IT's PARANORMAL TONIGHT - Kevin Kutchaver - It's Paranormal Tonight!

Episode Transcript
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(01:03):
From Hollywood Paranormal Tonight. I'm MarkSummers and now here's your host, Dan
Orrari. Hello everyone, thank youfor joining us. This is live from
Hollywood. It's Paranormal Tonight. Actuallyit's live from beautiful downtown Beverly Hills.

(01:25):
Don't tell anybody, but this isreally live for beautiful downtown Beverly Hills.
My name is Dan Harari. Iam the host of Paranormal Tonight. And
tonight we have a very special guestand a longtime friend of mine, and
I'll introduce him in a minute beforewe do. Thank you all for watching

(01:46):
these last few weeks. I've beengetting a lot of nice fan mail and
I really appreciate it. For thoseof you who don't know me, I've
been a Hollywood publicist for many,many years and I've represented a lot of
films and TV shows, plays,visual effects artists, graphic design people,

(02:07):
writers, authors, comedians, allkinds of wonderful things. I've had a
really nice career, very grateful.I'm also an author. I have written
two books which are both on Amazon, Flirting with Fame, which is right
behind me. Here is my historyof my career in Hollywood, and I
have a lot of fun photos ofthe in me with people like Jerry Seinfeld

(02:28):
and Mel Brooks and Steven Spielberg.Check that one out. And if you
like science fiction novels about benevolent aliens, I may be the only person recently
who's written a benevolent alien book.That book is called After They Came.
Right here, and because of thesuccess of After They Came, I was
very fortunate to be friends Stephen Bassett, who was a leading Hollywood sorry,

(02:53):
a leading disclosure advocate out of Washington, d C. And Steven and I
recently launched the Hollywood Disclosure Alliance andwe are now taking donations. We are
a five oh one C three nonprofitorganization. We are marrying UFO researchers and
experiencers with Hollywood producers and storytellers.It's a wonderful organization. I'm blessed to

(03:17):
be the chairman. We have twohundred members now around the world. Please
check it out and if you canconsider please making a donation. Hollywood Disclosurealliance
dot org. Hollywood Disclosure Alliance dotorg. Thank you to my daughter Ajulie
Harari, who is always watching myshow. She's my biggest fan and I

(03:39):
am her biggest fan. She helpedme to create the donation page on Hollywood
Disclosure Alliance dot org. Okay,moving on. My guest tonight is a
friend of mine. I've known himfor quite some time, and now I'm
going to read his little bio,So here we go. Kevin koch Chaver
was born in New Jersey in Junenineteen fifty seven, exactly one year and

(04:03):
two days after me. I wasalso born in New Jersey. For most
of the past forty years, Kevinhas been one of Hollywood's most in demand
visual effects artists, working on countlessfeature films and TV series. Kevin refers
to himself as the Vaudevillian of visualeffects, which I think is just very

(04:27):
fun. Early in his career,Kevin was involved in creating, designing,
and producing visual effects for many manyblockbuster motion pictures, including Ready for This
List, You Guys, Return ofthe Jedi, Star Trek six, The
Undiscovered Country, Ghostbusters two, bothAdams Family movies, All three RoboCop movies,

(04:54):
Blade, and the comic book inspiredhell Boy. Those are just some
of his film projects. Kevin wasone of Hollywood's leading originators of desktop visual
effects for TV shows when he workedon Babylon five, and shortly after that
he became one of the co foundersof Flat Earth Productions, which created and

(05:16):
produced six years worth of visual effectsfor two of the biggest ever syndicated TV
series in history, Hercules the LegendaryJourneys and Zena Warrior Princess. I had
the good fortune to be the publicistfor Flat Earth Productions way back in nineteen
ninety six. In fact, Kevinand his company were the very first clients

(05:41):
I ever had when I launched byAsbury pr Agency, but way back in
nineteen ninety six, so Kevin andI go back quite quite some time.
A two thousand and five Emmy Awardwinner for Outstanding Visual Effects for his work
on the TV show Lost, Someof kevin other film and TV projects have
included Alias Scooby Doo and Supergirl.Kevin recently wrapped up being the senior visual

