3From there O'Neill was offered a chance to launch a visual effects division at CFI, one of the largest film laboratories in the world. The new division produced the effects for Darkman, with Liam Neeson, as well as for Highlander II. On the basis of that work, other offers started coming in, and O'Neill ended up as the visual effects supervisor for such films as Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Addams Family Values, and Last Action Hero. He was also making the transition from the traditional chemical processes of producing effects to the digitized possibilities offered by high-powered computers and sophisticated software. "The advantage of computer animation over stop-motion is that you don't have to move a model for every frame," he says. "You create key frames, and the computer fills in with in-betweens. You can animate a simple scene very quickly, and you can look at what you're doing as soon as you make that key frame. With stop-motion, you had to wait overnight and hope it turned out all right. If it didn't, you had to start all over." In addition to its creative implications, the computer also offered a business niche, and in 1995 O'Neill and two other special effects veterans, Doug Beswick and Kevin Kutchaver, formed Flat Earth Productions. "The reason we got to do Hercules and Xena is that we can do everything around a desktop platform using Macs and PCs," O'Neill explains. "We can create the models and digitize them in the computer. For example, one of the scripts called for a centaur --- a creature with a horse's body and a human head. A lot of people thought the way to produce the effect was with a model and stop-motion photography and 3D animation, essentially building everything from the ground up. But we found a way to shoot two separate elements, a man and a horse, digitize the images, put them together, and output that image to film." Right now Flat Earth Productions is based in a studio and employs about 30 people. Some work in the California facility, some at their homes in other parts of the country, but they're all connected by the Internet. Supervising and creating the visual effects and helping run the business make for a big job, but O'Neill manages it while maintaining his family life with his wife, Annie, who owns IQUTE, a children's clothing company, and their new daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in October. "Flat Earth's goal," says O'Neill, "is to turn a vendor situation into a production situation. Eventually my partners and I want to produce and direct our own films." In working toward that end, Flat Earth will continue to produce the effects for Xena and Hercules, as well as provide animation for theme parks and branch into feature films. Look for the company's work in Mortal Combat Part II and Blade, with Wesley Snipes. "I went through high school playing basketball and wanting to make effects-oriented movies," O'Neill says. "In college all I wanted to do was make effects movies. And now I'm doing exactly what I've always wanted to do, especially since the company is expanding. I remember back in Ithaca, hanging out and talking about making movies with all those people I went to college with. I don't know where they are now, but I wish them well and hope they're somewhere, like me, doing what they always wanted to do." |
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