Drawing on a Special Effects Skill : Pair’s work on movies like ‘Honey, I Blew Up the Kid’ has earned them a reputation for animating realistic-looking phenomena.
The Disney studio is the undisputed king of animation. But when the studio was making “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid” and needed almost 40 bits of animated lightning effects, it turned to a specialist.
John Van Vliet is president of Available Light Ltd., a Burbank company that has gained a wide-ranging reputation for animating realistic-looking natural phenomena.
“He is the best,” said Tom Smith, Disney’s director of visual effects for “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” which was released earlier this month. “He operates out of a storefront in Burbank, but I don’t know anyone who compares to him. He does great animation. He’s an extremely talented guy who has chosen to work in this very strange little niche.”
Dozens of filmmakers have called upon Van Vliet to handle their animated special effect chores. He and his wife, effects designer Katherine Kean, created the dark spirits in “Ghost” and the ghoulish creatures that the Nazis unwittingly unleash in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” They also worked on such blockbusters as “Star Trek,” “Ghostbusters,” “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” “Conan the Barbarian” and the Michael Jackson/Disneyland music video “Captain EO.”
On most of these projects Van Vliet and Kean simply added animated grace notes from their repertoire that Van Vliet described as, “stars, pixie dust, fluffy little blobs, lizards flying off.” For example, in the romantic comedy “Chances Are” there is a scene in which an angel taps out numbers on a plastic slate. Kean animated little stained glass-like color bursts to appear when the angel tapped.
“It was very subtle, but, boy, it made a difference,” Van Vliet said. “Before the animation, it was just some guy sitting there with a big hunk of plastic. Afterward, there was something nice--subliminal nice. I love that sort of stuff.”
On other occasions, their effects more dominated scenes. For “Rush,” a story about narcotics cops, director Lili Fini Zanuck was looking for a way to illustrate a drug trip without using the cliched slow motion, strange sound effects and blinking lights.
Van Vliet said he tried to make the scene subtle. “This woman has been coerced into taking a lot of drugs,” he said. “She is driving down the road. There’s a shot of her getting goofy-eyed, then a shot of the road. At first it looks OK, but then you realize everything is soft and creaming and streaking a little bit. Then a car passes her and the sound of the car has an echo to it and leaves a long trail and the headlights leave an even longer trail.”
It’s this ability to find credible solutions that keeps Available Light in demand. “They have a great sense of storytelling,” said Richard Taylor, a filmmaker who regularly uses the company to do the effects for animated commercials. “The personality of the animator always comes through. They give character to their special effects.”
Before starting his own company, Van Vliet worked for film studios and large special effects concerns, including George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic. But after four years at ILL, he said, he got tired of begging for lamps or pencil sharpeners from people who didn’t understand the hand-drawn work that goes into special effects animation.
He and Kean bought equipment and went into business for themselves in 1983.
For “Honey, I Blew Up the Kid,” they made the electrical field that surrounds the toddler and his mother, the lightning-like energy tendrils that massage the boy and make him grow. And they did the emanation beam that appears to be coming out of a big laser cannon.
“Every time they fire it, we have all these big waves coming up, like frequency waves, particle beams, real science fiction, blasting the kid around,” said Van Vliet.
Available Light is now working on director Francis Ford Coppola’s new version of “Dracula.”