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Article
by Jody Duncan
Though
known as a visual effects supervisor, Jeffrey Okun worked in a
number of film-related fields early in his career -- as a picture
editor, sound editor, and right-hand man to the late graphic designer
and director Saul Bass, the channel through which he gained entry
to the visual effects world. "Saul was a noted title sequence
designer and master of the montage," said Okun. "He
designed all the racing montages in Grand Prix; and, depending
on who you talk to, he designed and shot the shower sequence in
Psycho. When I went to work for him, I discovered that
no matter how he shot something, it was wrong and had to be made
right in post. As a result, everything we did became an optical
effect. Unfortunately, by the time I started there, none of the
optical effects houses in town wanted to work directly with Saul,
because he was so exacting."
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Okun
started acting as liaison between Bass and the optical effects
houses. "I got my foot in their doors, one at a time,"
Okun recalled. "I would say to them: 'I have no idea
how you are going to do this, but this is what we want.
Tell me how we can do this, and I'll tell Saul.' As a consequence,
I got a phenomenal education from these optical camera operators,
and I started to understand all their tricks and tools."
Okun gained a reputation as an ingenious solver of tricky
problems, and began getting SOS calls from those same effects
houses. Eventually, he was called in on troubled feature
film productions. "That was a great position to be
in. As the 'fix-it' guy, only one of three things could
happen: It wasn't broken in the first place, but I got the
credit for fixing it; it was broken and I fixed it, and
they thanked me profusely; or, it was broken and nobody
could fix it, but they thanked me anyway, because it wasn't
my fault."
In
1983, Okun was called in to consult on The Last Starfighter,
for which a pioneering effects crew was employing a Cray
computer to produce early computer generated images. Okun's
contribution was to make the high-tech approach workable
within a production schedule. "In my first meeting,"
Okun recalled, "I asked two questions that made everyone
hate me. 'How many polygons are you averaging in a frame?
And how long will it take to print that to film if the computer
works 24 hours a day, seven days a week?' It came out to
more than 17 months! And so, we had to come up with a redesign
of everything and some really clever ideas." One shortcut
involved the computer generated spaceship. "The spaceship
alone was a million and a half polygons! We redesigned shots
so that there was no perspective shift -- which meant we
could take a still image of the spaceship and put it on
a single polygon. That was a revolutionary idea, back then."
The
Last Starfighter marked Okun's introduction to computer
generated effects in movies. "The digital age was so
new," Okun said, "the people speaking that language
didn't speak our film language at all. There were all these
space geniuses talking about polygons and wireframe models
and artificial lighting -- and I was thinking: 'I just want
to pick up a light and move it over here. Wouldn't that
be quicker?' I tried not to look like a complete moron as
I learned what all these words meant. My real value to the
process was that I knew what looked right."
Knowing
what looked right served him well as Okun continued his
acclimation to the digital world through 1994's Stargate.
"During Stargate," Okun said, "I found
that most of the digital technicians didn't have a good
eye for what things really looked like. And so, I would
organize brown-bag lunches in the park once a week, just
to make them look at real life -- where the sun was, how
shadows were cast. It was an educational period, a coming
together of the digital world and the filmmaking world."
The
Stargate experience also sparked Okun's interest
in mentoring future visual effects artists -- something
he continues to do to this day. "I realized that there
was a need for experienced people to pass on what they knew
to those who didn't have experience, but had great capabilities,"
Okun explained. "Since then, I've searched for talented
people that I could help out."
The
personal reward from mentoring has heightened Okun's experiences
as visual effects supervisor on shows such as Cutthroat
Island, Sphere, Deep Blue Sea, Red
Planet and The Last Samurai. Currently, Okun
is working on Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, and
is involved in developing a new technology that he believes
will revolutionize the entertainment industry. Okun is also
an active member of the Visual Effects Society, serving
as vice-chairman of the society and chairman of its awards
committee.
