Poof! Movie Magic

Though it's far more expensive to create effects software in-house, the firm frequently does this to try to stay ahead of competitors. One example involves the baby who stars alongside Jamie Kennedy in the forthcoming Son of the Mask. His on-screen image is a combination of real actors and digital doubles who can do such improbable things as leap out of a walker, do a midair flip, and stick the landing. To develop a digital stunt double for the actual babies who were to perform in front of the camera, ILM needed to learn how to create more natural-looking skin.

While attending a graphics trade show, the company's engineers met with a group of Stanford researchers who had written a paper entitled "A Practical Model for Subsurface Light Transport," which dealt with the way skin absorbs light. (Previously, skin had been reflective or flat, which is one reason why early computer-generated humans often looked like they were made out of plastic.) ILM, which already had familiarity with the researchers' work, invited them back to headquarters to discuss their study further, and soon after that, engineer Christophe Hery began trying to incorporate the ideas into ILM's software.

"You want to take the theory and put it in the software so that the artists will use it," says Hery, whose office whiteboard is full of physics equations. "They need tools that are intuitive, because they don't always want to understand the details of how it works." The new software helped lend more realism to Son of the Mask. (This past February, Hery was part of a group that received a Technical Achievement Award from the motion picture academy for their work on realistic digital skin.)

Sometimes cost and complexity mean that movie magic still requires a measure of human ingenuity. "You can get a little crazy with the digital stuff, and it turns out that it'd be easier to just go on the back lot and blow something up," says Plumer, ILM's chief technology officer. Although the company earned an Oscar nomination for the digital waves it created in the movie The Perfect Storm, budget and scheduling reasons don't always make it realistic to generate an angry ocean on a computer. "With Pirates of the Caribbean last year, we decided it was more effective to just build a huge water tank out back and quarter-scale miniature ships and shoot it all," he says. "The result was terrific. It was real water, and it looked great on film."

I Ought to Be in Pictures >>

Fade in on the exterior of Mikimoto, the jewelry shop on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Jonathan Caouette, a 31-year-old would-be actor and filmmaker, is in a suit and tie, working as the doorman. When traffic into the store is slow, Caouette makes notes on yellow Post-its. "I would write down ideas for scenes, or how a Joni Mitchell song would evoke a feeling in a certain montage," he says. "I also had a tendency to mumble to myself, thinking about the footage I had in my mind's eye. These superconservative people coming into Mikimoto would look at me like I was crazy."

When Caouette got home each evening, he'd hole up in the small computer room of his apartment in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens to work out his passion. (His apartment isn't far from the location of one of the first major movie studios, built in 1920 by the company that later became Paramount.)

Tarnation was the resulting film, and it's about Caouette's upbringing in Houston, where his mother, a former child model and diagnosed schizophrenic, was often institutionalized, and where he passed through a succession of foster homes before being taken in by his grandparents. He combed through a trove of videos and photos from his childhood, digitized many of them using his boyfriend's four-year-old iMac, and edited them together using Apple's iMovie software. (IMovie comes free with many Macintosh computers, or can be purchased for just $49.)

Caouette used whatever tools he could get his hands on. Since he didn't own a scanner, he'd tape photographs on the wall and use his Sony video camera to take snapshots of them. Then he'd import those shots into iMovie. Total cost: $218.32. The two biggest parts of the film's budget, Caouette says, were the Hi-8 videotapes he bought from Walgreens to store his footage once he'd finished editing (his computer's hard drive wasn't big enough to hold everything), and a $60 pair of angel wings used as a costume in several scenes.

With the encouragement of a friend's roommate, Caouette entered the film in 2003's MIX, a gay and lesbian film festival held annually in New York, where the or-ganizers raved about the "uplifting, heroic, and wholly unique cinematic experience." Stephen Winter, the artistic director of the festival, persuaded Caouette to send Tarnation to the organizers of the Sundance Film Festival, the premier indie showcase held each January in Park City, Utah. When a Sundance rep called to tell him Tarnation was in, Caouette, who was screening his calls, didn't answer the phone "because I was jumping up and down."