Visual Effects Artist: Al Magliochetti

A journey into the world of visual special effects

Visual Effects Artist Al Magliochetti

By J. Jekyll
October 2009
Goremaster.com

Mr. Magliochetti has been working as a visual effects artist for more than 20 years. His credits include The Addams Family (1991), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), The Cider House Rules (1999), Skinned Deep (2004), Delta Farce (2007) and most recently Dark House (2009). Read on to learn about his career journey through the world of visual effects.

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GM: When did you make your decision to enter the field?

AM: I was always a fan of film and I started making my own films at age 10 with a Super 8 camera, but since I was raised in a tiny little blue-collar town in Connecticut it seemed like working in that field as a career was a totally unreachable goal. I even went to college as a cinema major thinking it was all a waste of time and money since most films were shot in Los Angeles and that place seemed like it was on the other end of the world.

In film school, though, I realized that everybody wanted to show off their directing skills and always tried to one-up each other. I decided to use a different strategy and decided to teach myself animation and optical effects so that I could make my own films look cooler than anybody else’s. Star Wars had just come out at the time and there were dozens of articles and magazines devoted to the techniques, many of which were fairly new, so I felt as though I was there at the ground floor of this new technology. My film school had a very rudimentary 16mm optical printer that nobody ever seemed to use, so I designed a complicated effects-based film that took me over two years to produce. When it was done, the finished film – Dance Macabre - seemed to get some notoriety in festivals and even won a few so I thought it might be a career worth pursuing after all, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about it.

GM: What or who inspired you to start? Who was your influence?

AM: Universal monsters were a big influence. They were very popular when I was a kid everywhere except in my very conservative area so I was the solitary monster freak that everybody thought was weird. But, like a lot of other future filmmakers from that era, I discovered the legendary Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine at a corner drugstore and everything took off from there.

I’d seen a Wolfman transformation on TV (which turned out to be from House of Dracula) and some Invisible Man film and I wanted to know how those effects were done. My parents’ explanation of it “being done with mirrors” didn’t exactly answer my question so I began buying Famous Monsters whenever I could hoping that at some point there’d be some article on those kinds of effects.

Special Effects scene from Frankenhooker (1990)

GM: Favorite early visual effects memory – movie scene – book – TV show?

AM: The first effects movie I remember viewing was Darby O’Gill and the Little People. I saw it at the Drive-In, so it was hardly optimum conditions, but I literally remember being spellbound by some of the imagery in that film. By the way, I was four.

Second to that would be the Martian War machines in War of the Worlds when it was first shown on TV in the mid 1960s – and I was sent to bed at the apex of the Martian invasion and was scared to death that the earth would be taken over by the time I woke up.

Another was an innocent viewing of an old Clark Gable movie titled San Francisco which just happened to be one lazy afternoon. At the climax of that film the 1906 earthquake strikes and the city is leveled. I had never seen destruction on that scale and it horrified me so badly I didn’t sleep for weeks and nobody could figure out why. I eventually blurted out what I was afraid of only to then be told there were no earthquakes in Connecticut .

Honorable mention has to go to Jason and the Argonauts as well; and especially to the skeleton fight sequence. Again, it was an early showing on TV and I thought the skeletons crawling out of the ground were the coolest things I’d ever seen . . and then they let out this insane shriek when they attacked, which I wasn’t expecting, and again I had the crap scared out of me. God I was a wuss…

Skinned Deep severed head
Al digitally servering a head for Skinned Deep (2004)

GM: What are your top five visual effects movies?

AM: Star Wars blew me away – that was really the one that took things to the next level. I saw the first trailer in November of 1976 and had to wait six months until it was released!

Forbidden Planet - some of the best effects of the 1950s, and it got beat out of an Academy Award by the cartoony Pillar of Fire in The Ten Commandments. Not fair.

War of the Worlds – there are still some shots in that movie that mystify me as to how they were put together. Absolute genius for its time.

Darby O’Gill and the Little People – I mentioned it earlier but what’s amazing about this film is that more than half of the effects were completed in camera using forced perspective and didn’t require any further optical processing. Incredibly well done.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – Come on, who couldn’t watch Nazi heads melting all day long ?

GM: What is your favorite visual effects scene from a movie? (it doesn’t have to be from one of your movies)

AM: Oh don’t worry – it definitely wouldn’t be from one of my movies J

The asteroid field chase from The Empire Strikes Back really impressed me at the time because there’s so many layers of work in it that all have to sync up. It’s a beautiful example of how effects should work, since you’re completely pumped up and immersed in the action. The first time I saw it on a big screen with that six-track stereo music blaring I felt like was riding a rollercoaster.

