1

Beasties, Centaurs, and Ghoulies by Keith Davis
	The first people to view Kevin O'Neill's special effects were his grade school pals in East Islip, New York. They also appeared in his films, along with puppets and a model railroad track. "When I was a kid in the '60s I wanted to know how Willis O'Brien made King Kong move," says O'Neill. "I wanted to know how Ray Harryhausen got skeletons to swordfight. So I read everything I could get my hands on about special effects. I also got an old super 8 mm camera and went to work on this model train track we had in our garage. I set up the puppets on the railroad platform and shot them moving, one frame at a time. I also convinced my neighborhood buddies to be in the films. Mostly they just stood around looking up and saying, 'Oh, look at that,' but they didn't seem to mind. Then I'd spend a week or two in my room figuring out how to put it together, and we'd all get together in the basement for a screening." These days the viewers of O'Neill's special effects number well in the millions. It's his California-based company, Flat Earth Productions, that creates the cyclopses and ghoulies and bug-eyed dragons that appear each week in the MCA television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess. The popular shows are currently seen in more than 50 countries. True, it may seem that O'Neill's boyhood home on Long Island is a long way from a land where a trident-toting Neptune rises out of the waves and towers over a cliff, but O'Neill is convinced that his early efforts were critical steps in his development as a creator and supervisor of visual effects. "What I learned from those neighborhood shots was that there are so many little functions that go into making a movie," he says. "If you can stand putting all those little things together, you can come to understand how the bigger functions work. That process weeds out so many people who are just casually motivated. It took a lot of obsession to deal with that, and by the time I got to college, the discipline was there for me."
	1   Table of Contents -- IC Home Page -- Quarterly Home Page