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Coming
up on 40 years in the business, Okun has maintained a rare level
of independence, having never worked within the confines of a
visual effects facility. With the proliferation of such facilities,
spurred by the digital explosion, Okun has witnessed the arrival
of a new breed of visual effects supervisor. "Visual effects
companies always want their supervisors on the set," Okun
commented, "but I've seen some appalling behavior from some
of these people. I've seen alleged supervisors asking stars for
autographs instead of setting up their shots. I've seen supervisors
making unnecessarily big deals of setting up their shots, mainly
to make themselves look important. You've got 200 crew people
sitting there for three hours, when much of it could have been
done after wrap. It is the 'visual effects voodoo dance,' and
since most producers don't really know how this stuff works, they
are reluctant to question it. But it winds up affecting us all,
because producers and directors finally get fed up and say, 'We
don't want visual effects people on set anymore.'
"As
a visual effects supervisor, I have a different idea of what my
job is than some of these new 'supervisors.' They think the job
is to get the best shot possible, at all costs. But, really, the
job is to get the best shot possible without stopping the making
of the movie."
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NOW
PLAYING
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Lon
Chaney: A tribute to Universal Studios' first master
of the monsters, Lon Chaney, is planned at Universal Citywalk
on October 16 as part of the Screamfest Horror Film Festival,
October 15-24. The presentation -- fifth in a series of
makeup tributes to legendary artists produced by Visionary
Cinema -- will include a biography of Chaney's career
performed onstage, makeup effects demonstrations and clips
from Chaney's classic films. Click
here for ticket information.
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King
Kong: Click
here to view KongisKing.net's latest Quicktime coverage
of filmmaker Peter Jackson and friends riding the high
seas on board the S.S. Venture on the Stone Street
Studios backlot in Wellington, New Zealand -- the up-close-and-personal
video production diary chronicling the filming of Universal
Pictures' giant-ape classic remake.
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Star
Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith: Not to be
outdone, the folks at Lucasfilm have been equally industrious
with their latest Quicktime documentaries covering the
making of George Lucas' final Star Wars film. Click
here to see Lucas with director of photography David
Tattersall, Industrial Light & Magic animation director
Rob Coleman, visual effects supervisor John Knoll and
accomplices enjoying the pleasures of large-format plasma
screen playback on set. Click
here for a video of costume designer Trisha Biggar
displaying samples of 1,300 otherworldy wardrobe creations
for the film, with Bruce Spence's costume as alien administrator
Tion Medon particularly awe-inspiring.
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Bond
21: Variety and The Hollywood Reporter
announced MGM and Eon Productions are delaying their twenty-first
James Bond spy thriller for at least a year. Production
had been gearing up to shoot the next spy adventure for
a November 21, 2005 release. The delay has been attributed
to the lack of a director, though there has also been
much conjecture and debate in the media about the casting
of Bond.
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Opus:
Variety announced Miramax, Dimension Films and
Wild Brain Inc. are developing a CG feature, animated
by San Francisco animation studio Wild Brain, starring
Opus the penguin from the syndicated comic strip Bloom
County, created by Berkeley Breathed.
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Slanted
and Enchanted: The Hollywood Reporter states
director Chris Columbus -- who directed the first two
Harry Potter films -- is developing this project
for Warner Brother Pictures from a screenplay by Ben Queen
about a recovered pathological liar who reverts to his
old ways upon returning to his family home and attempting
to 'unravel the mystery of his sister's illness.' The
film is described as a 'dramedy' and will reportedly include
magical Potter-esque elements. Prior to this, Columbus
will direct a Warner Brothers film adaptation of the Broadway
musical Rent -- which is an entirely Potter-free
version of Puccini's opera, La Bohème, set
in New York's East Village.
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Robots:
Click
here for a Yahoo Movies presentation of a trailer
for Blue Sky Studios' upcoming CG animated feature, their
followup to Ice Age, co-directed once again by
Carlos Saldanha and Chris Wedge. Set in a world populated
by robots, the film features the voice of Ewan McGregor
as Rodney Copperbottom, an innocent boy robot new to Robot
City, who runs afoul of corporate boss Big Weld (Mel Brooks)
and a sexy femme fatale Cappy (Halle Berry). Coming from
Twentieth Century Fox, March 11, 2005.
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Superhero:
Variety reports David Zucker, Craig Mazin,
Robert Weiss and Dimension Films -- the folks who brought
us the Scary Movie spoofs -- are next preparing
to unleash their comedic slings and arrows on the superhero
movie genre with this lampoon of the current crop of spandex-clad
crimefighters. Mazin will script, Zucker will direct and
Weiss will produce, reportedly taking jabs at Spider-Man,
next summer's Batman Begins and Fantastic Four.