Honorable mention has to go to the jeep going off the cliff in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was at a sneak preview and had no idea what the movie was about. When that scene came up I literally forgot myself and stood up in astonishment at how good it looked - and apparently I really ticked off the people behind me.

Al with Bridgit Marquardt on set of The Telling (2009)

GM: Who is your favorite visual effects person?

AM: Willis O’Brien. That poor guy had the most tragic life but he still managed to create the basic techniques of stop motion animation that are still in use today.

GM: How did you get started working in the Visual Effects industry?

AM: I was fortunate enough to do a few small effects on industrial training films for a local company when I was a teenager. I did both makeup effects and some effects-laden title sequences, along with a fairly elaborate slitscan animation sequence. After college I took that work and my thesis film around New York and eventually was given an effects supervisor job on a low budget feature.

That, unfortunately, turned out to be a bad experience, since the producers had written a script that was far more expensive than they could afford to shoot, but it did introduce me to Gabe Bartalos whom I then suggested to the producer of the next film I did visual effects on, which turned out to be Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage which is a great film to have as your first offical feature credit. After a few more New York credits and a brief stint on some TV shows in Toronto I figured I had enough of a resume to move to Los Angeles, which I did for Terminator 2, and I’ve been here ever since.

GM: Whose current work do you admire?

AM: I thought about that question for a long time since it’s really difficult to answer nowadays. Nobody is really a one-man-band in effects anymore besides myself and a few other independent contractors. The trend seems to be that everybody specializes in one particular area, be it lighting, modeling, texturing, animation or compositing – very few people are good in more than one or two categories anymore.

I guess I’d have to say I admire anybody who can keep a small company with only a few employees and put out work as good as, or better than, some of the main digital companies such as Digital Domain or Industrial Light and Magic. Peter Kuran at VCE and Kevin Kutchaver at HimAnI Productions are two people that come to mind who make sure the clients get their money’s worth and the resulting work always looks fantastic. Another gentleman named Jim Danforth is someone I consider to be one of the best effects artists of the modern age. He’s not as active in the industry as he once was but his work is always flawless.

GM: How have you gotten work in the industry?

AM: Most of my work comes in by referral and plain old word of mouth. I’ve tried taking out ads and sending out demo DVDs to producers but I rarely make any new contacts in either of those ways. When producers find out some of my credits (such as most of the Thing shots in the original Addams Family movie) I tend to get their attention. When they also find out I’m affordable it helps my case quite a bit since many producers have horror stories about working with effects companies who can’t deliver what they promise.

Al (with severed head) and the cast of Skinned Deep (2004)

GM: What was your toughest job?

AM: I have two answers to this:

One form of tough job is any effect that has to be invisible to the audience. Nobody knows what a spaceship or a demonic entity really looks like so you have a lot of liberty in creating those kinds of effects. The hard jobs are the ones that have to look absolutely natural and real – in my case the most difficult job was the digital landscapes for The Cider House Rules, wherein we had to change the seasons since we shot in September but the film’s narrative took place in mid-winter. Complicating matters was that one of the shots was in the title sequence and was almost a minute long, which gives an audience a long time to see any flaws that might be present, so we had to be extra careful when layering all the elements together. Back in 1998 with the equipment I had at the time that shot took one full week to render and then another full 20 hours just to transfer the files back to a film negative. The suspense was killing me… J

The other job that’s recently become tough is working with first-time producers and directors. Digital technology has made filmmaking much more accessible to financiers who would never have considered investing in the field twenty years ago. Unfortunately quite a few of them have an unrealistic view of how film works and fully expect Jurassic Park style effects for a fraction of that budget, (I literally had a Newbie producer say to me recently “Why are visual effects so expensive? You have a Computer!) Their ignorance of the field makes them think that just because every pixel on the frame can be addressed that it’s their duty to fiddle around with every single one . . and not only does that attitude get very tiresome it’s generally very detrimental to the quality they’re supposedly trying to present.

GM: What was your favorite job?

AM: My favorite job was probably Star Trek VI for several reasons. For one thing it was the first job I had in Los Angeles where I was given the opportunity to supervise on set. Having Nicholas Meyer as the director was a great experience; to say nothing of interacting with the original Star Trek cast – that was a dream come true. That job also allowed me to work at Industrial Light and Magic up in Northern California when the Los Angeles effects unit, VCE, had completed their share of the work. At the time ILM was still the only really large effects facility in the world and you couldn’t help but learn a lot from every little thing being done up there.

GM: How do you pick out materials to use for a project? Do you make your own? Are there any brands that you recommend?

AM: I’m presuming this question is geared more toward makeup effects than CG, but I’ll give it a try anyway.

