Software Vault: The Sapphire Collection/Software Vault (Sapphire Collection) (Digital Impact).ISO/cdr16/wired1_1.zip/MORPHS

Text File | 1994-09-18 | 23KB | 433 lines

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**************************** G*E*T**W*I*R*E*D*! ***************************


Beyond The Valley of The Morphs:
PDI dreams of making it big in Hollywood, but the Doughboy pays the
bills

by Michelle Quinn


After Michael Jackson's video "Black or White" aired last winter, the
company responsible for making 15 faces merge rapidly into one another
received a second job offer. A woman from the Midwest asked for help in
solving one of her life's greatest questions: Was she Elvis' lost love
child?

To find out, she asked Silicon Valley based Pacific Data Images to fuse
a photograph of her mother and one of the King to create the
hypothetical child of such a union. PDI declined, though they did
consider it  more for the press than the profit. "We thought we should
do it free if we could get on the cover of World Weekly News," said
Jamie Dixon, the company's visual effects supervisor.

For more than four years, PDI has been "morphing," as the technique is
called, though until recently they only morphed inanimate objects. The
Jackson video, with its combination of a "warm fuzzy feeling and the
leading edge of technology," transfixed audiences, suspending their
disbelief and creating a sustainable fantasy, Dixon said. "There was an
odd innocence that really caught us off guard." But innocence is a
receding line in the world of special effects. It was once easy to
excite audiences with a toy King Kong clinging to the Empire State
Building, or thrill them with Darth Vader swinging his laser sword.
Digital technology has done away with those traditional smoke and
mirrors. Now audiences clamor for the impossible: heads twisting
unnaturally, metal men pouring themselves into planes, cows singing
Italian opera.

There's an inherent trap in visual effects: staying one step ahead of
audience boredom. Once you "morph," everyone knows about morphing. And
morphing and other special effects are not just for the privileged few.
A Macintosh based morphing software package is already on the market for
about $100  soon any child will be able to morph away a Saturday
afternoon.


A Script in the Desk Drawer
***************************
Carl Rosendahl knows all this. As PDI's president and founder, he's well
aware that his company can't specialize in a few effects or rest on its
laurels. That's why PDI, which was born in Silicon Valley, opened an
office in Hollywood last year.

On a fall morning, Rosendahl takes a break from thinking about the
company's future to work on an immediate problem: how to construct a
Canadian client's logo. He finishes his coffee, lifts his hands as if
they are claws, and begins to slink in slow motion across his office.
"How would a cougar move?" Rosendahl asks, turning his head right to
left. With the morning commute still in full swing, it's not the most
pressing question in Hollywood. But for Rosendahl, figuring out how to
make a stone cougar leap, cats talk, skeletons move and Michael Jackson
turn convincingly into a pile of sand is just the kind of behind-the-
scenes grunt work that aims to amaze the most jaded of audiences.

Rosendahl, a wiry blond with a boyish face, massages his shoulder as he
rotates it forward. The cougar's shoulder joint is complicated, he says.
PDI could handle it in a number of ways. He mentions morphing  the image
would be literally stretched from stone into live video of a cougar. Or
PDI could construct a digitized model and tell the computer how to make
the cougar move.

To create these effects realistically, PDI uses Silicon Graphics
computers, which are upgraded every year or so. The company writes its
own software, often tailoring it for the specific job at hand. The
Silicon Graphics machines, which have become a standard in the computer
animation world, let an animator create high-resolution, full color,
three-dimensional graphics in real time. The result is unique
storytelling tools that coax the students of "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
"Star Wars" and Nintendo to suspend disbelief long enough to accept, for
example, that the Pillsbury Doughboy can mambo.

As quickly as he transformed into a cougar, Rosendahl returns to his
normal self, a computer nerd and business pragmatist who ticks
off options and costs as rapidly as Ross Perot. In sneakers and a
sweatshirt, Rosendahl doesn't look old or officious enough to be
responsible for more than 70 employees, or to be working on film and
television projects with studios such as Universal, 20th Century Fox and
Sony. He looks more like a Boy Scout ready to lead a troop on a hike.

But in the world of computer generated visual effects, things are never
what they first seem. Rosendahl is no exception to that rule: He dreams
of morphing from a Stanford electrical engineering geek into a studio
executive, complete with trips to film festivals, lunches with writers,
and story pitch sessions with studio bigwigs. PDI won't always be the
hired gun for others with stories to tell. Rosendahl wants to tell his
own. "I don't want to be a Walt Disney  I hope to accomplish a fraction
of what he did," Rosendahl said. "My goal is to make PDI an animation
studio instead of a production facility. We want to use the technology
as a springboard to tell stories."

