ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, July 19, 1996 TAG: 9607190021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
No, he doesn't blow up the White House, but director Peter Jackson has filled "The Frighteners" with some of the most impressive special effects that moviegoers are going to see this summer.
With his shaggy-hair, beard and comfortable paunch, the New Zealander hardly fits the Hollywood stereotype. By choice and geography, he's an outsider. On a promotional tour, he admitted that he really didn't understand what it was going to be when he showed producer Robert Zemeckis a two-page treatment.
"We knew it was about ghosts," he said, "and that it would have a major amount of special effects. We didn't know that ultimately we were going to be doing 570 CG [computer-generated] shots. I suspect that if we'd known that at the time, we'd have made something else."
Those CG shots take up almost half the film's running time. To create them on a relatively modest $30 million budget, Jackson set up his own facility with 35 computers in the same building where the film was made in New Zealand. The images the staff conjured up are the real stars of the film.
"Having your ghosts transparent makes them look like they've been pasted over, and you're seeing through them." Jackson explained. "So we wrote a piece of computer software that refracts the image that's directly behind them where they're walking. That gives them a little bit more substance. It makes them a little more three-dimensional within the scene."
He also used a computer-controlled camera to match shots of the live actors and special effects.
"We had a New Zealand guy who'd built a motion-control camera. It was a homemade thing he'd put together in his garage with all sorts of motors and wheels and cogs attached to it. It worked incredibly well....
"We're shooting [the film's star, Michael J. Fox] by himself on one element; three months later, we're shooting the ghost actors against blue screens. If you want to move the camera in Michael's shot, then you have to have a computer-controlled robot with a camera attached to it. You set that same thing up three months later and the computer program runs the same movement again on the blue screen so that the two camera moves are exactly the same. When you put them together, there's no difference at all in the movement."
With the critical acclaim of his previous work, "Heavenly Creatures," and the technical dexterity he displays in this one, Jackson is being heavily courted by American studios, but he claims that he's not ready to move. "I don't have an interest in shooting anyone else's scripts. I just want to do my own thing. So, ultimately, I don't intend to go to Hollywood; I'd rather Hollywood come to New Zealand and I can work in an environment where I feel comfortable and secure."
LENGTH: Medium: 56 linesby CNB