"What Dreams May Come", a production in which the Digital Domain and Mass Illusions, both from the USA, were the leading participants, in addition to POP, Shadowcaster, Giant Killer Robots, Mobility and Lunarfish, tells the story of life after the death of Chris (Robin Williams). In the "Painter's Sequence" entered for the Prix Ars Electronica, the real landscape is gradually transformed into a painting from the 19th century, in which the actor moves. In addition to complex 2D and 3D software, specially developed software was used in combination with a hybrid technology (Motion Paint).

It's hard visualizing the Afterlife, even with the world's master artists guiding the way. Bringing director Vincent Ward's inspired vision to life on screen in What Dreams May Come demanded the utmost from several effects houses, including Mass.illusions, Pacific Ocean Post (POP), Digital Domain, Illusion Arts, CIS, and Cinema Production Services, Inc.

Visual Effects Producer/Supervisor Ellen M. Somers was formerly Boss Film's Head of Pro duction for eight years (where she originally met Ward on the ill-fated Alien3) and Warner Digital's VP Head of Production. Somers was actually planning to take some time off after the demise of Warner Digital when Dreams' producer, Interscope Pictures, per suad ed her to come in on the production side in March 1997 and make an evaluation of the effects that would be needed to complete the film.

Somers' persistence would be a key ingredient in the overall success of What Dreams May Come's visuals. The entire effects package had already been award ed to Mass.illusions (Judge Dredd), which was being bankrolled by troubled mini-major Cinergi. But in September 1997, on the eve of production, Cinergi was sold to Disney and backed out of Mass.illusions. Suddenly, Somers was in the uniquely difficult posi tion of having to bring in other effects houses to save the picture before cameras had started rolling!

Somers attempted to split the work up along biblical lines. POP took over 118 shots spanning the Victorian landscapes of "Marie's World" and "Bridge City", the astounding "Venetian Library", and the ship grave yard and inverted cathedral. The tabletop miniatures for the hellish environments were built by Mike Joyce's Cinema Production Service, Inc. Digital Domain took on 54 shots ranging from character animation to reconstructing an entire poppy-laden landscape.

Mass.illusions' contribution would be visualizing 99% of the "Painted World", some 58 shots depicting a wild, floral landscape comprised of running pigment, which is Chris Neilson's introduction to the Afterlife. It was critical that this sequence evoked a strong response, or audiences would tune out of the film before its emotional one-two punch could ever connect. Ward, who had trained as a painter, intuited that the Afterlife should be both familiar and alien, and drew inspiration from the German Romanticists, especially the lush imagery of Casper David Friedrich.

For three months before filming began, visual re searchers delved into countless art libraries search ing for illustrations in the vein of the images Ward had in mind. Ultimately, Friedrich and other 19th century masters helped define and communicate Ward's vision to a whole range of artisans, from production designer Eugenio Vanetti to cinemato grapher Eduardo Serra and dozens of visual effects artists.

"We actually hired Josh Rosen as the Art Director for Mass.illusions and installed him in that community. Although all the people working on the project at Mass.illusions, even the software people, were paint ers themselves, Josh's art direction had that certain feel we were looking for. Josh was an amazing find-he was a software developer we found on sabbatical in Italy doing illustrative work for a book, and on the side, he was off painting frescoes, you know? We also hired Sid Dutton of Illusion Arts and Michael Lloyd to do matte paint ings. And basically, we went to POP because there were certain artists there that I knew would match Vincent's criteria, like Deak Ferrand, who became an incredibly instrumental person on the film. So find ing the right type of personnel was a bit like finding a needle in a haystack."

Somers' support itself may have played a key role in keeping Mass.illusions' team-including Visual Effects Supervisors Joel Hyneck and Nicholas Brooks, line producer Donna Langston and software creators Pierre Jasmin and Pete Litwinowitcz-on the project long enough to prove that their untested strategy for the Painted World's effects would work. Others had posited a more traditional approach involving shooting the actors against greenscreen and comp ing them into a digital landscape created via multi-plane or 3-D matte paintings, which might have worked, but would not have given Ward the freedom he demanded and the sense of reality he desperately sought.

Having discarded motion control and greenscreen while Ward and cinematographer Eduardo Serra planned complex and very fluid camera moves in Montana's Glacier National Park, Somers' team relied on traditional tracking and Lidar surveys of the loca tion to recreate camera motion and locate objects so the shots could later be immersed in running pig ment. Lidar is basically a radar survey, typically used in building dams and so on, which gave us 'a burst' -or cloud-of points, resulting in a 3-D wireframe of the landscape. Then by doing a traditional survey of the markers we placed on location, we could line up this wire frame with the shot and basically rec reate both camera move and topography."

Amazingly, every single shot in the "Painted World" began as a photographic plate, yet ended up looking like it had been freshly hand-painted by a 19th century master. But since Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding Jr. had to remain unretouched, they were painstakingly extracted from every shot. Then a new edge-detection system created by Mass.illusion and dubbed "machine vision" was applied to the now clean plates to further deconstruct each shot into between fifteen and thirty maps, which were then treated with particle systems brushstrokes to create the "Painted World" effect. But applying dripping, swirling paint to thousands of flowers and leaves demanded both procedural and manual control.

Then Mass.illusions built a toolkit of a number of brushstrokes, so they could control the color, separation, thickness and dynamics of the paint-strokes themselves through certain handles, which allowed them to create paint rolling down blades of grass in certain shots. The amazing thing about this process is that we could have a crane on a 30' camera track, moving in every possible axis known to the cinematographic man, and then basically apply brush strokes to every leaf and every detail in that scene!

Digital Domain's Visual Effects Supervisor Kevin Mack created the "Painted World's" only indigenous species, the "Painted Bird", as a 3-D animated element which was supplied to Mass.illusions for composit ing. DD handled an additional 54 shots, including full landscape reconstruction on the sequence in which Chris flies through a field of poppies, and adding a ghostly blur to Cuba Gooding Jr. But their "main event scene," according to Somers, "was the Autumn Tree, which blows apart as Chris connects with Annie and realizes things are horribly wrong." The "Autumn Tree" wasn't constructed as a model, it was actually grown organically using a series of algorithms in what's called an L system.

The remarkable imagery of What Dreams May Come is a testament to the determination of a small group of filmmakers and effects artists to convincingly portray paradise and damnation on celluloid. It also represents a synthesis between two very different artforms. "One thing the filmmaker and the painter have in common is they're trying to describe the world," Ward concludes. "I would like to think that this film has actually opened another perceptual way for artists to view the world and a completely different range of options of how to describe it. I hope ultimately that artists will choose to work in live-action film paintings-not matte paintings-and perhaps we have initiated that.