But to be a storyteller, you need more than the ability to suspend
disbelief. You need a story. Fortunately, Rosendahl has a script.
Several of them. And they're not exactly collecting dust on his shelf.
Rosendahl is busy trotting his stories around Hollywood, doing what he
calls "the song and dance" sales job at the big studios. His current
favorite is about statues whose movements can't be seen by humans. It's
a favorite theme for animators: The characters only move when the human
dupe isn't looking. Rosendahl dramatizes how the computer animated
creatures come to life, move, and interact with live characters. While
he won't spill the whole plot, his script is rife with a conservation
moral  a desire to hold on to the past in a world where progress and
technology sometimes destroy it.

So far the studios aren't biting. Some of PDI's critics, chief among
them rival effects-house Rhythm and Hues, say that's because PDI's work
in video and advertising has nothing to do with the world of film
effects. John Hughes, president and co-founder of Rhythm and Hues,
doesn't have a script in his drawer and doesn't intend to get one. PDI
might like to think Hollywood is its oyster,  Hughes said, but
"something PDI does for a music video  on video  has nothing to do with
the film world."

So what really counts in Hollywood? " 'Terminator II'
or the 'Abyss'  the effects in those films have had a profound impact on
the film industry," Hughes said.


Good Pay, No Limelight
**********************
In the meantime there's money to be made. PDI continues to make its name
by creating sleek graphics and technically interesting commercials such
as Dow's Scrubbing Bubbles and the agile, mambo-dancing Pillsbury
Doughboy.

Although there's enormous profit in such techniques, there's little
public glory. The Doughboy won't make PDI a household name. Often
commercial and video clients insist that PDI never admit its involvement
in some of its best projects. Advertisers and musicians worry that too
much exposure for PDI would destroy the magic of the effect or that the
effect itself will get too much attention. In other words, you make the
Doughboy sing and dance. We'll pay the bill and take the credit.

Projects like the Doughboy don't give the company much of a creative
outlet (although several animators did take mambo dancing lessons). But
recent work with the late Muppet creator Jim Hensen, Barry Levinson
(director of "Avalon" and "Toys") and ex-Talking Head David Byrne has
given PDI a chance to work closer to the limelight.

In Byrne's video "She's Mad," PDI got a chance to show off its
smorgasbord of special effects. While Byrne laments a crazy love
relationship, his eyes fall out of his face, his limbs stretch and twist
unnaturally, and at one point he and his electric guitar dissolve into a
series of large orbs dancing to music. "[PDI's] profoundly twisted sense
of humor, combined with a gut wrenching creativity, is lethal," Byrne
wrote in a letter to the company. "No one is bored and nothing is
boring. I contort myself in their honor."

And Byrne got to contort himself cheap. Because the company helped to
shape the video instead of just following orders, PDI charged below its
normal book rate, Rosendahl said.

But you can't stretch and bend celebrities all day. With an eye to
becoming a full-fledged production studio, PDI has made several short
films itself, including "Gas Planet," a three-minute animation which won
the Best Computer Animation Short award at the Ottawa Animation
festival, and will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January.
PDI has submitted "Gas Planet" to the Academy for a possible Oscar
nomination. PDI's other animated films include "Locomotion" and "Opera
Industrial."

In "Gas Planet," three armless, speechless creatures with long snouts,
expressive eyes and suction cups for legs move inside a futuristic gas
world. In fact, the spewing of gas (the creatures' own) is the film's
main action.

Some of the people behind this fart-filled animated short and the Byrne
video are gathered for a staff meeting later in the morning. The
company's office decor is what one producer describes as "nesting in
extreme." Rooms are cluttered with old movie posters, "Don't drink and
animate" signs, toys, guitars and even a windsurfing sail.

Several staffers sit on the floor, joking about the stock market crash
five years ago to the day  an event that left PDI virtually unscathed.
PDI has grown more than 20 to 30 percent every year since the crash,
Rosendahl said, adding that the visual effects industry hasn't really
been hurt by the recession. And making animated short films doesn't pay
the bills at PDI, commercials do. The company has spent years building a
long list of clients willing to pay a few hundred thousand dollars for
the typical 30-second commercial. "One thing our industry has been able
to do is maximize an advertiser's bang for the buck,"  Rosendahl said.
"When you only have 30 seconds to get your point across, people like to
watch morphs."

