Changing World of Movie Effects : Film: Companies such as Dream Quest Images turn to theme parks for business.

Mars, Gotham City, a sunken nuclear sub and a colonized moon--all were created and destroyed in a black-draped, 54-by-83-foot studio at Dream Quest Images.

Now a miniature asteroid city stands there, glowing with tiny yellow lights, a symbol of the Simi Valley company’s attempts to stay afloat in the increasingly stormy world of movie special effects.

Sculpting planets is nothing new for the 14-year-old, Oscar-winning special effects company that staged a submarine dogfight in “The Abyss,” put Arnold Schwarzenegger on Mars for “Total Recall” and made Michael Jackson into a robot for “Moonwalker.”

But the asteroid was built for a different type of movie--a theme park ride.

Increasingly, tight-fisted Hollywood movie producers are divvying up what once were solo special effects contracts to a variety of lower bidders, and relying more on computer-generated special effects than upon Dream Quest’s meticulous model-making, say movie industry insiders such as Bruce Doering, head of the Hollywood camera operators’ union.

“This is a very erratic business these days,” said Doering, executive director of the International Photographers Guild, Local 659, which has worked extensively for Dream Quest. “With the development of digital technology and the outsourcing of different parts of projects, it’s a far more competitive business.”

As a result, Dream Quest has been branching out, increasing its work in TV commercials, launching a new company to produce computerized effects and accepting work on motion-based theme park rides.

“As feature film work has somewhat gone down, the theme park work has come in to replace it,” said Keith Shartle, executive producer of Dream Quest’s film division. “It’s a growing market. It’s really exploding.”

Dream Quest has been making short, effects-laden movies that are played to amusement park audiences of about 20 in tiny rooms that are rocked back and forth on hydraulic lifts to simulate motions presented on-screen.

Last September, Dream Quest delivered to an Australian theme park a ride film based on “Batman Returns,” where the 4 1/2-minute movie’s wild, roller coaster-like trip through the bowels of Gotham City is winning raves from park-goers, company officials said.

Shartle said Dream Quest’s participation in the writing and production of the “Batman Adventure” film gave him and partner Hoyt Yeatman--the company’s co-founder, vice president and effects supervisor--hope that it can expand into producing its own feature films.

“It’s very rewarding for us, who’ve been doing bits and pieces of action films in the past, to go to doing a complete production,” Shartle said.

Miniature props from the Batman ride, such as highly detailed newsstands and street lamps, still sit on shelves in the model shop at the company’s Park Center Drive studio, along with leftover props such as the massive arrow from the trailer for “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.”

The model shop is far roomier than it was in Dream Quest’s old Culver City studio, which the company vacated in 1987 to move to larger, cheaper quarters in Simi Valley, shop supervisor David Goldberg said.

“This is great. The other place was like working in a shoe box--very cramped,” Goldberg said, standing amid wide workbenches and gazing out through huge, tinted picture windows at the ocher hills of Simi Valley. “This is one of the only model shops I know with a view. It keeps people calm to see the trees and grass.”

The workbenches are nearly empty now, the decks cleared for a 7-Up commercial. But while the 25 or so craftspeople hired for the shop’s latest project are gone, the fruits of their labor are laid out on the asteroid city set on Stage 5.

The set for “Asteroid Adventure” was built in two months from lumber, chicken wire, urethane foam, plastic resin, fiber optics and laser-etched brass.

A high-resolution movie camera hanging from a computer-controlled ceiling gantry swung in extreme slow motion over the asteroid set one day recently, its shutter snapping one frame at a time.

Camera assistant Craig Moore followed behind at a snail’s pace, baby-sitting the camera during its half-hour, black-and-white test pass over the set.

Later, stage supervisor Scott Beattie would reprogram the computer to adjust any variations in the camera’s path. Then the computerized gantry would repeat precisely the camera’s pass over the set for the final take--in color and four times as slow, for sharper clarity.

The film will be played for visitors to a German amusement park. Sixteen at a time will sit in a small room, jostled about hydraulically to simulate the swooping, jarring motion of their “spaceship” while they watch Dream Quest’s vision of another world.

The camera gantry, designed and built by Dream Quest’s machine shop, will take viewers on a much smoother “flight” over the asteroid set than the old-fashioned method would have, Shartle said.

“Classically, the way miniatures were shot was to shoot a frame, move in a little bit, shoot another frame, move a little more,” he said.

Shot in the 70-millimeter IMAX format at 48 frames per second, twice the speed of a feature film, “Asteroid Adventure” will last only about four minutes. But combined with the rocking motion of the room, it will give a realistic ride, Shartle said.

Lighting adds to the illusion.

In “The Abyss,” for instance, smoke passed for seawater surrounding a sunken nuclear submarine, while the miniature salvage submarines cruising around it were filmed a second time in clear air and dramatic light so that the smoke did not obscure them, Shartle explained.

The separate film images then were sandwiched together in a complex optical-printing process known as matting.

But that process might have been done entirely differently if “The Abyss” were being filmed today, Shartle said.

Digital editing, digital matting and computer modeling have made filmmaking quicker and more specialized, he said, adding: “There’s been a revolution in the way films are put together.”

As computers became more widely used, “We sat with envy and watched as producers could go into a post (-production) house and put things together in a few hours that used to take two or three weeks,” Shartle said. “It’s the way of the future.”

About two years ago, Dream Quest sank nearly $300,000 into a new division called Motion Pixel Corp. to develop new methods of computerized matting and special effects.

Howard Burdick oversees the shop, which dumps filmed images onto computers, mattes them together electronically, and then transfers the finished special effects back onto film for productions such as this summer’s “Coneheads.”

On one computer screen in the shop, a young Conehead wolfed down a foot-long submarine sandwich in five bites--an illusion created almost entirely in the computer, said Burdick, who loves his new job.

“I came from a company that generates high-powered image-processing equipment--most of our work was for the military and intelligence agencies,” Burdick said.

“Everything I did before, in some way or another, was meant to kill people,” he said. “This is kind of fun. This is the first time I’ve worked in an industry that’s just fun-fun. Like Hoyt says, ‘It’s a great industry, because when you make a mistake, nobody dies.’ ”