How Adelaide’s Rising Sun Pictures is making the magic happen
Cutting-edge artists working at an Australian visual effects company on some of the world’s biggest film productions are out in public for the first time for a groundbreaking project.
It is somewhat ironic that the extraordinary creatives at Australia’s Rising Sun Pictures spend thousands of hours painstakingly working on some of the most famous and awarded scenes in recent cinema history yet are considered most successful when the audience doesn’t notice their handiwork.
Katniss’s flaming fire dress in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire? Rising Sun Pictures. The memorable – and Academy Award-winning – Pentagon kitchen scene in X Men: Days of Future Past with its time-bending, crystal-clear, slow-motion raindrop, bullet and food-strewn sequence? Rising Sun Pictures again. The arresting horn headdress proudly worn by Marvel Studio’s villainous Hela as she battles the Valkyries on their flying winged creatures in Thor: Ragnarok? Yep, you guessed it: all of it Rising Sun Pictures.
But while these scenes and their protagonists may be famous (think Jennifer Lawrence, Hugh Jackman and Cate Blanchett), pulling in billions of dollars at the international box office, chances are no one has heard of Rising Sun Pictures (RSP), the Adelaide-based studio that is well and truly punching above its weight.
Now in its 26th year of operation, RSP was born during a session at Adelaide’s Rising Sun Inn in 1995 when colleagues Tony Clark, Wayne Lewis, Gail Fuller and Steve Roberts found themselves out of work after working for a filmmaking company.
“It was right at the beginning of computer graphics coming back big time as a special effects tool in filmmaking,” says Clark, a former ABC cameraman whose work on the documentary series Great Wonders of the World earned him an Emmy award. “We’d been terminated and had to find our own way and foolishly thought we’d make a company ourselves and it would be great and we’d aim to work on big international movies.”
Initially the filmmaking seemed like a pipedream, and the group found themselves working instead on TV commercials and website design in the early days of the internet, but before long they began to move into feature film visual effects. “We got noticed by someone in the US who was in Australia filming Red Planet in 1999, so we got a tiny little role on that, which opened the door to a range of relationships overseas. We invested in keeping those relationships alive and it went on from there,” Clark says.
To date the company has worked on more than 150 film and television productions ranging from the Harry Potter films to The Lord of the Rings, Mortal Kombat, Peter Rabbit, The Great Gatsby and Pirates of the Caribbean. The powerful special effects achieved in the aforementioned films need no explanation. Deconstructing exactly what visual special effects do and how they come together isn’t so straightforward.
“RSP does creative work for filmmakers around the world working on big films for Marvel and Disney,” begins Clark. Yes, but what do they actually do? “Aha! Well that’s the tricky bit,” he laughs. “We do special, brand new things no one’s ever seen.”
Put another way, the team at RSP helps a filmmaker achieve their vision for a film that is typically too fantastical, complex or dangerous to film in real life, building a digital environment that is created around the filmed content to realise the astonishing magic in Harry Potter or convincingly bring to life each silken hair follicle covering the titular all-speaking, web-spinning spider in Charlotte’s Web.
What began as four people has now grown to a staff of 210, anticipated to be 250 by year’s end, bringing with them a mixture of expertise as mathematicians, physicists, artists and makers. “Typically people come into this area because they’re artistic, they’re driven, somewhere in the line of theoretical and mathematical, and deeply creative,” Clark says.
The effects they create are big, bold and spectacular, often involving explosions, fire, water and ice, but the craft itself is painstakingly slow requiring hour upon hour working on minute details invisible to the untrained eye. Clark cites the X Men: Days of Future Past kitchen scene, a time warp sequence in which Quicksilver (Evan Peters) displays his hyper-speed abilities as he runs horizontally along the kitchen walls and time slows to a near-stop.
“Everything you’re seeing as he runs around that room is made in computer graphics,” Clark says. “Someone has built a system that makes all that stuff fly, makes the tiles smash, the water droplets get smashed by bullets going through them, the spaghetti and fruit each look right. It’s an amazing scene that would have consumed a couple of person years of time to create over a three-month period. That’s what people come to us for because they couldn’t possibly film that.”
RSP is proud to note that in the often project-based world of VFX many of its artists and producers have remained with the company for years, some of them decades. Today RSP is part of a thriving community working in digital media and special effects in Australia: think Sydney’s Animal Logic (whose work on Happy Feet contributed to the Oscar for Best Animated Feature), Iloura in Melbourne and ILM (Industrial Light & Magic).
