Kramer: fx sorcerer Photo:Noah Berger

dward A. Kramer came face to face with the monster, and experienced not fear, but clarity.

The year was 1999. The monster was a mummy with 300-year-old flesh hanging off its bones. Kramer '77, a computer-graphics sequence supervisor for George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, was working on lighting the mummy for the upcoming feature film in which the creature was to have a starring role.

"I was all of a sudden hit by this feeling," Kramer recalls. "I remembered when I was a kid and was into all these monster magazines. What was on my screen was exactly like what was in my magazines. I thought, 'Oh my God, I actually grew up to do the kind of thing that I thought was so cool.' "

If you saw swarms of scarabs in The Mummy, tornadoes in Twister, sixty squirming puppies in 101 Dalmatians, the rock monster in Galaxy Quest, the werewolf in Van Helsing, or just about anything to do with water in The Perfect Storm, you saw Ed Kramer's work.

"It's kind of fun to be able to mention something and have somebody say, 'Oh yeah, I remember that!' " he says, sounding like a kid who's found a permanent home in a Never Never Land for computer geeks. "My whole career, I feel like I've been living on the edge of the latest and greatest all the time."

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Convincing computer-generated imagery, or CG, calls for a programmer's mind and an artist's eye. For someone like Kramer, who has that combination in spades, it's a heckuva way to make a living. What he does is technically complex and evolves rapidly as new methods are invented, but in a nutshell: He takes the background that the film director has shot, adds an object that was never there, and makes it look real. Sometimes that involves making a giant kick up dust as he walks or tornadoes twist across the horizon. At other times, it means creating lighting on a monster or a boat deck that matches the lighting in the background shot. Or it involves compositing, pulling together all of the computer-graphics elements and integrating them seamlessly with the background.

The result is what moviemakers hope will help usher moviegoers into the suspension of disbelief that keeps them riveted to their seats. When Dracula bares his fangs in Van Helsing, your blood pressure shoots up. When a 200-foot wave looms over the boat in The Perfect Storm, your heart leaps into your throat.

Kramer works out of ILM's headquarters building in San Rafael, California, just north of San Francisco. Walking through the building is like taking a tour of the history of the feature-film special-effects industry. ILM has been doing special effects since 1975 and the making of the original Star Wars movie, released in 1977. Visitors are greeted by a life-size model of a Storm Trooper; around the next corner is Darth Vader standing next to R2-D2. ILM is considered one of the leaders in the advanced digital-effects industry. The company pioneered, among other things, the development of motion-control cameras and optical compositing. It has won fourteen Academy Awards for visual effects and sixteen more for technical achievement.

A huge amount of the work that ILM does is what Kramer calls "practical effects"--things like miniature sets or models that exist in the real world. But Kramer's work in computer graphics concerns the "unreal" world. In Van Helsing, he covered the werewolf in computer-generated fur, gave the vampire brides flowing hair, and helped the digital "double" for the star, Hugh Jackman, do the stunt work that the flesh-and-blood actor never could have achieved.

Some of the movies Kramer has worked on have big-bang special effects--tornadoes, exploding comets, tumultuous seas. "The first killer wave you see in The Perfect Storm, the huge wall of water--that was my work," he says proudly. Basically, the more complex and realistic-looking it is, the tougher it was to do. The Perfect Storm is a perfect example. Computer-generated boats had to float with believable buoyancy, mist blowing off the top of waves had to look wispy, and objects flying off the boat and splashing into the sea had to have weight and trajectory. Kramer and dozens of others used special software to make the scene come to life in a believable, photo-realistic way.

"The human eye knows what's real and what isn't," Kramer says. "If I look at something and it doesn't look quite right, I have to figure out, well, what about that is not looking right? Is it the scale? The density? Does it need to be more particulate?"

"The mist coming off the tops of waves is a pretty good example. There's a whole new technology called 'particle systems' that allows us to animate millions of infinitely small particles. And we animate them using basically the language of physics: things like gravity and wind and turbulence," he says. "No one had ever done anything even approaching what we did on Perfect Storm. It was totally uncharted computer-graphic technology. This was the first time that computer-generated water had to mix seamlessly with real ocean water."

In fact, he says, he has yet to work on a movie and rely solely on known techniques, even those already invented by ILM. "There's never been a project where we've said, 'We have all the technology to do that.' That's why people come to ILM. A great deal of the groundbreaking work is done here. In some shows, every single shot, we have to develop new techniques. That was true of The Perfect Storm. And The Mask. When Jim Carrey turns into a tornado--ILM had to invent ways to do that."

Not surprisingly, the same holds true with the movie he's now working on, a sequel to The Mask called Son of the Mask. However, he says, it is too early in the production stage for him to be able to reveal any specifics. For this latest project, Kramer is a "sequence supervisor," overseeing teams of computer-graphics artists known as technical directors. He himself started as a technical director when ILM hired him back in 1994. He was put to work doing the CG equivalent of working with a needle and thread. "The first thing I did at ILM was 'sock' an elephant," he says, referring to the technique of using special software to stitch together a computer model by removing all the seams and cracks in the image. "We were able to realistically show muscles and fat working under the surface of the skin of the elephant. When the foot hits the ground, it ripples through his chest," he says.

"And immediately thereafter I had to sock a monkey."

Kramer socked things so well that he was promoted to sequence supervisor in 1998 and now oversees the work of an average of ten technical directors on any given film. On a typical day, Kramer wanders from desk to desk, looking over shoulders, sharing software tips, and answering questions. "The paradigm of special effects here at ILM differs from the stylized, fully computer-generated techniques of Pixar or Dreamworks," he says. "Here, we have to invent techniques to mix computer-generated effects with live-action footage shot by the director, where the audience sees them side by side. Whether it's vampires, dinosaurs, Dalmatian puppies, or 200-foot ocean waves, our technical and artistic challenge is to create images that look so photo-realistic that you can't tell where in the frame the real footage ends and the CG begins."