There wasn't much suspense in the Visual Effects category at last week's ^ Oscars. The nominees were Hook, for its twinkly, shrinkly Tinkerbell (created by a team at producer George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic shop), Backdraft, for its nifty fire rampage (Industrial Light & Magic) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in part for its liquid-metal cyborg that can "morph" -- change seamlessly, seductively -- into any shape (Industrial Light & Magic). And the Oscar went to . . . Industrial Light & Magic, for T2.
Dennis Muren, senior visual-effects supervisor at ILM, has become a familiar figure on Oscar night, both because this was his seventh Academy Award and because he is a towering gent with lank white hair and a serene face. That picture -- of a modern Merlin holding a gold totem -- is appropriate, for Muren, 45, is a wizard in the movie craft of computer graphics. In the bland ILM barracks in San Rafael, Calif., he and his merry alchemists wave a little wand over their Silicon Graphics VGX 340 terminals, and out comes the magic.
As traditional special-effects experts, Muren and his ILM-makers brought to life some of the most famous icons in movie history, from Darth Vader to E.T. Now he is leading a revolution in moviemaking. ILM has tamed the elements: fire and water are notoriously tough to animate, but the company managed the first convincingly in Backdraft and the second with the slinky pseudopod in The Abyss. An ILM team led by Steve Williams animated -- brought to life, if you will -- the T-1000 creature in T2, which could transform itself from, say, linoleum into a lethal humanoid weapon. "Movie effects have been the same for a hundred years, and they're changing this year," Williams, 30, says with a visionary's lack of modesty. "This is the milestone right here."
Computer graphics as movie art form -- a technical advance that leapfrogs over the wondrous and cumbersome stop-motion puppeteering of such effects geniuses as Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen -- is just a decade old. The Disney film TRON, which took place inside a video game, was the first to explore the new technique. In the Steven Spielberg-produced Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), a computer-generated knight wielding a sword leaped out of a stained-glass window and menaced a priest. Morphing, the big news in special effects, made its debut in Willow (1988): a reclining tiger is smoothly transformed into a sleeping woman.
These days, morphing is everywhere. The swamis at Pacific Data Images -- one of the half a dozen California studios competing with ILM -- devised the | melting pot of faces for Michael Jackson's Black or White. Pacific has also changed a car into a running tiger for Exxon and morphed a man's face into a block for Schick razors. The process can be used to fuse separate takes of a scene or restore damaged film frames.
"Computer graphics," says ILM animator Mark Dippe, "has become an essential design and communication tool. Entertainment is only a small part of it." Hospitals use realistic three-dimensional computer animation to walk doctors through their next operation before they ever pick up a scalpel. The FBI can simulate what a missing child would look like years after a disappearance.