(06:09):
effects artist for the Warner Brothers TVhit shows The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow
and twenty years ago. This yeartwo thousand and four, he co founded
his own production company called Sheer Forceof Will so he could develop his own
film and TV projects. Kevin isa longtime member of the Motion Picture Academy,

(06:30):
the Television Academy, and the VisualEffects Society. He has been married
to Kathy Zelenski, an animator forDisney DreamWorks and The Simpsons, for thirty
five years, and I don't knowhow she's put up with him all that
time. We'll get to that questionin a few minutes. Kevin and Katy
have two children. And I amnow very happy and delighted to bring in

(06:55):
my dear friend Kevin koutchever Race.So let's bring him in, mad Arian.
It's been really great. Thank you, good night, Thank you.
The way to it I did.Don't worry man. Good Luckily my voice
came back a couple of days agofrom whatever horrible flu is going around.

(07:16):
Okay, well, you look good, you sound good. I got my
tea, You got me two yearold set. Let's rock and roll for
an hour. Are you ready?I'm going to grill you. This is
I'm ready to choose the tea.This is Kevin Goode, this is your
life. So I hope you're preparedby fred. Well, hopefully, like
I said, hopefully, stills areon the way. Uh. I had
a glitch on my end because Iwasn't being computer compliant. But hopefully we'll

(07:42):
solve that, but there's still alot to talk about. Sure. Absolutely,
Okay, So my first question foryou is, you know, had
it too nice? I was goingto say nice Jewish boys, but you're
not to I had a nice twonice boys from New Jersey end up in
Hollywood. You know, give usa quick overview of your childhood growing up
and you know how to get intovisual effects well. As a kid,

(08:05):
I started off by like a lotof kids then people that are in the
business, watching the Universal Monster movies. I mean they were great. Every
time they were on. We wouldwatch them every Easter. King Kong would
show twice a day on w pi X from New York, and King

(08:26):
Kong was the most fascinating thing tome. And really that's the first interest
I had in getting into whatever theheck stop motion was. I mean,
there was no way to there wereno schools, there was nothing. So
I was into that. And ata certain point, neighbors of mine,
they had a cousin of theirs visitand that guy was named Peter Kuran,

(08:48):
and we became friends as kids andstarted making selling movies together. And he
was like a year ahead of me. So he was doing things that I'm
like. I was trying to figureout how to do what he was doing,
and he had it figured out,so we you know, it was
really kind of a great, agreat friendship just in terms of making stuff

(09:09):
too, But yeah, we gotalong famously. Eventually, I went to
school School of Visual Arts in NewYork City for photography. Pete ended up
going to cal Arts for the ExperimentalFilm department, and he kept trying to
get me to come out to calArts. I was kind of into what

(09:30):
I was doing in New York Cityand I was working as an assistant of
fashion photographers. But at a certainpoint Pete ended up with the job.
They awarded all of the lightsabers forJedi to his company because he figured out
how to get a green lightsaber ona blown out desert background, and he
said, hey, you want tocome out and work on this movie.

(09:54):
I was getting tired of what Iwas doing. I had finished school,
I graduated college, and I thought, you man, fashion business just isn't
really for me. So and Ifigured a cameras a camera. So I
just made the change and I cameout and I stayed. I lived on
the floor of Pete's apartment for acouple of weeks until I found another apartment
that I could crash and to changemy careers. Then that's great. Did

(10:20):
Peter know his wife ben Jackie?She was Yeah, at the time,
she was basically running a VCES bookkeepingand kind of doing all the secretarial work
and financial work and stuff like nineteen. I started like nineteen eighty two.
So they go, they go wayway back. I'm going to have Peter
on my show a month from now, so yeah, I know Peter as

(10:43):
well. So you got started inHollywood in eighty two and your first project
was Return of the Jedi. That'spretty good, right, Yeah, it
was. It was a Return ofthe Jedi, just animating, animating and
roding lightsabers at the same time workingon Dreamscape, which he had in house
also. So there's this big budgetmovie and this very kind of small,

