First venture in Digital Effects/ Working on "Demolition Man" in 1993

Around 1993 I was hired by a relatively small effects studio located in Marina Del Rey called Video Image to work on a science fiction action film to star Sylvester Stallone called "Demolition Man". The film takes place 40 or so years in the future after a great earthquake left most of the West coast decimated. The new leaders of the future form a utopian society where all manner of violence and immorality are outlawed. As typical in most films that postulate the future, gadgets and futuristic machines abound. My job on the film was to coordinate the massive amount of digital imagery and video effects to be seen in the film. Literally everywhere you went on the set, a computer screen would there. And if a computer screen was there, odds were it was on. And if it was on, it was a sure bet it had imagery on it. The imagery on the monitors was a mix between complex computer graphics with digital imagery, to city maps, to generic rolling data to videos of naked women.


One of the great innovations that Video Image did was that it developed a system for video to synch with film cameras (Keep in mind , this waaaaay before the advent of digital motion picture cameras which wouldn't be seen for another 15 years). In the days before flat screen televisions, movies used standard Cathode Ray tubes for on screen video playback, computer monitors or the like. This created a problem with film cameras shooting at 24 frame a second and the refresh rate on the CRT moving at 30 frame ( Unchecked this would look like a roll bar on the TV set-look at some older films that have TV's in them, you'll see it). In addition to synching the cameras to the video playback machines, we were tasked with building and installing massing video walls in the police station scenes with Sandra Bullock. Also the futuristic cars all had monitors and graphic displays in them. For the cars, we used early versions of what is commonly known as "Plasma Screens". Since these monitors were prototypes, we had no way of knowing what the imagery displayed on them would look like in color. We spent several days testing them by adding bnc video inputs into them and feeding them imagery from a Beta max playback deck. These new screens proved problematic. Unless you were shooting directly square on them the imagery brightness would fall off considerable. The steeper the angle and more obscure the image gets.

the challenge of the film was adapting to the emergence of new technology but also keeping up with the hectic schedule as most of these effects were done "live" on set and not in post production.