Close-Up on Hollywood's Creature Teacher

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"Fume," a personal project by Gnomon School founder Alex Alvarez | Courtesy of Gnomon

Alex Alvarez puts down his coffee and lights up a cigarette.

He noodles out The Exorcist theme on the piano in his living room. Then he turns to his collection of Star Wars figures. "They were mine when I was 5," he says proudly. Now they belong to his son, Griffin. "I was obsessed with Star Wars," he adds. "The impact it had on my generation's imagination was rather staggering."

Rather. For a guy with some of the most powerful connections in the movie business, Alvarez, founder of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, in Hollywood, is an unapologetic geek. His baggy army-green pants are hiked up by a black quasi-military belt with three rows of grommets. He shares his Los Feliz home in L.A. with a collection of latex monsters with bulging eyes and antennae. He throws Jägermeister-soaked parties packed with artists who sometimes sit down and sketch on the fly for their friends, with the results thrown up on a big screen. ("It's kind of like Sex, Lies, and Videotape," admits one regular. "You might be drawing something embarrassing depending on how many shots you've had.")

But all traces of dorkiness fall away when Alvarez takes his place at the front of his class on character-and-creature design at Gnomon. Seven pairs of eyes pin their gaze on his round, youthful face; his commanding 6-foot-1-inch frame; and the thick mustache that connects to a beard manicured to follow his jawline. Long strands of jet-black hair are slicked back and chopped abruptly at the nape. Over the course of his lecture, he uses words such as "sci-fi'd out," "badass," "hard-core awesomeness," and "zombie dragon" as naturally as "topology" and "base mesh." When Alvarez taps into a key concept, he raises his eyebrows and gesticulates in symmetrical and controlled motions, like a mime. These gestures become a kind of geometry, as if he's physically molding the same 3-D polygons he models on his computer and projects onto a screen at the head of the room.

With his buttery charisma and bottomless technical chops, Alvarez has become the pipeline between Hollywood's studios and rising digital artists. In fact, for an industry increasingly driven by -- and dependent on -- digital effects, Gnomon has become its most dependable stockpile of highly refined fuel. When Alvarez started the school back in 1997, computer graphics (CG) were just breaking out. Jurassic Park, Independence Day, and Toy Story had proved the box-office appeal of visual effects and 3-D animation (a 3-D representation of 2-D images, not the stereo 3-D camera and projection technology that's all the rage today). But the talent pool had yet to catch up. Alvarez was only 24 at the time, an "applications engineer" for Alias|Wavefront, which created software used in such movies as Terminator 2, and was making daily rounds to the studios to school artists in 3-D modeling and animation. He mined those connections and created a school joined at the hip to the industry. Patricia Beckmann-Wells, manager of school and outreach relations at Walt Disney Animation Studios, calls Alvarez a visionary for redefining the educational landscape for CG. "It was an undefined beast 10 years ago," she says. "Alex took it on himself to fill a void."

Today, Gnomon is considered the MIT of visual effects -- the most reliable route to a real job for art-school grads focused on Hollywood. Teachers are working pros drawn from DreamWorks, Industrial Light & Magic, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Disney, Pixar, Digital Domain, Rhythm & Hues, Blizzard, and Electronic Arts. "These are the people pushing boundaries," says Jeffrey A. Okun, chair of the Visual Effects Society. Alvarez himself is both admired and feared for his talent; students log 16-hour days to get their work in good-enough shape for him to tear apart. "I had the luxury of having classes with Alex," says Tefft Smith II, who graduated from Gnomon in 2000 and worked at studios like LookFX and Zoic before returning to the school as director of education. "My brain just felt like it was going to explode -- but in a good way."

"My interactions with him leave me gob smacked!" exclaims Okun. "He is a Svengali, but in the best way. A student goes in there feeling like the world's biggest loser, without a creative bone in his body. Twenty minutes with the guy, and he's written the greatest opera ever."

Given the performance at the U.S. box office in 2008 -- attendance dropped 4.7% -- digital effects have become ever more important to the studios, and not simply because the majority of the 100 top-grossing titles ever are effects-driven or animated films. Digital effects can also save money -- lots of it -- by reducing production time, papering over continuity problems or other glitches that weren't caught on set, and even by generating entire scenes from the thinnest visual material. And in a business built on software, the more you know, the more you're worth. Alvarez's range makes him all but priceless.