Company Town : Movie Magic : New Technology Is Revolutionizing the Special Effects Business

The arrival of a new generation of power personal computers is creating vast new opportunities for a cluster of small Hollywood special effects companies, who until recently had to cede feature-film digital effects to expensively equipped industry giants like George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic.

This revolution-in-progress is planting the seeds for a whole new cottage industry of hobbyists who will make movie magic in their own homes. For filmmakers, the trend means lower costs for the kinds of digital effects that created Jim Carey’s elastic face in “The Mask” and allowed Tom Hanks to shake hands with three Presidents in “Forrest Gump.”

For audiences, it means more visually stunning effects will be turning up even in low-budget independent films. And for small special effects companies, “This is the biggest thing since the invention of adhesive tape,” says John Van Vliet, president of Available Light in Burbank.

Van Vliet got into the digital act last summer to create more than 60 visual effects for the recently opened “Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight.” He invested in two $3,000 Power Mac 8100 computers, rented two others and upgraded a Macintosh Quadra--all for less than the price of a low-end machine made by Silicon Graphics Inc., the gold standard for digital effects production.

Traditional special effects were created using chemical photography, models and a host of optical exposure tricks. But beginning in the late 1980s, advanced computer graphics technology made it possible to create a whole new breed of special effects--and do it more quickly and cheaply. And powerful PCs have now made it possible for even small special effects houses to stay in the game.

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“There used to be more (special effects boutiques), and a lot of them were good. But they could not make the transition to digital,” said Peter Kuran, owner of VCE, a special effects and color restoration firm in Sylmar. “Anyone who only does optical work and doesn’t deal with digital has absolutely no work anymore.”

But business is booming for the boutiques that remain because “more and more people are writing for low-cost digital effects,” said Leslie Huntley, owner of Fantasy II Film Effects in Burbank.

Like the makers of “Demon Knight,” for example.

“For considerably less than $1 million, we got a look we ordinarily could not have afforded,” said Ed Tapia, a member of the film’s production team. For “Demon Knight,” Available Light’s digital artists used an $895 program called Adobe Photoshop to “attach” a mechanical puppet head onto an actor’s body that was filmed separately.

“It doesn’t matter whether they use a $10,000 machine or a million-dollar machine,” said Stephen Lovejoy, the film’s editor. “If you look at ‘Demon Knight,’ I don’t think anybody would say, ‘Oh, those effects were obviously done on a Mac.’ ”

Even simpler to use is a $99 program called Morph, which Kuran used to turn an elderly Dracula into a young man for “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

“A few years ago, a Morph used to cost $30,000 and now you can do it for $5,000,” Kuran said.

The combination of powerful PCs and inexpensive software may launch a new breed of computer hobbyists capable of doing professional-quality work in their spare time at home.

Says Kuran: “This will enable thousands of people to be their own independent little entities. There’s going to be an explosion of people working at home with a Mac.”

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But Judy Pasternack, a spokeswoman for San Rafael-based special effects powerhouse Industrial Light & Magic--which uses 200 high-end Silicon Graphics machines--says the boutiques haven’t made a dent in the business. And if they do, she says growing demand means there will be plenty of work to go around.

While economics have always forced smaller filmmakers to use the special effects boutiques, Kuran believes that it’s only a matter of time before movie makers in major studios realize they can buy most of their favorite effects for much less, and thus begin looking beyond the reigning giants of the industry.

“Producers will start going back to the smaller companies because they want to save money and they know they can get the job done,” he said.