in the game and is building bridges with Hollywood, bidding for a market share of an industry with an estimated value of $25 billion, with an average growth rate of 30 per cent, per year.
Jeff Kleiser’s pioneering work in computer animation has spanned the history of the medium. His company, Kleiser-Walczak, established with his wife Diana Walczak, is rated amongst the top ten animation houses in the US, with groundbreaking visual effects in movies like Tron, Stargate, Judge Dredd, Mortal Kombat Annihilation and X-Men. In the martial arts thriller The One, Jeff’s innovative face replacement techniques enable Jet Li to battle his evil self. Kleiser-Walczak was also involved with X-Men 2 and is currently working on Jim Carey’s The Son of Mask, while bidding for a number of other Hollywood projects.
Jeff Kleiser, the creative director, president and co-founder of the company was in Pakistan recently to establish the possibility of out-sourcing work, and perhaps establish co-productions for animated feature films like Jungle Book and Shrek. Such projects would cost upward of $150 million if done in the US, and $40 million if executed in Pakistan.
Visual effects serve to exaggerate reality, and there is invariably a moral dilemma there. How does Jeff Kleiser cope? ‘I don’t have a problem, except when called upon to bring back actors from the dead! The actor devoted his entire life to perfecting his craft, and without his permission, to use his image under someone else’s control, is not morally right. Even though his descendants might say ‘okay, I’ll take money to let you use pop’s image!’ I don’t think that should be allowed’
“In our discussions with the Hollywood studios, we found that they’re all very much interested in doing computer-generated films, but they’re not interested in paying the top dollar that Pixar or Dreamworks pays to get those films done. So, working with Asif Iqbal and his team at Post Amazers struck us as a smart way of keeping the quality up and the price down. That’s been the motivation for this collaboration,” says Kleiser, whose only apprehension in coming to Pakistan was whether the language barrier would inhibit work. “Once here, I found everyone to be very warm and generous with his or her time, and very conversant with the English language!”
High-end animation is one of the most difficult types of footage to create, says Jeff, and it can be extremely costly, slow and tedious work. Some of the frames take as much as eight to 12 hours to calculate on a fast computer, and a whole animated sequence can have 24 or 30 frames per second. The cost can vary from several hundred dollars per second to tens of thousands of dollars per second, depending on how complex the work is and what output medium is involved.
How does a new project unfold, and what does it entail?
“For a feature film’s visual effects, we speak to the director and get an idea of what he has envisioned. We might do some experimental work to show him how we would approach solving his problem. This would lead to an award of the contract to do the visual effects for the movie. We’d visit the set and see the live action photography, and make a note of the lighting, the set, the camera lens, and all the other detail. Appropriate information is necessary when we add the computer-generated elements to that scene. Then they shoot the film. We get the film from them, digitize it and put it into our computers, create the effects, composite our effects with the background imagery and then put it back onto the film. For theme park rides we would typically draw up storyboards with details of what a ride might look like. Then, when we have the contract, we have our teams go in and build the models and do the animation, render the images, and put back onto whatever projection mediums they need for the attraction. It’s computer-generated imagery with live action. It varies quite a bit.”
Kleiser-Walczak’s most memorable work is at the Universal Theme Park, called the ‘Amazing Adventures of Spiderman’ in Orlando, Florida. It’s been called the best ride in the world by a lot of people, including Steven Spielberg, and sometimes entails a wait of three hours or more. Universal is spending another $150m to replicate it in their new theme park in Osaka, Japan. But, there will be no royalties for Kleiser-Walczak from this deal.
How did Jeff Kleiser discover his passion for animation?
“My older brother Randal was a film director. He was even making films in high school, while I was in elementary school. I learnt film-making from him. When I went to college, I majored in Maths, and then transferred into a Computer Science major, and became interested in using computers creatively when I met some people using computers to make images. This combined my interest in maths, computer science and film-making! Computer animation was the logical place for me. So, it really happened in college, Colgate University in upstate New York.”
Jeff convinced the Art department and the Computer Science department to allow him to create his own major area of study that was more in-between their scopes.
“There wasn’t any communication between them. The Art department didn’t know anything about computers, and the Computer Science department didn’t know anything about Art, and I wanted to be somewhere in the middle. I got an art professor to sponsor me to create this new department at the college, which is now a very active department that still exists at Colgate.”
While Jeff is not particular about the hardware, as long as it is as fast as possible and reliable, the software that Kleiser-Walczak use is called Maya, developed by a company called Alias. Their relationship goes back to 1985 when they were just starting out. They get access to the software before anybody else, and Alias gets access to real world feedback.
Visual effects serve to exaggerate reality, and there is invariably a moral dilemma there. How does Jeff cope?
“I don’t have a problem, except when called upon to bring back actors from the dead! People have asked us to make a computer-generated version of them and put them into a project. Usually I don’t feel that it’s an appropriate use of the medium. The actor devoted his entire life to perfecting his craft, and without his explicit permission, to use his or her work or image under someone else’s control, is not morally right. That’s what I believe. Even though his descendants might say ‘okay, I’ll take money to let you use pop’s image!’ I don’t think that should be allowed.”
Asif Iqbal is quite excited about the link with Hollywood and Kleiser-Walczak. However, he laments the lack of trained human resource.
“We have developed 10,000 square feet of purpose built operational space here in Karachi, but there is no institute for animation. We have to do all the training in-house. If the Pakistani government wants to benefit from the estimated $400m potential export revenues from this field, then it will have to allocate funds to develop the human and physical resources. This is a high valued-added industry, and each animator has potentially $100 to contribute per day.”
This was Jeff’s first visit to Pakistan, and he just loved the local cuisine!
“I’m a big fan of spicy food and I have a lot of hot sauces at home,” he added, on a lighter note.
With a little help from the government, this mutual love for hot curry and animation could blossom into a meaningful employment generator for Pakistan.
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