Firm Does Big Business in a Small Way
In a city of big ideas, Shannon Blake Gans thinks in miniature.
Gans, the 29-year-old chief executive of Hunter/Gratzner Industries Inc., is leading a revival in model-making, a low-tech craft as old as the silent era that until recently appeared doomed by the computer.
Gans and her partners--master model builders Ian Hunter (“The Abyss” and “Total Recall”) and Matthew Gratzner (“12 Monkeys” and “Independence Day”)--create tabletop environments ranging from villages to skyscrapers and from airplanes to spaceships that become life-size on the screen.
The 5-year-old company, which operates out of an 8,000-square-foot West Los Angeles warehouse, is small by any standard with sales of only $2 million last year. Still, despite a lull after computer-generated effects became the rage, growth was up by 8% last year and has risen 14% this year.
Not only did her company survive that challenge, but Gans has found herself in the limelight lately, winning recognition as alumnus of the year at USC’s Lloyd Grief Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and as one of Working Woman magazine’s current crop of “20 Under 30” high-performing young women.
The industry trade group’s leading figure, Visual Effects Society Executive Director Tom Atkin, calls her company “one of the hottest model shops in the world right now.”
“In the long run this might be a dying art,” Gans said recently while finishing an array of tiny deep-space radio antennas that will appear in a Dodge commercial. “But I think there’ll always be some demand for models. People like the tactile interaction, and [digital] technology isn’t always there to replace it.”
Computer-generated, or CG, images are created entirely by artists working at computer terminals and can be cheaper to obtain than comparable practical images, said Bart Brown, associate producer of Universal’s “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas.” For instance, the CG establishment shots of the town of Bedrock, were much less costly than the alternative hand-painted matte painting, Brown said.
But sometimes the effect is worth the time and money. Miniature pistons were used in the engine-room scenes in “Titanic,” said Lee Berger, executive producer and vice president of the production/feature division of Rhythm & Hues Studios, who was a member of the team that created the set. The model process was costlier in that case, he said, but brought greater detail and more realism than could have been created on a computer terminal.
Berger sees an upswing in miniature and model work in part because movie makers have asked computers to do too much. “I’ve seen some CG effects that I thought weren’t as good as if they had been done in miniature,” Berger said. “Maybe the filmmakers . . . want to do CG out of a lack of education, or they think it’s cool, or for expense reasons. There are things you can do in CG that you can’t do in miniatures, but for many applications, the technology isn’t there yet.”
Last month at the production trade’s ShowBiz Expo, the firm’s miniature cathedral built for Universal Pictures’ “End of Days” was the centerpiece in an elaborate behind-the-scenes demonstration put on by high-end Hollywood visual effects artists.
Forty artists worked nine weeks to build the cathedral, making it one of Hunter/Gratzner’s biggest set pieces ever, Gans said. A $750,000 project, the cathedral “is absolutely the finest miniature I’ve ever seen,” said production designer Peter Clemens (“Mission to Mars”).
Gans and her partners’ first movie project, the 1996 20th Century Fox release “Broken Arrow,” was a miniature bomb bay, with rotating bombs, and a tiny aircraft hangar.
“Then we got work on another movie, ‘The Arrival,’ and we’ve been busy ever since,” she said. The firm uses a crew of five to 40 freelance modelers, working 10-hour days, five days a week.
“Beyond 10 hours they start to wane and their efficiency goes down,” Gans said. “If we burn out our people they can’t be creative and create incredible work.”
Hunter/Gratzner crews have built sets for “Batman and Robin,” “Gattaca” and “Men in Black.” The firm created pyrotechnic sequences--one of its other specialties--for “The X-Files” movie and built the Chrysler Building that was pulverized in “Armageddon.”
Yet another Hunter/Gratzner miniature will hit theaters this summer. For Touchstone/Buena Vista’s comedy “The Crew,” the firm created sets for a burning house sequence. The house is set afire by a mouse with a burning rag tied to its tail as it runs between the walls.
“No mice were harmed in the filming of this movie,” Gans said.
