Sunday November 1, 2009
Dream job
By ELIZABETH TAI
Ng Chun Seong has helped to make some of Hollywood’s recent major productions look bigger, better and impossibly spectacular.
THE next time you watch a Hollywood blockbuster, pay attention to the dazzling special effects because they may be created by a Malaysian.
Ng Chun Seong, 25, has lent his expertise to blockbuster films such as Wanted, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Incredible Hulk, and the upcoming 2012.
With his computer, he made a city for the Hulk to destroy, created a menacing alien in Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, and then there’s that cool scene in Wanted where James McAvoy has to grab a fast-moving spindle in a loom with his bare hands.…
The Kuala Lumpur-born Ng, who is based in the United States, had always wanted to be involved in movie special effects, especially after watching CGI-rich films like Jurassic Park in his youth.
Ng helped to create the ‘cracked ground’ in the supermarket scene in 2012. This scene was especially difficult to conjure as most of the objects in the supermarket were CGI. –Photos courtesy of Ng Chun Seong “If the movie has a lot of visual effects, I’ll watch it regardless of the storyline,” Ng says in an interview during his visit home earlier this year.
Therefore, after graduating from One Academy in 2003, he found employment with a local company which did work for American television shows. However, he was restless after four months.
“I wanted to learn more advanced things that were not available in Malaysia – ‘Hollywood stuff’ like special effects. I thought, ‘Why waste my time working longer here when I can travel and explore myself?’”
So he headed for the United States to get his Master’s at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Upon graduation he moved to Los Angeles – Hollywood land – to look for a job.
The job hunt was “pretty much a nightmare”, recalls Ng. For one, there were many people vying for a limited number of jobs in the special effects studios. “If there was a position open, thousands would apply for one job. They always want experienced people.”
Furthermore, most companies prefer to hire Americans as they are unwilling to pay extra for a foreigner, he points out.
So for the next three to four months, from “morning to night” in his one-bedroom apartment in LA, he studied to improve his skills and sent artwork to various competitions in the hope of winning awards and gaining some recognition. He did win some awards after two months, but no one was responding to his resumes.
“There were times when I felt stressed up and depressed because I worked so hard and yet I couldn’t get a job. After two to three months I began to feel nervous and uncertain about the future. It seemed like no matter what I did there was no recognition. This is really common, however, as there are so many artists out there,” he says.
Still, Ng was luckier than most. He finally got a response after sending out 15 resumes. The company which responded, Hydraulx, is where he’s been ever since.
He initially started working on the night shift for the firm in August 2007. Although that meant working at night in a near-empty office and sleeping in the morning, Ng was happy as he finally achieved his dream to work in Hollywood.
That’s not Cate Blanchett, really – animators ‘attached’ her head to a model to make it appear as if the actress is really dancing in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Creating movie magic
Ng’s job is to do “modelling and texturing”, which means he builds a 3D object with a computer and adds texture to it.
His most challenging job to date was in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where he and his colleagues had to film someone dancing and then place Cate Blanchett’s head on the model. (In the film starring Brad Pitt as a man who ages in reverse, Blanchett’s character is a ballerina.)
“That was really, really tough,” says Ng.
Fortunately, he had worked on an almost similar project when he built Eddie Murphy’s 3D face on Meet Dave.
It took Ng almost half a year to do part of the dancing sequence (his supervisor did most of it). While one of his co-workers built a whole head, Ng had to create Blanchett’s expressions – sadness, joy, anger – on her face.
“It was really, really tough,” he says again. “Sometimes when you put her in the shot it didn’t look like her because the light might not be right or the texturing was not good enough,” he says.
But the end results, as one can see from the intriguing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, were astounding. I, for one, never realised that it wasn’t Blanchett dancing!
But Ng doesn’t always have the luxury of time to do his work.
“In The Incredible Hulk, we built a helicopter and put it into the shot. (It’s the scene where the Hulk attacks a helicopter.) The scene was too dangerous to shoot in real life and it would be easier to do it in 3D,” he explains.
