DIGITAL ART 'Van Helsing' offers computing lessons

Creating the special effects was a monster effort.
By ASHLEE OWENS
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
YOUNGSTOWN -- Cliff-jumping, computer-produced carriages. Vampire brides that soar at dizzying speeds and heights. Amazing, yet totally unreal, mountain scenery.
Technology has changed since the bobbing bat-on-strings that was Dracula.
A Youngstown State University-sponsored animation festival at the Butler Institute can prove it. Kicking off the festival Wednesday evening, Jeff White, creature technical director from George Lucas' Industrial Light & amp; Magic, visited to discuss the technology used in the visually stunning movie "Van Helsing."
Through a slide show presentation, White touched on everything from attaching actresses' heads to computer-created bodies ("Six months of work just to keep her head on while she was flying around the scene"), to making computer-generated hair "move right."
It was a monster of a project.
The seamless creature transformations in "Van Helsing" involved hours of work using geometry to plot actors writhing and contorting themselves. Computer animation that matched the actors move for move was then developed.
"Being able to match the geometry is a huge part of how we can make transitions from real people to whatever we want," said White.
Multiple parameters
And director Stephen Sommers didn't want characters simply to morph into wolves; he wanted the skin to appear to be torn off as a different character emerges from underneath. The concept of cloth simulation, which begins with geometry, was used. Parameters, like stiffness of the material, are added based on how real cloth moves. In the making of "Van Helsing," the cloth could rip anywhere based on strains applied. "We didn't want it to look like cloth; we wanted it to look like skin," said White.
The transformation to Hellbeast -- the looming monster Dracula becomes -- also presented challenges because man becomes monster in the same shot. Sommers stipulated that appendages not "just pop out anywhere, magically," so clothes were converted from one form to another. "We had to figure out how to take 18-foot wings and 'pack' them into Dracula's jacket," White said.
Even actors faced difficulties in the making of "Van Helsing." White showed a slide that featured actor Hugh Jackman, as title character Van Helsing, meeting up with the monstrous Mr. Hyde. But Hyde's not scary; he's downright funny. Before visual effects, an unidentifiable entity in a "Hyde helmet" -- a contraption with a paper Hyde head on a pole -- conveyed a sense of where the monster's face would appear in the scene.
"And you wonder," White joked, "why it's difficult for actors to put on a convincing performance."