I was channel surfing once, an activity that I feel is greatly underappreciated by most (especially the general female population), when I happened upon Spielberg’s classic, JAWS. My son was sitting next to me, wondering why I was clicking past Rugrats and Cat Dog. Throwing caution to the wind, I thought it would be a perfect time to introduce him to the nerve-wracking cinematic classic, the groundbreaking nail biting thriller of my youth. This was about ten years ago so my boy was maybe nine (he’s a sophomore in college now). The film was right at the scene where the shark attacks Captain Quint’s boat, and based on my kid’s bland reaction, I nearly wanted to check his pulse. “Hey! Isn’t that scary?” I watched, flashback terror gripping me as the robotic shark thrashed with the doomed Orca in its massive jaws. “Aren’t you scared?” He looked at me and said, “When’s dinner?”
Then I heard the garage door open and there appeared my daughter, who was 7 at the time. I tried to shield her from the screen as Bruce, the name given to th mechanical shark, chomped down on Robert Shaw’s character, blood spurting from his mouth. Too late! “Oh my god!” she screamed, her eyes bugged out like some work by Edvard Munch. She’d be traumatized, she’d be frightened forever of going in the water… “That shark is SOOO fake!”
Fake? What’dya mean fake!
I remember being in a theater when JAWS opened and being terrified. The kid next to me jerked backward so violently when the head fell out of the submerged boat wreckage that he broke his elbow. He cried quietly but didn’t go to the doctor until after the movie. Special effects have come so far and really, it’s all relative. My father, now 87, once told me that Frankenstein was the scariest movie he’d ever seen. To this day he won’t watch it.
Frankentsein? With Lon Chaney, Jr? All due respect, Pop, but you could see the plaster on his forehead.
Still, when that’s all you’ve seen, you can be fooled and frightened with ease. Indigo Studios, a leading 3D graphics studio in Atlanta has created some killer special effects that would’ve blown my father’s mind when he was a teenager. Heck, what am I saying; they would’ve made me hide under the covers, too (I still can’t watch The Exorcist if I’m home by myself). Today Indigo Studios is able to take data or create it to fashion everything from monsters and cows to tornados and tomatoes.
Some of the projects we receive from clients come replete with manufacturing data that we convert before working our magic on. But what do you do when your client asks you to make a shark? Well, we size up the situation and either photograph one (scary!) or go the preferable route, which is to retouch an existing or original shot. If that doesn’t work, we create it in CGI.
Indigo Studios, the leading 3D graphics studio in Atlanta has a revolving involvement in Discovery’s Shark Week. Indigo has done everything from designing and building a dorsal fin magazine insert to a virtual Great White’s face threatening to break through a billboard. It’s one of the main reasons we’re not only the leading 3D graphics studio in Atlanta but are building that same reputation nationwide.
It will be fun to see what the future holds for moviegoers years from now. One thing time and technology won’t ever change is peoples’ thirst to be entertained.