(11:07):
little low budget movie, and itwas interesting to just be able to put
a foot in each world and yourealize, hey, I'm doing the same
thing for both of these movies.You know, what can I take from
the big movies and slowly learn howto move into the smaller movies is what
my goal was. But You gotto remember this was back when like a

(11:30):
crew was maybe like ten people,you know, for these small kind of
smaller effect shops. There was nocottage industry of visual effects yet. I
mean there were a little small companiespopping up because of the original Star Wars,
but there certainly were no schools.You had to sit there and figure
out how to do stuff. Imean, it was really an inventive time
of visual effects. You had tokind of figure out how to solve what

(11:56):
the movie needed, which was fun. That's good that one second place race?
Can you put up slide number onefrom me, which was the Return
of the Jedi. There we go, So, Kevin, any fun any
funny stories, anything interesting that youcould share. The very first thing I
did when I came back to Californiaworked on The first thing we did was

(12:16):
the trailer for Revenge of the Jedi. We were animated lightsabers for the trailer
for the Skiff. It was thefirst stuff that I'd seen from this movie
and it was really cool. Andthen I had a four x eight piece
of like masonite or or plywood thatI drilled holes at every animation field mark

(12:37):
so I could do I could comeup with a stock library repeat of lens
flares, and I was photographing lensflares but doing time exposures, possibly for
the lightsaber hits. We sent themup to il M. I wish I
had kept a note because the noteback from ILM said everybody loves these except
George. So so they did.But I looked like the operation was a

(13:01):
success. But the patient died rightexactly. The VFX artist was sent back
to New Jersey. Well, Kevin, what's interesting is you worked on Revenge
of the Jedi, which was theoriginal title of Return of the Jedi.
Well, actually I worked on BlueHarvest at that time. I think I
still have a Blue Harvest. Wasthat? The was that the Jedi won

(13:22):
Blue Harvest. Now I'm getting confused. They had a fake name because they
didn't want to get stoked when theywhen people found out they were filming a
Star Wars movie on location, sothey always had a a bogus name.
After the first movie, they startedto come up with fake names for the
production. So I think I'm prettysure my cruise shirt was that, and
it might have been. I thinkBlue Harvest was the Jedi name. I

(13:45):
see, I got you, Okay, in my book, I have a
funny story about Return of the Jedi. I just remembered this. I was
working up at American Film Institute atthe time that came out, and I
used to steal. I was anassistant to the guy who ran the film
school. Okay, he used toget Academy movie screening passes for all the

(14:11):
all the movies to a beautiful Academytheater in Wilson, Bolivar. I was
Penny. I was dating by nowx, So I thought I was dating
my girlfriend Kim, and I hadno money and I was stealing stole all
of my buses passes. So Iwas seeing every every movie there was,
and I'm sitting with every famous personyou could think of, right, So
I stole that pass and actually mymother came out for that time. So

(14:33):
I took my mother to the Academytheater and we're watching Jedi, and sitting
right behind us was Harrison Ford,you know. And then so my mother
looked and then she looked at me. She goes, oh, that seems
to be a nice looking a manor a nice looking fellow or something,
and Iverson already goes, thanks lady, you know. So she had no

(14:54):
idea. She didn't know who hewas. Well, yeah, well I
know. It's it was fun tosee Jedi in the theater. It was
my first big movie experience because youknow, when I had a spoiler when
Darth Vader throws the Emperor down thatbig nuclear toilet or whatever, that tunnel
was right. I mean, itwas like the Beatles landed the the the

(15:18):
I saw at the Westwood Man's Theaterand it was the The audience was just
like you couldn't hear yourself over thatover the roar of people just applauding that.
I mean, it was really It'slike, man, I want to
stay in this business. Is prettyfun. That's awesome. That's great.
Okay, let's move on a raceSlade number two. Please, let's here

