CREDIT KEEPS BUSINESS BOOMING; GLENDALE FIRM SOARS MAKING IMAGINATIVE TITLES FOR MOVIES.

Byline: Dave McNary Daily News Staff Writer

They are the first thing an audience sees and typically the last to get done in the Byzantine process of filmmaking.

They are a movie's titles and logos. And in the final furious weeks leading up to a major Hollywood release, craftsmen in the niche art can be found in unassuming buildings in quiet corners of the San Fernando Valley packaging a director's creation just so.

``What we do here goes to the heart of the directors' vision,'' said Tony Valdez, partner at motion-graphics specialist Lumeni Productions. ``It comes down to a question of how the film is branded.''

Lumeni's portfolio includes ``Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,'' ``Pushing Tin,'' ``Terminator 2,'' ``Con Air,'' ``The Mask of Zorro'' and logos for Miramax, Gramercy, Rysher Entertainment and Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

All told, the 10-employee company works on as many as 200 projects per year, often in the final weeks before a film opens. For its efforts, Lumeni takes in about $1.2 million annually.

``The director often doesn't know what the feel of the film will be like until it's just about finished, so we don't get the work until it's a month before opening,'' said Gilbert Yablon, who heads the software side of Lumeni. ``He'll labor over the visuals and feel he's created a masterpiece so that if we don't match it, what we've done can seem like a tie that doesn't go with a suit.''

Pleasing studios and directors often means working around the clock to meet deadlines that simply can't be extended. ``It gets fast and furious here sometimes,'' Yablon said.

``Most people don't realize how films can be worked on until about three weeks before they get to theaters,'' added Mark Dornfeld, a longtime visual-effects specialist with The Walt Disney Co. who recently left to form a joint venture with Lumeni. ``It's most cost-effective to get a film onto screens as quickly as possible once you're done with it.''

Despite intense hype over the computer-generated special effects that have helped transform modern filmmaking, Lumeni executives are wary of abandoning tried-and-true techniques that deliver within budget. By teaming with Dornfeld, a two-decade veteran of Hollywood post-production, they're now offering a fusion of computer-generating capabilities and standard optical processes.

``We like to take off-the-shelf software and make it do extraordinary things,'' Yablon said.

``We're noodlers,'' Valdez added. ``People who are predicting that the age of doing everything digitally is just around the corner are not being realistic because of the costs. What we offer is going to depend on the film's budget and how we can give them the most bang for their buck.''

With conventional optics, different parts of a scene are filmed separately against a blue screen. That background is then erased as the images are layered on one another and then filmed again with the still widely used optical printer.

With digital technology, images are simply scanned into a computer and converted to electronic data. Technicians then use computers to manipulate the images. ``We do use computers sometimes but the bottom line is getting work out in the most cost-effective manner,'' Valdez said.

Being cost-effective has grown more important in recent years due to the proliferation of players in the business and tighter budgets for Hollywood's major films. The 1997 closures of two large players - Boss Films and Warner Bros.' digital operation - underscored the brutal competition for special-effects and post-production dollars.

``We were in a niche by ourselves, but the field's been blown wide open recently, so it's a very different playing field now,'' Valdez admitted. That means making money has become much tougher.

``It's become very difficult to do special effects on features because the profit margins are so small,'' said Tom Atkin, director of the Visual Effects Society trade group. ``There's a lot of bidding and price wars so it's difficult to cover overhead.''

Competition for film work is especially intense because having the association with major studios and their movies carries an invaluable premium, Atkin noted.

``Obviously, if your portfolio has recognizable imagery from features, it's a real attention-getter and brings a lot more credibility,'' he said. ``The other reason why people like doing features is that the artists and craftspeople are storytellers and the biggest palette is the giant screen. It is the best format as far as impact on an audience because you have a 40-foot screen, digital sound and the audience's undivided attention.''

Not all Lumeni's work is done with a killer deadline. Take, for example, Lumeni's creation of a new logo for Miramax, a task that consumed more than a year off and on. The final result is the studio's name floating across the East River with a Manhattan skyline moving from late afternoon to night.

``The idea was to give very much the sense of Miramax being a New York company,'' Valdez said. That meant using computer-generated water and ``taking apart'' and reconstructing buildings to give the illusion of time-lapse photos.

Lumeni had the good fortune for the new logo to debut late last year with ``Shakespeare in Love,'' which went on to win the Best Picture Academy Award. ``We put a lot of our heart into it and Miramax was tickled,'' Valdez said.

Earlier this year, Lumeni aggressively expanded its capabilities by bringing on Dornfeld. It's a tactic for standing out from the dozens of other shops by offering quick-fix service with the ability to create and produce a single memorable icon that sums up a movie.

Dornfeld's first project, under the Custom Film Effects banner, was completing the quirky titles of ``Pushing Tin,'' which were in the style of an air traffic controller's scribbles laid over jets zipping across the New York City skyline. The project was completed in association with design firm Imaginary Forces.

``We were trying to be hooked into the concept of the film's tone and feeling of what it's like to be a controller,'' Dornfeld said. ``A director is going to be very concerned about how the start of the film is going to play.''

Dornfeld left Disney last year to move outside the corporate fold but found that the costs of firing up his own business would be prohibitive. ``I'm not a businessman and I didn't want to mortgage my house,'' he said. ``I started looking at the cost of post-production visual effects and the infusion of digital technology and I thought, This town doesn't really need another house when there's already 75 or so.''

The executives say that the collaboration resulted in a ``gangbusters'' first quarter despite the tightness of the overall feature film market. ``I think we've really hit the ground running,'' Dornfeld said.

Dornfeld, who has four employees, started work earlier this year using mostly optical printer techniques for a project that cost the client $20,000 for 600 feet of film; creating the same footage digitally would have cost $65,000. ``A lot of people are trying to work digitally because they need to pay off the costs of a very large digital workstation,'' he noted.

It's not that Valdez, Dornfeld and Yolan have anything against digital technology. They just don't see it as the solution to every problem.

``It's a very strange environment we're in right now because the optical printer can do a lot of our bread-and-butter work, while the computer can handle really complex jobs,'' Yolan said.

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2 Photos

PHOTO (1--Color) Visual-effects specialist Mark Dornfeld, center, formed a joint venture with Gilbert Yablon, left, and Tony Valdez of Lumeni Productions.

(2--Color) Mark Dornfeld's first project under the Custom Film Effects banner was the inventive credits for the recent John Cusack comedy ``Pushing Tin.''

Hans Gutknecht/Daily News