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MillimeterWhat CADA Did Last Summer
May 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Kristinha McCort
Last summer, students at NYU's Center for Advanced Digital Applications had the opportunity to create effects for a Hollywood feature-length film tentatively titled I Know What You Screamed Last Summer. The film's producer, Stephen Nemeth of Rhino Films, came to CADA's "The Making Of a Digital Movie" class as a guest lecturer. After he saw the quality of the students' work (they had already created effects for live-action footage provided by course instructor and ILM technical director Corey Rosen), Nemeth said he would supply additional footage from his film for educational purposes-and possibly use their work in the real deal.
"I thought it was a win-win situation," says Nemeth of the experience. "[Corey Rosen] is from ILM and is overseeing them, they get to see the fruits of their efforts in theaters within six to eight months, and I get my effects done at a cost that I couldn't afford to have had them done at under normal independent-film circumstances."
The students added a swarm of killer bees to back plates of actress Julie Benz. Broken up into teams fashioned after those of ILM's production pipeline, they modeled and animated in Alias|Wavefront's PowerAnimator and Maya and composited in Discreet's Flint (all on SGI O2s). "Normally, at schools, students work in video resolution," says CADA program director and executive producer for the effects shot Peter Bardazzi. "We were working in film resolution, so everything was giant and there were the real-world problems of file management and storage. It was a good learning experience."
Bardazzi, who has his sights set on similar projects involving commercials and on a more ambiguous museum-bound creation that he calls a "digital extravaganza," says he looks forward to future collaborations. For more information on CADA, go to www.scps.nyu.edu/cada."
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