Production will begin Spring 2005, with Scary Movie
4 scheduled to follow, faster than a speeding bullet.
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Starship
Dave: The Hollywood Reporter states Paramount
Pictures has optioned this science fiction comedy screenplay
by Ron Greenberg and Bill Corbett. The story is about
a man who walks out of a ball of flames in New York's
Central Park, and who turns out to be a starship piloted
by an extraterrestrial on a mission to save his alien
planet. Jon Berg and Todd Komarnicki will produce for
Guy Walks Into a Bar Productions; and David Friendly and
Marc Turteltaub will produce for Deep River Productions.
Karen Rosenfelt will oversee the project for Paramount.
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Spaceballs:
Episode II - Revenge of the Schwartz: Playbill
magazine reports comedian Mel Brooks is developing a sequel
to his 1987 Star Wars spoof, Spaceballs.
Brooks hinted that he will reprise his star turn as Schwartz
Master Yoghurt -- a diminutive holy man with a flair for
merchandizing -- and he hopes to open his film close to
the May 19 opening of George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode
III - Revenge of the Sith. The late Peter Donen supervised
visual effects for the first Spaceballs, produced
at Apogee, with additional visual effects by Illusion
Arts and a special dancing alien chestburster created
by ILM and detailed in Issue #31 of Cinefex, available
here.
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Flight
of the Phoenix: Click
here to see the trailer for this Twentieth Century
Fox remake of the 1965 desert adventure about survivors
of an airplane crash in the Sahara desert who rebuild
their downed aircraft. Robert Aldrich directed the original
with a great ensemble cast that included Jimmy Stewart,
Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger and Ernest
Borgnine, with special effects by L.B. Abbott and Howard
Lydecker. For the remake, John Moore directs Dennis Quaid,
Giovanni Ribisi, Tyrese Gibson and Miranda Otto, with
spectacular aerial antics and impressive miniature effects
supplied by special effects supervisor Hans Metz and visual
effects supervisor David Goldberg, Digital Domain, Rhythm
& Hues, Café FX and The Farm West. Opens November
24.
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Rosemary's Baby: Variety reports ABC-TV
is developing a four-hour miniseries based on Ira Levin's
horror novel and its sequel, Son of Rosemary's Baby,
about a fertile young newlywed in New York City, who begins
to suspect she has been impregnated by Satan. No writer
or director have yet been assigned to the miniseries,
but the story will reportedly focus on the exploits of
Rosemary's teenage son. Roman Polanski adapted and directed
a superb adaptation of Levin's original novel in 1968,
starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes, which featured
sparing, but chilling, use of optical process photography
by visual effects master Farçiot Edouart.
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Disney/Pixar:
Reuters news service reports that despite recent
speculation in the media to the contrary, Walt Disney
president Robert Iger has indicated a renewed partnership
between Disney and Pixar Animation Studios is unlikely.
Disney will distribute Pixar's computer animated superhero
comedy The Incredibles, opening November 5, and
its automotive comedy Cars in 2005. However, beyond
that Iger stated: "We are not in any discussions
with Pixar right now."
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The
Ring 2: Dark Horizons reports the sequel to The
Ring will now appear March 18, 2005 -- a week earlier
than its previously reported release date. The film is
directed by Hideo Nakata, who directed the highly popular
Japanese original, Ringu, adapted from Koji Suzuki's
novel about a mysterious videotape that causes the death
of all who view its contents. The sequel will feature
Rick Baker's return to special makeup effects after a
recent hiatus. IMDb reports Peter Chesney supervised special
effects and Betsy Paterson supervised visual effects,
supplied by Rhythm & Hues. Naomi Watts, Simon Baker
and Sissy Spacek star.
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International Makeup Artist Trade Show: Makeup
Artist Magazine reports Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff
-- creators of alien effects for the recent Alien Vs.
Predator and founders of special makeup and creature
effects studio Amalgamated Dynamics Inc. -- will be keynote
speakers at the International Makeup Artist Trade Show
to be held in London, England, January 29 and 30, 2005.
For more information, click
here.
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