Big Scary Monsters and Little Serious Movies : Special effects: Two companies work on a wide range of projects, from movie blood and guts to theme park thrills to trade shows.
Some call them modern-day wizards. They deal in surprise, capable of enthralling millions of moviegoers and theme park enthusiasts with ghoulish gore or mystical characters.
They are special-effects designers. And, at one time, they were as much of an illusion as the fantasies they created. But that was before blockbuster movies like “Star Wars” and “Alien” set the stage for scores of other effect-packed films.
Before that time, studios frequently used in-house technicians or free-lance artists. But, for the last five years, the trend is for designers to band together, forming their own special-effects companies.
In the San Fernando Valley, two effects companies are making themselves known with their ability to produce a wide range of effects designs. (Although other companies exist in the area, they work in limited fields like fires or explosives.) Technifex specializes in theme parks and corporate displays. KNB EFX, a “blood and guts” outfit, has designed expanding heads and expendable body parts for “Nightmare on Elm Street 5” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3.”
Rock (Rockne) Hall and Monte Lunde, former Walt Disney “imagineers,” began the Sun Valley-based Technifex in 1984. Five years later, the pair, who now take in nearly $2 million a year, whistle while they work around their 15,000-square-foot production warehouse.
“When you work at Disney as a designer, you’re assigned a certain show and certain effects,” said Lunde, adding that his company now scripts, designs and builds all its own effects. “There’s just no time to experiment to try out your own ideas.”
Hall adds: “They were just ideas in our head at the time. We’d get together after work and have a beer and talk about how we would do it differently and how we could expand marketing effects to the general public.”
Today, much of the team’s business comes from designing effects for theme parks such as Disney’s MGM Studio Tour and Universal Studios Florida. But their 1988 patented technology, Techniscan, a device projecting two-dimensional video images, is increasingly used to lure a different breed of tourist-convention-goer.
The pair recently demonstrated the technique in their warehouse, staffed by 17 designers, cinematographers, electricians and machinists.
Hall, 38, flicked a switch behind a miniaturized set of a study with roll-top desk and table. Soon, a 3-inch-tall Sir Isaac Newton appeared, demonstrating the laws of gravity as he tossed a few balls around, sat on a chair and glanced at three tiny candle flames that flickered on a candelabrum.
The two-dimensional video image of Newton and the candle flames, Lunde explained, is simply matted into the set. The eye is tricked into thinking the 2-D Newton is as solid as the chair he appears to sit on. The process of creating the effect, used frequently by AT&T;, Chrysler and Lockheed in trade shows, begins with filming an actor dressed as Newton walking about in a full-scale version of the miniature set.
“It’s very popular at trade shows,” said Lunde, 30, a former special-effects designer for several Epcot Center pavilions in Florida. “We can really zero in on a consumer product and have a character interact with it--make it come to life.”
Hall, who was once in charge of special effects for the revamping of Disneyland’s Fantasyland, adds: “People mistake it for a hologram, but this is fully animated, in full color, and you can make it talk.”
AT&T; has welcomed the technology, even with a $100,000 minimum price tag for a 10-minute show. The bit of theater is a guaranteed audience-grabber, they discovered, especially at conventions where 60,000 people often mill about, growing bored with such elaborate displays as towering waterfalls and gyrating neon lights.
“It definitely gathers a crowd,” said Nancy Forrester, AT&T; trade show manager. “There’s a definite story line to the show, so it really rivets people’s attention. We had a 400% increase in sale leads the first time we used it.”
In 1984, the company received its first contract to design and build lighting effects for Six Flags Power Plant, a Baltimore theme park. Instead of the customary paycheck, Technifex was paid off in saber saws, drill presses, mills, lathes and other necessary equipment.
About 70% of the company’s business now comes from theme parks--mechanical effects, animations, front and rear video projections, depth charges and intricate fiber-optics displays. But Hall and Lunde believe future business will rely more heavily on Techniscan. The pair have talked to McDonalds and representatives of Brooke Shields hair-care products about retail displays using Techniscan, but no deals have been struck.
“It’s a unique effect, and we want it to be a special experience for a certain crowd of people,” Lunde said. “When the timing is right, it could hit the mass market.”
KNB EFX is known for its ghoulish creations. The 2,700-foot warehouse has the air of a haunted mansion, with cadavers, human heads, severed body parts and lots of blood.
Stomach muscles and other body parts have become the company’s specialty. The Chatsworth enterprise received its first break in mainstream motion pictures with its design execution of 16 skinned cadavers for “Gross Anatomy,” a 1989 release from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures about first-year medical students.
Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger (the initials of their last names form the acronym KNB) said they perused medical center morgues for a month in search of realistic details for the cadavers, featured in a lab scene during the film.
“They needed custom-made bodies,” explained Berger, 25, who lives in Northridge near Kurtzman and Nicotero. “They were calling around town, looking for bodies that were previously used (in other films) that they could lay on the lab tables, but nothing else was available.”
The trio, who have completed 20 films since joining forces, went to work sculpting organs out of latex and urethane, which would later be positioned in full-body fiberglass molds for the cadavers.
“It was quite a job,” said Donna Cline, medical-technical adviser for the movie. “I made sure the bodies were accurate in every detail. They were very cooperative, very willing. Not everyone has the skill to make those bodies.”
Much like Hall and Lunde of Technifex, the three designers banded together after working for other companies. “Before, we were like individual subcontractors working for different studios and makeup designers,” said Berger. “We wanted to do our own stuff and get the credit for the work we do. We now get the paychecks we feel we deserve.”
But the team lost money on effects designed for “Gross Anatomy” and invested considerable money on its own.
“We realized it was a big show for us, and that it would give us a chance to get out of low-budget, flasher-type films we were working on previously,” said Nicotero, 26. “It lent a certain amount of credibility to have worked on a Disney production, so we gave them a lot more than they asked for.”
They feel the job with “Gross Anatomy” has led to bigger projects, such as “Dances With Wolves,” a Kevin Costner film that recently completed filming.
KNB designed and built 24 buffalo for the film, 21 of which were skinned before cameras. “Originally, they were going to kill real buffalo, but a lot of the production people thought it wasn’t appropriate,” Nicotero said. “So we sculpted them from scratch ourselves.”
Kurtzman, 25, adds: “We’re still a young company, but we’re working our way up the ladder.”
Scattered around KNB’s warehouse are eight work tables on which up to 24 staff members labor over latex, pondering how best to sever, crush or rip open models of human heads for future films. In one corner, a walk-in oven burns steadily, curing molded foam-rubber body parts. Tall shelving houses other fiberglass body molds. And, in the company’s display room, two skinned corpses are pinned to one wall next to gargoyles, Freddy Krueger masks and other nightmarish images.
