Scenes from Goldcrest's new sci-fi feature, Space Truckers are screening at the Laemmle Monica Screen 4 at 11 am. The film, directed by Stuart Gordon, is a futuristic thriller starring Dennis Hopper and Stephen Dorff.
State of the art visual effects were created in a specially commissioned studio in Ireland and at Electric Image in London. Visual Special Effects Supervisors Brian Johnson (The Empire Strikes Back, Alien) and Paul Gentry (Total Recall, Terminator 2) have overseen a complex schedule involving model work, computer graphics and digital compositing.
They were assisted in London by Digital Special Effects Producers Jay Williams and Paul Docherty who co-ordinated their work through ISDN telephone link using video image compression.
One of the most spectacular items in Space Truckers is the vast pirate spaceship Regalia. This was created using silicon graphics with Wavefront Explore software. "The decision to create Regalia in the computer was taken to allow a huge amount of detail on the craft and flexibility in its use", says Jay Williams. "I don't want to give the plot away but certain things can happen to a model only once. With a computer generated model, we can retrieve the various elements and try different ways of doing things".
Visual elements from several sources were conformed on Discreet Logic Inferno, a multi layer digital composite edit facility. "We needed this machine to give us the kind of resolution a feature film requires", says Williams. "The 600 lines which is sufficient for TV would not have been enough for the kind of spectacle we are achieving here".