I find it necessary to have both Mac and PC workstations since each has their own advantages and disadvantages. The Macs are generally faster and more efficient but there’s sometimes more plug-ins available for the PC on their various programs so it really depends on what effect we’re trying to achieve.

For programs I still prefer Adobe After Effects for compositing purposes and using Adobe Photoshop for digital painting and touch-up work is pretty much a given. For 3D work, it’s a split between Maya, Lightwave and 3D Studio Max, again depending on what effect is required since each program has its particular strengths and weaknesses.

Working with Bathtub Baby puppet

GM: Are there any new breakthroughs or ideas in the industry that excite you?

AM: I’ve always been a big fan of 3D films so I’m glad they seem to be making a comeback, at least for the time being. Doing visual effects in three dimensions is certainly more of a challenge but I find it a lot of fun since you’re actually animating and compositing in three dimensional space.

GM: What is a current project you are working on? Or what project are you excited about?

AM: The last feature I completed is titled Dark House and it stars Jeffrey Combs as Walston Rey, a showman who has just built the ultimate Haunted House attraction which, unfortunately, has a few very fatal flaws. It was a fun job.

GM: Do you have advice for a beginner or someone just getting started in the business?

AM: My advice to beginners is to study film as a whole. Learn its language and be aware of how specific effects shots are cut into the narrative. There’s a tendency with newer artists to showboat a little and make their shots really stand out, which is fine for their own demo reel, but when it’s part of a feature it can call undue attention to the effect and distract the audience from the action. The ideal effect is one that is so well integrated the audience never even knows its there.

Another thing I suggest to beginners is to approach an effect with the attitude of “what does this shot require to look right” as opposed to “how can I achieve this effect with what I already know.” I think it’s important to constantly be expanding your knowledge and going beyond what the programs are initially designed for. That’s what artists do . . we create and use our tools in imaginative ways far beyond their original intention and that’s where we get our satisfaction. If you just sit at a console and push buttons that do simple things you’re no better than a trained ape without any creativity at all.

GM: What was the best advice/training you ever received?

AM: The best training I ever got was from both Cinemagic and Cinefex magazines, in that order. Cinemagic started life as a fan-based filmmaker’s magazine emphasizing makeup and visual effects and eventually was bought out and continued by the publishers of Starlog magazine. It showed a lot of younger filmmakers that they weren’t alone and that there were a lot of people getting involved in films with imaginative visuals. It also illustrated how a lot of very expensive Hollywood-style techniques could be done cheaply in your own backyard with a little ingenuity.

Cinefex, by contrast, profiled larger theatrical films such as the Star Wars series, but the publisher was extremely detail oriented in his articles and as such they were a great learning experience. I generally had to re-read each issue two or three times to fully understand what they were talking about in some cases but it was an incredible way to pick up new techniques from the professionals as they, themselves, were learning all this new technology.

GM: How do you envision the future of Visual Effects? (do you think CGI is hurting the industry?)

AM: I think CGI has taken a lot of bullying over the last few years and I find it really sad that so many people have regressed into the Rubber Vs CGI debate, since that’s not what any of this is about.

The goal is to create creatures and images beyond what exists in reality and whether one technique or the other is used shouldn’t be an issue as long as that technique works to everyone’s satisfaction. Unfortunately a great many producers are relying more and more on CGI and in many cases it’s not the best solution for a particular effect – but the producer chooses to go that route because either A) the company he’s hired has convinced him it can be pulled off flawlessly (and there are a lot of used-car dealers providing those types of visual effects services these days) or B) the producer wants the ability to tweak every little detail himself and he can do that far more cost-effectively during post production with CGI than he can during actual production with on-set creations. I’ve also had producers insist on using CGI in spite of my objections just because they want the bragging rights of saying they’re using the latest technology for their film.

I, personally, feel the answer is somewhere in the middle since rubber creatures do certain things better than CG creatures and vice-versa. I usually suggest doing the bulk of a creature practically on set and then using CG to enhance that creature either by rig-removal or by adding various elements that would be impractical to do by physical means (a live-action creature with CGI wings, for example.)

The bottom line is that we’re all trying to contribute what’s best for the film and it should never turn into a CGI Vs Makeup Department contest. At least that’s how I approach it. I’m just really getting tired of hearing “I HATE CGI” because generally that means the only CGI they’ve noticed is BAD CGI. As I said earlier, when done properly any CGI work should be undetectable.

What is truly unfortunate about CGI is that we’ve lost the innocence and wonder of the audience since most of them now think that ANY effect is CGI whether it is or not. And that glorious naiveté is not something we’re ever going to get back.

Al Magliochetti's Eye Candy Visual Effects Demo

Al Magliochetti's IMDB Credits
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0536018/

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