“Australians were very early starters in computer graphics, which started to get legs globally in the early ’90s,” says Clark, highlighting the early complex digital logos of television channels including the ABC and Channel 9 as examples of cutting-edge computer graphics coding dating back to the 1980s. “There’s quite a heritage of computer graphics. I think Australians are innovators because of our distance from major markets and our determination not to let that be an impediment. We always have to be a bit clever because of an absence of abundance and solutions, that old thing of being able to make anything from barbed wire and string.”
Australians have also been responsible for inventing some of what are now considered universal, mainstream tools for making computer graphics and visual effects such as Flame, worked on by Animal Logic; and cineSing, a tool designed by RSP that enables creatives in Australia and other parts of the world to work together digitally in real time.
Now a handful of those cutting-edge artists are preparing to step out in public for the first time for a groundbreaking project for Illuminate Adelaide. Opening on July 16, the inaugural festival is a citywide celebration of art, light, music and future technology. Run by co-founders and creative directors Rachael Azzopardi, whose work has taken her from the Melbourne Commonwealth Games to the Sydney Theatre Company and Chunky Move; and Mona Foma’s founding executive director Lee Cumberlidge, the 16-day festival is a mixture of art and light sculptures, virtual reality films, contemporary and classical music, talks program and exhibitions.
Among the 150 installations, performances and events is Emergent Horizons, an immersive light, animation and sound installation projected on to a series of buildings in the new technology precinct Lot Fourteen. Emergent Horizons is the brainchild of a group called Pixel Ninjas, a core team of eight from a working group of 22 made up of RSP creatives and independent artists from Adelaide and interstate featuring musician Roger Gonzalez, RSP’s Louis Dunlevy and artist Premamurti Paetsch. The project came about following an approach from Illuminate Adelaide to design their own event involving digital light and sound. Many of them, including RSP visual effects artist Kate Bernauer, jumped at the chance to experiment with the skills and tools they’d normally be using to fulfil a film director’s brief.
“It was something slightly different to anything anyone had ever done before, and the concept of making it interactive was one of the challenges,” Bernauer says.
Emergent Horizon’s Brisbane-based project manager Rangi Sutton says the group welcomed the chance to work together on an independent project. “It’s an experiment, an artistic expression where we’re not ultimately having to follow a director’s vision; and a chance for us to create a new medium.” Sutton is referring to projection mapping, the tools the team will use to project the images onto the building’s surface to achieve the effects of melting or liquid or fire, something that is proving more challenging to the team than working on a computer screen.
While festivals like Vivid in Sydney and Field of Light at Uluru have long been presenting multifaceted light projections, Emergent Horizons boasts a more interactive, immersive element that uses depth and visual sensors so an onlooker can personally interact with and alter the projections. Ten cameras will project the montage of artistic clips on a five-minute loop across the five surfaces.
“One of those surfaces we’re integrating with has an interactive component so audience members can stand in front of a camera that will track their motion and skeleton, affecting what’s playing out on the wall,” Sutton says. “It’s another interesting component for the crew, because we don’t get to do that with feature films. We’re also playing with the shape of the building so things will come in and out of the windows. It’s a bit of an artistic experiment, we’re hoping to provide a spectacle but also learn something ourselves.”
So busy are the team at RSP that a number of the artists who began working on Emergent Horizons have had to withdraw to meet their international production deadlines. These days the company is owned by FuseFX, a private equity funded company headquartered in Los Angeles, a deal that has so far proved effective according to Clark. “They’ve said they want to enable us to be a better version of what we are now, so it’s been really positive.”
If the current and future work slate is anything to go by, the pace isn’t about to let up. RSP has recently finished working on Black Widow with Scarlett Johansson and the Disney feature Jungle Cruise starring “the Rock”; and is currently involved with five Marvel films and series (rumoured to include Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, although you won’t hear that from Clark who is always bound by NDAs); the locally-shot original series The Tourist from the UK production team behind the hit series Fleabag; two series for Amazon, a Netflix film and a Netflix series.
While Clark is the first to acknowledge the longstanding support of the South Australian government in its commitment to making Adelaide the centre of high technology computer graphic film production, he is at pains to point out a company lives and dies by its reputation and the people responsible for that.
“It’s a fairly simple formula of doing good creative work and valuing our teams here because ultimately businesses like these are just about assembling great creative talents,” he says. He cites Thor Ragnarok and the Valkyrie flashback scene that took nearly 200 RSP artists to create, an example of a film that was offered to them following their work on X-Men.
“They came to us on the back of our reputation. Our tagline is ‘making memorable moments’ and this is one of those. We get these opportunities to do really complex, highly detailed and really sophisticated pieces of work. It is an amazing privilege.”
Illuminate Adelaide runs at various locations in Adelaide from July 15-August 1.
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