Hollywood demand booms for digital effects.

Lower cost, higher tech makes F/X easier to get

Scott Ross' mother didn't want him to be an artist. There was no money in it, she said. Fortunately, Ross didn't listen.

Today, he is the chief executive officer of a 275-employee company worth an estimated $90 million, part of a new fusion of art and technology that is exploding on the commercial scene.

Companies that design digital special effects for feature films, TV shows, music videos and commercials are suddenly encountering an environment of seemingly limitless demand from Hollywood studios and advertisers. Some, like Ross' Venice-based Digital Domain, are growing at a rate of about 100 percent a year since they started operations.

"Ten years ago, there was maybe one company doing digital special effects. Five years ago there were maybe 20. As of yesterday, there were probably 150 or 200," said Eddie Ackerman, CEO and general manager of Burbank-based post-production house Absolute Post.

The digitizing of Hollywood did not happen overnight - a handful of companies, led by network television news and sports departments, were doing digital effects on a limited basis as long ago as the early 1980s.

But a kind of revelation struck the entertainment industry four or five years ago, with the success of digital effects-laden feature films like "The Abyss" and "Jurassic Park" and music videos by Michael Jackson that turned "morphing" into a household word. What Ross calls the Digital Revolution had begun.

"I believe this is more important than the Industrial Revolution was in the 1900s," Ross said. "This is the first time since the Renaissance when art is a really driving factor in commerce."

Ross cut his teeth with one of the pioneers in the digital effects industry, George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic based in San Rafael. After serving as general manager of ILM from 1988 to 1992, he founded Digital Domain along with partners Stan Winston, an acclaimed creature creator, and film director James Cameron in 1993.

Rivals abound

Today it is one of about a dozen major players in the feature film digital effects business, including ILM, Simi Valley-based Dream Quest Images, Sunnyvale-based Pacific Data Images, L.A.-based Rhythm & Hues Studios, New York-based Sony Pictures Entertainment and Point Richmond, Calif.-based Pixar Inc. - producer of the first feature-length film generated entirely by computer, Walt Disney Co.'s "Toy Story."

Although only a few companies have the ability to crank out the kind of big-budget feature effects produced by these powerhouses, there are well over 100 others, mainly concentrated in L.A. County and the Silicon Valley, that produce digital images for TV shows, commercials and videos. Most of these companies have existed for fewer than four years, and were only able to enter the business after the technology to produce digital effects became better and cheaper.

A case in point is Valencia-based Foundation Imaging, which won an Emmy in 1993 for its visual effects work on the pilot of TV series "Babylon 5." While digital special effects for motion pictures are usually produced using specially designed workstations created by Mountain View-based Silicon Graphics Inc. that sell for around $60,000 each, Foundation Imaging was able to create award-winning TV effects using regular desktop computers.

Prices decline

"We can get six machines for the price of one Silicon Graphics workstation," said Ron Thornton, Foundation Imaging's president. "The whole technology for this business has gotten cheaper. I know that's contrary to popular belief when you see the budgets for some of these movies, but it has."

Foundation Imaging has doubled in size since its founding in 1992 and now has 20 employees. It currently produces a half-hour science fiction adventure show for kids called "Hypernauts" that debuted March 2 on ABC.

Hollywood's love affair with digital effects is based on more than their visual appeal. It is usually considerably cheaper to design spectacular sequences on a computer than it would be to create them the old-fashioned way, using models and stop-motion animation.

In addition, once a company creates digital sequences, they can very easily be incorporated into profitable CD-ROM games, which are sometimes sold as marketing tie-ins to motion pictures. And digital images are also becoming an increasingly important component of the Internet.

"If I create a rhinoceros for a commercial, I now have a rhinoceros that I can put in my cyber back lot," said Ross. "With every project we work on, we have more people and characters to call on for future projects."