Artist, Inventor, ILM’s Christopher Horvath's career has taken him
from canvas to calculus.
CGSociety :: Artist Profile
11 August 2009, by Barbara Robertson
When Christopher Horvath bounced back to Industrial Light & Magic after working on 'Lord of the Rings' and 'King Kong' at Weta, the studio didn’t exactly have a title that fit the work he’d be doing. “I feel like I’m essentially performing a mad scientist role,” he says. “Fortunately, we have a cover-all title now.”
That title is 'digital artist,' but mad scientist better suits this CG artist, programmer, compositor, Birkham yoga instructor, painter, and breaks/electrohouse DJ. Take, for example, the two feature films released this year that he worked on: 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen' and 'Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince.'
For 'Transformers,' he designed a GPU-based rigid body dynamics system that Cliff Ramshaw in R&D helped build to churn the top of a great pyramid into flying bricks and rubble when Devastator smashed into it.
For 'Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince,' he torched bits and bytes into an amazing 100-foot-tall wall of swirling fire that surrounded Dumbledore, again using the GPU. The system was such hot stuff that SIGGRAPH accepted a technical paper that he wrote with ILM’s Willi Geiger describing the calculus that fueled the fire. It was one of 78 papers accepted from 439 submitted.
And, while he was working on all that, he was painting stylized portraits. This summer, he had an exhibition of oil paintings completed during the past year. One, painted in Russian constructivist style, shows a man in a church holding a power drill. Horvath is never dull.
We caught up with him soon after he had finished 'Transformers' and had decompressed by spending 10 days practicing yoga and enjoying the benefits of Ayurvedic medicine at a health spa in Bali. The first thing we learned was that Horvath had slid into his career on a skateboard.
He was at the University of Illinois in Urbana at the time. It was hot, so he popped into a building near the parking lot where he’d been skateboarding to look for a drinking fountain. “As I entered the building,” he says, “a woman ran towards me, grabbed my hand, and said, ‘You’re late!’ She pulled me along and I went where she pulled me.”
He soon realized that he was in the International Studies building and the woman had led him into a meeting titled, “So you want to study in Australia.” At the end of the meeting, he put his name on a sheet the sponsors handed out, and quickly forgot about the incident.
Nine months later, he got a letter in the mail saying his first semester would start in February. “I was like, well, OK,” he says. He was 17 years old. He landed in Sydney, Australia with enough money from a student loan to cover his expenses for eight months.
“I blew it all in the first three weeks,” he says. “So, I needed to find a job. I got out the yellow pages and called every company with the name ‘graphics,’ in it. I knew I loved computer graphics, but I had no idea what people did with it in a professional context.”
But, he knew what he could do.
From the time he was 13 until he finished high school, he had spent each summer studying painting in a special program that put young students in college classes at Skidmore University in Saratoga Springs, New York. “We had three to five hours of classes and six to eight hours of studio time,” he says. “It was great, but when I came back to high school, art classes felt very strange.”
As a result, he created a kind of self-study art program, a program that took a digital spin in 1992 when two things happened: His high school got a few color Macintoshes and SIGGRAPH came to Chicago. With help from Autodesk’s education maven Laura London, Coco Conn, a media artist from Los Angeles, had spearheaded a learning laboratory called SIGkids where students could play with computers, video, multimedia, LEGO/Logo, digital journal keeping, interactive projects and the Internet. Horvath was one of the SIGKids.
“They were so excited about having kids doing this,” Horvath says. “I did a ton of stuff with Laura and Autodesk after that.” Among that stuff was a trip to the Library of Congress where he helped demonstrate the ways in which grade-school and high-school students used technology.
What did he demonstrate? “Oh, just animation,” he says. “Little shorts. Toy things. We had AutoCAD in our high school shop classes and we also had 3D Studio Version 1.” He also had a copy of RenderMan. “I was painting lion fish and I wanted to add bubbles with refraction,” Horvath says. So, having already written scripts for AutoCAD and 3D Studio, he taught himself how to write RIB files.
Thus in Sydney, when he had spent all his student loan money in three weeks and needed a job, looking for something in computer graphics made sense.
The first place he called did print graphics and although they didn’t have a job for a teenager who knew 3D computer graphics, they let him tour the facility. At the end of the tour, someone called a friend at a video post house and arranged for Horvath to visit. He spent the next two weeks contacting one facility after another.
“Each place said something like, ‘Of course you can’t work here, but call these people,’” Horvath says. “I thought it was cool. What I didn’t know at the time is that each place gave me the names of their competitors and the number of the president or general manager because it would be annoying to them.”
The joke, it turned out, would be on them. The thirty-second studio Horvath called was Garner MacLennan Design. He wrangled a visit and once again heard, “We don’t have anything you can do.” But it was the last place on his list. He didn’t give up.