It took him two weeks to build a helicopter from scratch. Ng says that it was a “rush” to do it, but that’s quite normal in his line of work.
For one, in the Keanu Reeves movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, Ng had to help make the sequence where Gort – the giant silver alien which landed on Earth – turns into millions of silver bugs. In six weeks.
“It was kind of unbelievable. To do a shot like that takes six months. We kind of killed ourselves. I worked 92 hours in a week for that,” he says with a laugh. His basic schedule comprises 50 hours per week, but he often works overtime to meet the clients’ very challenging demands.
But despite the long, crazy hours, Ng still loves his job. “If you really like this, you don’t mind working really long hours to make it look good.”
The super-cool effects of a spindle moving through a loom in Wanted. Apocalyptic vision
Malaysians will next see Ng’s handiwork in John Cusack’s 2012, the highly anticipated movie about the world coming to a cataclysmic end according to the ancient Mayan calendar.
In the production notes of 2012, visual effects supervisor Marc Weigert reveals that a thousand people from 10 to 12 companies around the world were involved in the department.
For nearly a year since last November, Ng created computer illusions such as buildings in Hawaii for animators to torch, and massive cracks on earthquake-ridden beaches. The film, as one can see from the trailers, is filled with well-known landmarks being demolished by earthquakes, fires and raging tsunamis.
Ng says the scale of destruction in 2012 is “bigger and crazier than everything that we have ever seen in the past”.
“Everything we modelled has to be seen as real and believable on the big screen and, of course, in accordance with our client’s standards and needs. So it wasn’t really an easy task for the whole team,” he admits.
Indeed, Weigert acknowledges that it was a challenge to create a convincing earthquake. “Everything had to move in the earthquake: every palm tree, every mailbox, every car, every building has to either crumble or fall down.”
Eventually, the visual effects team built a 182m x 12m-high blue screen which is placed on a floor that shakes and trembles. This movement is recreated in the computer-animated environment.
“We have to track the motion of the camera and the motion of the floor that shakes totally independently of anything else,” Weigert adds.
In a sequence where an earthquake splits a supermarket in two, Ng had to create that “trembling ground” effect.
Ng says the supermarket sequence was one of the toughest to do as he had to build thousands of objects in the supermarket as well. Almost everything in the supermarket was computer-generated. Furthermore, they had to fall in different directions.
“I assisted my modelling supervisor Yoshiya Yamada to work on the huge cracks that cut through the supermarket while he hand-animated the moving and rattling shelves to achieve the exact amount of motions the director desired,” he says.
The shelves were also stocked with products that were all digitally created. “Using a special software called PhysX, we managed to turn around thousands of items and products with different shapes and sizes within a limited timeframe,” he says proudly.
Bright future
There are more opportunities to do 3D work in Malaysia now, says Ng. “A British company opened an outsource company here. It’s a good opportunity for Malaysians to work on something really cool such as world-class games or TV animation.”
He advises those who wish to follow in his footsteps to be tough, patient and to love their work. “Without these qualities, it’s difficult to survive. There are only a few companies in Malaysia and so many schools. Not all the students will get a job in the industry. It’s kind of cruel to say that, but it’s the truth.”
The work is indeed tough, but seeing one’s work on the big screen is worth it. “When I watch my own film I feel excited. It’s on the big screen and everyone will get to watch it. And the special effects sequences are over so quickly, yet it took us months to do them. Just a blink and it’s gone.”
Ng aims to work on better, cooler films in the future. In fact, he is working on one now. According to his IMDb page, he’s a modeller on James Cameron’s sci-fi adventure, Avatar, about a disabled ex-marine’s migration to a planet of humanoids.
“I’ve already achieved my dream by joining my company. Every new project is a brand new start and a new challenge,” he says.
‘2012’ is set to explode on the local movie scene on Nov 12.
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