HEY, SAILOR DREAMWORKS HOPES YOU'RE LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME WITH `SINBAD'.

Byline: Jerry Rice Staff Writer

About 20 years ago, when Patrick Gilmore expressed an interest in film, his high-school counselor said to him, ``I'm going to send you to the same place I sent George.'' The future director of ``Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas'' knew he was following in some big footsteps.

The George she was referring to was Lucas, who by that time had changed American cinema with ``Star Wars,'' and the place she was talking about was the film school at the USC.

And like Lucas, Gilmore also drew inspiration from their common hometown of Modesto. For Lucas, it was cars, high school and cruising, which resulted in his 1973 breakthrough film ``American Graffiti.'' For Gilmore it came from sitting in the town's movie theaters, watching the films of special-effects master Ray Harryhausen.

``I grew up with not only the old Sinbad animated shorts, but the Harryhausen movies were huge for me,'' says Gilmore, 38. ``All the dynamation and the stop-motion animation, I've seen all of them along with 'Jason and the Argonauts,' `First Men in the Moon' and any number of the Harryhausen films. Watching them as a kid, they were absolutely seamless. All of that stuff was as real as you got.''

Stops and starts

True to that inspiration, the new ``Sinbad,'' which opened Wednesday, is a grand fantasy about the notorious rogue (voiced by Brad Pitt) who has been framed for stealing one of the world's great treasures, the Book of Peace. He must find and return the precious book or his best friend, Proteus (Joseph Fiennes), will be killed.

Along for the ride is Marina (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who wants to make sure Sinbad sees his mission through to the end because she is betrothed to Proteus.

``As far as the names that sort of stand for big adventure - Tarzan, Aladdin, Sinbad - Sinbad was one of the foremost that hadn't had a contemporary movie treatment,'' says Gilmore, who is making his film directorial debut with veteran director Tim Johnson (``Antz'' and the upcoming ``Over the Hedge''). ``As big of a fan of the character as I was, it was a natural for me to jump into it.''

And he did it with both feet, leading more than 550 artists, animators and technicians through a three-year process that allowed the filmmakers to improve dramatically over what Harryhausen could achieve on such spectacles as ``The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad'' (1958) and ``Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger'' (1977).

Like ``The Seventh Voyage'' - for which Harryhausen worked some memorable stop-motion visual effects magic to go with the movie's live action - the new movie blends two filmmaking technologies. In ``Legend of the Seven Seas,'' it's traditional pencil-to-paper drawings and computer-generated images.

Dubbed ``tradigital'' by DreamWorks co-chief and ``Sinbad'' producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, the process is the most complicated for animators because all of the scenes need to fit seamlessly together.

``The shots that were the easiest to film were the kind of one-world shots - either all-drawn with a painted background or all-CG with no drawn elements at all,'' Gilmore says.

One of several scenes that put the talents of animators to the test was an action sequence with Sinbad and Marina - who are hand-drawn - sliding down an environment that is fully 3-D, being chased by a giant bird of prey called the Roc.

``The challenge was making everything clear and then sort of juggling them, so that each (element) was being serviced ... and nothing felt like it came out of the blue,'' says Gilmore, who knows all about bouncing between two worlds.

On top of his game

Before coming to DreamWorks in 1996, he spent seven years working on more than 25 video games for Disney. One of his productions was ``Aladdin'' for Sega Genesis, which established a new benchmark for animation in a video game.

At DreamWorks Interactive, he helped launch the company's game console development with ``The Lost World,'' and later worked on the ``Small Soldiers'' game and ``Medal of Honor'' (which was based on a concept by Steven Spielberg).

In co-director Johnson's view, Gilmore's video game experience was a huge plus for ``Sinbad.''

``Patrick is really good at pulling the unexpected out of any kind of action, and trying to find the fresh and character-driven way to experience that action,'' he says. ``So whether it was trying to go over the shoulder and be in the moment, or just the kinds of places where he would come up with an unexpected twist in the action. Maybe that had a little bit to do with his trying to provide an action-adventure experience within the gaming world.''

While there are some similarities in the lives of the two Modesto filmmakers, Gilmore, who lives in Agoura Hills, has no illusions about being the next Lucas.

``That was sort of a real context in my life, that George Lucas had gone out and met with huge success,'' Gilmore says. ``I hope for the same thing, but I've always worked with the lightning-doesn't-strike-in-the-same-place twice mentality. I never felt that by trying to follow exactly where he did I would necessarily meet the same fate as him. So I've been kind of determined to find my own path and do my own thing.''

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Swingin' Sinbad

All you need is Brad Pitt and some breezy effects

(2) Marina, voiced by Catherine Zeta-Jones, takes control as Sinbad (Brad Pitt) looks on in ``Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,'' whose artists took inspiration from Ray Harryhausen's epics.