FULL-COURT PRESS FOR `SPACE JAM' : BLEND OF BASKETBALL'S JORDAN, CARTOON LEGENDS DONE IN CUTTING-EDGE PRODUCTION MARATHON.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Just watching Michael Jordan play is exhausting enough for most folks.

Imagine what it was like to surround the world's greatest basketball player with dozens of cartoon teammates and opponents, give them all a virtual (but utterly realistic-looking) arena to play in and, oh yeah, keep the whole thing funny and clever enough to justify an $80 million budget and gazillions of simoleons more in promotional blitzing.

``For 18 months, I've visualized every frame of this movie,'' says Ed Jones, president and CEO of the digital visual effects outfit Cinesite, which was instrumental in combining Jordan and the Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes for ``Space Jam.'' ``I haven't gotten much sleep, and I've dreamed about it when I have. There were also a few nightmares that we weren't going to finish the project.''

Producer Ivan Reitman, who has directed such hits as ``Ghostbusters'' and ``Twins,'' recalls a conversation he had with Warner chairman and co-CEO Robert Daly about two years back. ``He said, `Ivan, I'm turning over to you custody of the family jewels. I'm counting on you to protect them and bring them into the '90s. And by the way, could you have it ready for Nov. 15, 1996? We've scheduled all of these cross-promotion tie-ins.' ''

Those jewels, of course, are Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and all the other cartoon characters that have populated Warner Bros. short subjects and TV shows for more than 50 years. ``Space Jam'' brings them all together for the first time in a feature-length film, and it's essentially the first test of whether or not Warners' recently reactivated movie animation division can go head-to-big-eared-head with that of the studio's chief rival, Disney.

But ``Space Jam'' did not begin as a cartoon confrontation. Reitman started developing the project four years ago as a vehicle for Jordan, who had a movie deal with Warners.

``We didn't know what to do, exactly, but thought it would be a good idea to base it on the popularity of those Nike commercials by Joe Pytka,'' Reitman notes. ``We also knew we wanted some biographical structure to the story, but Michael's biography went through radical changes in the two years we were writing this. He decided to retire, then to play baseball. When he came back to basketball, I said, `Thank God, we've finally got an ending.' ''

The scenario that eventually evolved commences with Jordan in his minor league strikeout-king phase. Meanwhile, a bunch of alien Nerdlucks from a planet far, far away come to Earth to kidnap the Looney Tunes and bring them back to be mascots for their cruddy, extraterrestrial theme park, Moron Mountain.

The shrimpy Nerdlucks quickly enslave the residents of the underground Looney land with their big zap guns. But clever Bugs nevertheless tricks them into a contest for the Tunes' freedom. He chooses basketball, figuring money players like Foghorn Leghorn will cream the little aliens. But the Nerdlucks siphon the talent out of Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and other NBA players, apply it to themselves, and mutate into the gigantic Monstars. Now the underdogs, the Tunes turn to Jordan to coach and lead their team to victory.

Reitman hired Pytka, who's responsible for some 5,000 TV commercials, to direct ``Space Jam's'' live-action sequences. Tony Cervone, who has worked on such Warners television series as ``Tiny Toons'' and ``Animaniacs,'' and Disney veteran Bruce Smith came on as co-animation directors. Jones, who like Smith was involved with the last landmark in live-action/animation feature filmmaking, ``Who Framed Roger Rabbit,'' got the daunting task of overseeing the digital compositing of hand-drawn, human and computer graphics elements.

Which required, as Jones graphically puts it, ``so much data that, if you transferred it all to floppy disks, we could fill a 10,000-square-foot warehouse from floor to ceiling with them.

``This is the largest mixed-media project ever undertaken,'' continues Jones, who has done digital work on more than 200 films. ``It combines traditional two-dimensional animation, virtual environments like a stadium totally created in a computer, green-screen live shots and CG animation, like when Michael gets turned into a basketball or Wayne Knight is flattened and reinflated. There were 1,200 visual effects shots of one kind or another, and each averaged about 30 elements per shot.''

The first step for most of these complicated frames involved Jordan acting or playing basketball on an all-green stage. Everything except Jordan (or Knight or Bill Murray, the other actors with Looney land scenes), a ball and a hoop was painted the same ``terrible, light green shade,'' as Reitman calls it.

Everything in green would be replaced by animated elements at later stages of production. These included green-wrapped NBA players, who were hired to stand in for the tough Monstar opponents the movie Michael would be up against, and comedians from L.A.'s Groundlings improv troupe, who would approximate the comic antics of the yet-to-be-drawn Looney Tunes.

All this made novice actor Jordan's on-court playing and patter flow more naturally. ``I wanted to make Mike comfortable, so he could speak with his natural voice,'' Reitman explains. ``He has such great charm and charisma, and I didn't want him stiffening up under the weird shooting circumstances.''

Still, with nothing but a few green mummies and some geometrically spaced red dots (more on those in a moment) to play off of, even the most technically gifted actor would have trouble coordinating his performance.

``It's a cross between make-believe when you're a child and the Iranian hostage crisis,'' jokes Knight, who had a famous encounter with a spitting dinosaur in ``Jurassic Park.'' ``Every day, you're looking at the green, looking at the green, looking at the green.

