Digital Effects Supervisor Dave Smith has an eagle eye for the art,
the technical and the beautiful.
CGSociety :: Artist Profile
21 October 2008, by Barbara Robertson
Here’s how Dave Smith, digital effects supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks for 'Eagle Eye,' first learned he’d made the grade at a visual effects studio. The time is approximately 1992. The place, Boss Film in Los Angeles. The job: Create a golden lion that walks through Las Vegas, sits down, and turns into the MGM Grand for a commercial advertising the hotel’s opening. The visual effects supervisor: Jim Rygiel, who would later win three Oscars for 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy.
“I was called into a meeting and Jim said, ‘There are seven of us going to work on shots,’” Smith remembers. “I looked around the room and counted. There were seven of us in the room. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to work on shots.’”
Boss Film had hired the recent San Diego State graduate a year earlier as a runner. And even though Smith had a degree in from the film school, that’s what he did – drove a car around Los Angeles picking up lunches, mechanical parts, and anything else the effects studio needed. He became used to doing lots of things he'd never done before.
“I had started school as an electrical engineering major,” he says. “That was too technical so I switched to graphic design. But, that was too artistic – this was 1986, before people were using computers much for graphic arts. So, I switched to filmmaking, because it was a nice mix of technical, creative and artistic.”
'Eagle Eye'
Narnia.'Disney Enterprises Inc. & Walden Media LLC. All rights reserved.'
After graduation, Smith headed to Los Angeles, poked around a local university’s job boards, and saw the ad for a runner at Boss Film. “They were doing optical effects,” he says. “It seemed interesting – technical and artistic.” Little did he know he’d landed a job in a studio headed by multiple award-winning visual effects pioneer Richard Edlund, now an American Academy of Arts and Sciences governor for the visual effects branch.
“There was so much neat stuff going on, I tried to do more than run around town,” Smith says. “This was right about when computer graphics were first being used and it seemed like some of the departments were struggling, so I tried to have foresight. I thought, if they can do little bits of things in the computer, I bet that soon, they’ll be doing everything in the computer.”
So, he decided to learn about computer graphics. When he told Rygiel that he knew how to use a Macintosh, Rygiel put him to work scanning textures. That wasn’t enough. In addition to running around town and scanning textures, Smith started coming to work early, staying late, and working on weekends to learn as much as he could. Soon, he was doing enough work on the computer to stop running. And then, he found himself on seven-member crew for the MGM Grand commercial.
“Jim had me help animate the lion,” Smith says. “I had never animated before. But, fortunately, some great people showed me the ropes. I took off from there.”
At Boss, Smith worked on 'Outbreak,' 'Species,' and 'Waterworld.' “That was back when we’d do two shots over a couple of months,” he says. “So, I was able to get my feet wet, and get experienced and established in computer graphics when it was just getting going. We were doing groundbreaking stuff at a slow pace.”
From Boss Film, he moved to Warner Digital where he worked on shots for 'Mars Attacks,' and from Warner Digital to Imageworks. By then, people working in computer graphics and visual effects had begun to specialize and Smith picked his niche: technical director.
Beowulf. Paramount Pictures and Shangri-La Entertainment LLC. All rights reserved.