Rosendahl sits quietly through the meeting. He follows the conversation
with his eyes, never asking a question. His mind is elsewhere, perhaps
thinking about a lunch date tomorrow with a writer who has a crazy idea
to use visual effects in a baseball film. While Rosendahl daydreams,
Dixon discusses upcoming projects and their due dates. The group is
still trying to get the kinks out of "Toys," a film starring Robin
Williams. For "Toys," PDI has created a war room scene where children
are trained for high-tech combat by playing "video war games" on 15
small, curved screens. (There's no strategy, just blow up everything you
see.) PDI created the action on the screens and inserted them into the
film.

A tall, longhaired man with an earring, Dixon dresses in a pink T-shirt
and worn jeans  symbols of the company's laid-back personality and what
one partner calls its "egoless identity." (PDI does have the wherewithal
to hire one guy with a suit  their vice-president of marketing, Alan
DiNoble. DiNoble used to work for Motown and knows the vagaries of the
entertainment industry.)

A seven year veteran of PDI, Dixon has helped develop a different kind
of "suit," one made especially for performance animation. Consisting of
Nintendo gloves and electrified cubes, the suit's magnetic field is read
by a computer. The wearer's mannerisms are captured as data, which is
then fed into an animation program. Byrne wore an older generation of
the suit for his video  instead of seeing him dance, the viewer sees a
crush of small lights move with the distinctive gyrations of the ex-
Talking Head.

Dixon wore the performance suit in "Toys" to create the characters of
four generals sitting around a table discussing weapons systems.
Security guards watching on closed circuit TV see only the generals'
skeletons, giving the scene the feeling that it has been filmed by an X-
ray camera.

Performance animation is going to be the next craze, Dixon says. The
scene in "Toys" was his first real use of the technology. "It really
allowed me as an animator to be experimental. There was a real immediacy
to it," he said.  "I wouldn't mind doing it again."

Back in the meeting, Dixon races through other projects. A dinosaur's
paw needs to be morphed into a human hand for the TV show "Dinosaurs,"
and cats, barn animals and goats have to learn to talk realistically for
four feature film bids. "It's the year of the talking animal," Rosendahl
said later. "Don't ask me why," he said, lifting his hands in the air.
"It's just Hollywood."


Digital Visionary or Digital Spoiler?
*************************************
It's lunch time at Raleigh studios, a small, gated neighborhood of Wild
West style houses and sheer glassy buildings where PDI has set up shop.
"You can't understand Hollywood unless you're here," Rosendahl explains.
With its feet firmly planted in Silicon Valley's technology, PDI is
extending its reach to the core of the entertainment industry. Silicon
Valley needs Hollywood's money, Rosendahl says, to keep producing new
technology. Rosendahl is hungry and because of that, irritable, he says.
He puts on his sunglasses and walks to a nearby outdoor cafe. Young
studio workers, fashionably dressed set designers, and other film
industry types are having lunch under an awning. Rosendahl sees himself
as one of the computer animation industry's visionaries and defenders.
It's a role he relishes, except when he's viewed as some sort of god who
can bring beloved actresses back from the dead, or a demon who can
manipulate reality and play with a viewer's mind.

Rosendahl also plays the industry's spoiler, unselling digitized effects
and shooting down what is not technologically possible. Computer
animation is not cheap and digitized effects are not instantaneous, but
Hollywood is constantly looking for that silver bullet to cut costs,
extras, and maybe even stars.

A common question from studio executives  "Can we make a movie with
Bogart and Monroe together?"  drives the normally cheerful Rosendahl to
forget his food and rant, not at the studio execs, but at the
unattainable effects the computer industry has promised them. "It's a
lie. It's not true. People know Monroe's dead. There's so much hype from
people on my side of the industry," he says. "There were promises sold
to Hollywood and Hollywood says, 'We've been lied to before by you
computer people.' " Computer animation and effects are not as easy as
people think, Rosendahl explains. "One good example is performance
animation. People are saying you can do real-time characters for
television now.

"Maybe the technology can get you close," he continues, "but if you add
on the realities of making it into a TV show, the budgetary constraints,
the image quality you need for broadcast television and the time, it's
currently outside of reality.

"A lot of people preaching this stuff have never done real production
and don't understand what's involved," Rosendahl complains. Alan Citron,
a business writer covering Hollywood for the Los Angeles Times, believes
that besides the hype surrounding the computer effects industry,
Hollywood is just generally resistant to change. "I think people are
coming around to the idea that computer effects might save them money in
the long run," Citron said. "It's one of those things that's inevitable
that people haven't fully accepted."