``It was a matter of trying to keep fresh from take to take when there's no scenery, set or props to ground you,'' Knight continued. ``And trying to be funny while in some way staying like a human being. Knowing that cartoon characters will be all around you, going off-the-wall in comedy, you have to figure out where the governor is and how far to go.''

The inevitably improvisatory nature of the live basketball footage meant that, once Smith and Cervone's animators began penciling in the Tunes, Monstars and Nerdlucks, they pretty much had to play Michael's game.

``Everything was shot kind of wild and loose,'' Smith said of the live footage. ``I mean, what kind of direction do you give to the world's greatest athlete? We had to choreograph the animated characters around everything Jordan was doing. They had to run and shoot in the right places, or play correctly against Michael's defense.''

``There was no prewritten script for the basketball game,'' Cervone adds. ``We just knew we needed shots of Michael scoring, getting bullied around and shouting stuff to the other characters. We just kind of put the whole sequence together through a series of gag sessions. Then we'd put stuff together in roughly drawn story reels and pitch them to Ivan that way. He'd make sure everything jelled into a movie instead of letting us go too nuts, which we have a tendency to do.''

Once all the hand-drawn elements of a scene were completed, they were crunched along with the live footage in Cinesite's computers. Then the pieces of the pictures were not only digitally combined, but enhanced, stretched, spindled and otherwise manipulated in ways reminiscent of a Road Runner cartoon.

But with infinitely more possibilities, subtleties and three-dimensional capabilities.

Jones describes the complexities of a typical sequence. ``A CG ball is passed to Michael by a Tune,'' Jones says. ``When he catches it, it's a real ball. He's in a virtual environment, with a crowd replicated from 20 animated elements to look like 25,000 cartoon fans. Michael dribbles down the court and passes the ball to the Tasmanian Devil, where it becomes a CG ball again.

``The Devil dribbles around two Monstars, which is traditional animation in the virtual environment, tied to the floor with shadow and lighting programs. When the Devil shoots to score, the backboard of the basket is CG, the rim and net are real, and as the ball leaves the Devil's hand, it turns back into the real ball.

``All in a brief few seconds. That really describes the magic of this film; you never know quite what is real and what is virtual.''

The computers were also able to duplicate complex, live-action camera moves swiftly, thanks to those evenly placed red dots on the green-screen footage.

``It looked like the green walls had a very regular set of measels,'' Reitman explains. But those dots formed a grid that a post-production computer program could use to exactly imitate the live camera's movement. Traditionally, a computer is hooked up to a live camera, then each animated element has to be scanned individually in that same exact manner. Called motion control, it is a much more time-consuming process than the one used for ``Space Jam.''

And time was of the essence. ``Space Jam's'' animation commenced a mere 18 months ago; the average Disney cartoon feature takes about four years. Two Warners animation studios, one here and one in London, worked full-blast on the project, but Smith and Cervone had to subcontract some of the drawing out to private studios in California, Ohio, Canada and England.

``Animation still starts the same way that it always has, with the artist, pencil and paper,'' Cervone states. ``But computers allow us to do things faster and gave us more versatility than we're used to. If we wanted to make a character bigger or smaller or move him on the screen, we were able to do that quickly and with no redrawing involved.''

``I like to say that `Roger Rabbit' was the vinyl LP of live-action/animation and `Space Jam' is the compact disc,'' Smith concludes.

`` `Roger' was one of the first live/animated films to use active cameras,'' Cervone adds. ``We took that one step further. We have the camera movement you'd expect to see during a basketball game. The camera's all over the place.''

Very nice. But the question remains whether all this innovation will end up costing or earning Warners a fortune worth the family jewels.

``I couldn't go into this movie with an attitude that so much was riding on this, because it would have frozen me,'' Reitman reveals. ``As a filmmaker, you've just got to try to make a good movie and hope audiences will want to see it. In the end, we've all done what we can and the movie is as good as it can be.''

And it's a movie that ends, after its extended credit crawl, with Michael Jordan asking if he can go home now.

``We plan to decompress for the next couple of months,'' Cervone says, speaking for himself and Smith.

``I do want to rest a little,'' confirms Cinesite's Jones. ``I want to stop dreaming of creatures from `Space Jam' and have a normal life for a while. I want to have breakfast in the morning, instead of drinking three cups of coffee and then start jamming.''

CAPTION(S):

10 Photos

Photo: (1--6--Cover--Color) Michael Jordan's scene with a Shakespearean Bugs begins with 1) Jordan and a live stand-in, 2) rough animation drawn over the stand-in, 3) ``clean-up'' animation so the image can be computerized, 4) rough effects animation to give Bugs a 3-D quality, 5) a more detailed version of effects animation and ends with 6) the computer-melded shot.

(7) Brought together on the movie screen in ``Space Jam'' by the latest computer animation technology, Daffy Duck hears basketball star Michael Jordan tell it like it is.

(8) Marvin the Martian tips the basketball as Jordan faces off against the alien Monstars.

(9) Bill Murray, left, Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan huddle during the game that will decide the Looney Tunes' fate.

(10) NBA stars in ``Space Jam'' include Larry Johnson, left, Shawn Bradley, Jordan, Muggsy Bogues, Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing. With the exception of Jordan, the Nerdlucks ``absorb'' the players' skills.