CRAIG BARRON

Visual effects supervisor and founder of Matte World Digital. Credits include Batman Returns, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Shadow, Casino, Broken Arrow, Independence Day, Star Trek: First Contact, Con Air, Kundun, Titanic, The Truman Show, Armageddon, Soldier and Mighty Joe Young.
In 1979, at the tender age of seventeen, I was lucky to be hired as a camera assistant at ILM, assigned to the matte painting department on The Empire Strikes Back. I remember my first day, when Neil Krepela was showing me around and we went onto this stage where the walkers were being photographed. Having been a fan of stop-motion work, 1 knew immediately what was going on. Here was Willis O’Brien’s technique – which he had used on King Kong- updated and applied to a new feature film. There was a large painted backdrop of clouds and distant mountains. Miniature snow’ covered tables on which the walkers were being animated, sandwiched between sheets of glass used to create matte paintings of the foreground snow and rocks. When you looked through the camera, all the layers of this amazing diorama snapped into place – you could actually see the whole shot in the camera’s viewfinder. It was very exciting, to say the least— especially for the young aspiring cameraman that I was. To this day, that remains my favorite effects sequence from the past twenty years.
Of my own work, a significant landmark was a shot we did for a Martin Scorsese film most people probably don’t even realize has effects work in it. In 1995, Matte World Digital was awarded the effects for Casino – which was very exciting because it was a vote of confidence from a director that 1 admired and respected, and our biggest and most important project to date. Up to that point, we’d shied away from 3D environments because it was so difficult to achieve the level of realism we wanted, compared to what we could achieve with traditional matte painting techniques. We were experimenting with a rendering technique called radiosity,’ which had effects people. It was a very long shot; and it had to be done as a master, all in one. We built a bicycle that rode itself, brooms that were sweeping – it was a huge floor effects sequence, probably one of the toughest I’ve ever done.
The great thing about Roger Rabbit, though, was that it was one of the first films that created a performance and real character-driven work through special effects. It made us put story and character first. We took each character and gave it a personality, and the effects had to reflect that That went on to become a really important thing in other movies-like Casper and Jurassic Park and The Lost World -where the characters actually had to interact with the set, and where the performance led the way.