"People claim they want to make a synthetic actor," Dixon said, echoing
his boss. "People say you don't have to pay Arnold Schwarzenegger $15
million, you can do it with computer graphics. But if a person could
make Arnold, they'd want $15 million for it. It's still difficult to
make a movie. You still have to be able to tell a good story, and
computer graphics doesn't change any of that."

But the question that rankles Rosendahl the most, the one that makes him
stand on chairs and uncharacteristically interrupt others, is whether
the new technology obscures people's ability to distinguish fact from
fiction. "No, no, no," is Rosendahl's answer. But others at PDI
disagree.

"We've narrowed the gap between fantasy world and reality," said Richard
Chuang, PDI's vice-president and co-founder who wrote much of PDI's
original software. "You can no longer believe what you see on TV. The
border is no longer real."

Glen Entis, PDI's executive producer, agrees. "[Digital computer
effects] tend to make images more disputable. People can become more
skeptical," Entis said, adding that it has become more of a challenge
"to keep audiences stimulated."

Is this something to be afraid of? Chuang thinks so. "PDI and others
with the right tools have the power to create a news story," he said.
"You can create a news story with actors," Rosendahl countered. "You
don't need a computer to do it."

Maybe so, but Chuang asked: "Now that we can simulate reality, will
people be interested in reality anymore?"

It's a question that concerns reporter Charles Solomon, who wrote
Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation, and who covers the
animation industry for the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter.
"Carl is too decent and too honest a person to worry about this. But
they can turn signs around in a shot so that you can't tell it's been
altered. The implications for propaganda purposes are pretty
staggering," Solomon said.

His mind on the future, Rosendahl is more pragmatist than philosopher.
After lunch he sits silently in a pitch-dark theater, viewing the daily
progress of PDI's projects.

Dixon holds a laser flashlight, pointing out scratches and unintentional
shadows in the film. When the "Toys" war room comes up on the screen,
dozens of boys are seen with their own private battle screens.

"That looks like fun," says someone in the dark viewing room. "I want
that mission."

"It's too bad it doesn't exist," someone else answers.

"We can fix scratches, water damage and remove cables," Dixon says.
Improve bad acting? "Can't fix that yet, but we're working on it," he
says dryly.

While improving bad acting could make PDI millions, what Rosendahl
really wants to do with the company  tell stories  remains elusive.
There are scripts to be read, animated characters to develop and studios
to convince that a full-length, computer-animated feature film is a good
investment.

Harder yet, PDI must convince a stodgy and conservative elite that
computer animation can be as versatile as traditional, hand drawn
animation. "What they have done has a place in animation," noted old pro
Bill Hannah, cochairman and founder of Hannah Barbara Productions, who
hired PDI to do the computer-generated Martian characters in "The Last
Halloween," a TV animated special. "But a good animator can put more
emotion in a character than a computer can."

Tell that to John Lasseter, an animation director with Pixar, who won an
Academy Award in 1989 for "Tin Toy," a totally digital animated short.
He says that PDI is gaining a reputation for being able to take the
coldness out of a computer effect. "It's not the tools you have, but how
you use them," Lasseter observed. "They've been around longer than any
other company, and it shows."

PDI may have been around the longest, but it was Pixar that inked the
first digital animation deal with a major studio. Pixar is currently
under contract with Disney to produce a full-length computer animated
feature. Details of the project have been kept secret.


Outside Looking In
******************
The day is winding down, the traffic choppers dot the sky outside
Rosendahl's office. His window frames Paramount studio's water tower, a
Hollywood symbol and constant reminder that PDI is still a newcomer
trying to make it in the film industry.

It's not easy to walk into a studio with an animation idea that needs a
$20 million budget.  "Producers say, 'Well, wait a minute. What's it
going to look like?' " Rosendahl says. "You can't say, 'well, it will be
a little bit like this movie and a little like that movie.' You have to
get the short made out of your own pocket and use it to sell features."

In fact, Rosendahl recently had to pull back one of his scripts that was
languishing in "development hell" at Universal Studios. But there'll be
another day and another studio.

If PDI does succeed in making a full-length feature, it will be due to
the company's people, who try to use the technology to tell good stories
not to show off new software.

"We're the people who are always behind the scenes. You're never
identified when you walk down the street," Rosendahl explains, grasping
for some word, some way to dream the big dream without sounding overly
naive. But he is more understated. "I think that's changing." ===


Copyright (c) 1993 Wired Magazine