(15:43):
we go. So, Kevin,you worked on all three Robocops. Yes,
tell us some stuff about that one. It was interesting because we were
working on the film once again,I was working VCE through P and you
know, once again it's like Robovision. Pete. Pete as a specific talent

(16:06):
for doing kind of art direction anddesign on the optical printer, so we
were in the art department would comeup with ideas and like stuff, graphics
and whatnot, and Pete was startedto put that all that stuff together in
a you know what it would benow digital composing, but then it's like
in the optical printer by layering allof these elements. So, but everything

(16:30):
was more difficult back then. Graphicswere basically just ink lines on cells painted
with black tape and stripped up likegraphics or letters were. Actually they used
to be something called then maybe they'restill there called letter set, which were
transfer letters that you had to basicallylike peel off and we put them on
cells, photographed them on high confilm. You got the reverse, you

(16:53):
got clear letters on black. Petewould put them in the printer double exposed.
Man, it was a really tediousprocess and we would do all of
these pieces and Pete would then kindof orchestrate the timing on everything and through
tests figure out what was working andwhat was not, and you know,
all based on what the script said. So most of the first movie was

(17:15):
all the robovision stuff and the targetingwhen he's shooting criminals, and you know,
it's the best part of Roebook thefirst Robot Cop was realizing that this
movie was really like something different.It seemed important, and also working on
it over and over again as wetried, not us, but as they

(17:37):
tried to get it away from gettingan X rating because it was just massively
violent and it kept getting the NPAkept throwing it back, you know,
and they had to keep doing littletrims and stuff. But it was like
every week it was like it isdid they make it? Nope? That
shot where the guy gets shot throughthe eyeball with the sniper rifle, that's

(17:59):
got to go. So stuff likethat. Well, were you on the
set for RoboCop. No, mostof the time. I was at VCE
at the beginning. I was ina really dark room with an animation stand
and a slowly filling ashtray. Sowere you Were you smoking? Then?
You're not a smoker. You werea smoker? Oh? I didn't know.

(18:21):
Yeah it was cigarettes. Yeah,I got it, no problem.
Race. Do we have Kevin's otherstuff we do? Oh? Yeah?
Can you uploaded the last of fiveand seventy six images? That sounds like

(18:41):
Kevin? Do you see anything upthere for RoboCop under our? I guess
it would be under our let's seethat we have. Yeah, there's robo
Cop one, two and three.I think I have a picture of each
thing. There we go. That'sthe first RoboCop. That's the targeting I
was talking about, where it's basicallyjust graphics and roto that's photographed on Haikon

(19:03):
stock to give you this kind ofblack and white graphic the background. Pete
offset the photography by moving it hasa mat of pixel lines. One set
would move to the left and thenthe opposite set of lines would move the
image to the right, and thatgave you that kind of fake aliasing like

(19:26):
the TV screen would back then,and it was a nice way of getting
a TV effect on had a filmAnd like I said, Pete was really
kind of great at figuring these thingsout. Should we do RoboCop two?
There we go? What have wegot here? I admitted a lot of
electricity all through RoboCop to most mostlyamong the other things I did, but

(19:49):
this is a big electricity show andI had fun. This is one of
the things that I really kind offound I had a kind of a knack
for and really enjoyed animating so samedeal paper pencil animating this and drawing as
a frame at of time over roughdrawings of the photography. Then photograph it

(20:11):
on black and white high con stock, and then it gets optically printed.
He puts a glow on the stuff. You said, it's a it's kind
of a tough process because you haveto animate all of the frames, then
you have to photograph them, thenyou have to develop them. Then they
got to go to the optical printer, and then you have to do tests.
You know what what what takes basicallylike a day used to probably take

(20:32):
like three or four days back then, right, I know, John Van
Vliet did a lot of electricity andlightning bolts and that kind of stuff.
Well, I think everybody from NewJersey does that. I think I think
always unique to you three, thethree of you New Jersey does absolutely Okay,
a race robo cup three oh hello, yep, that's a nice robbo

(20:53):
team makeup. I believe it's robotteam makeup on the Tomo robot who gets
his skull cracked open and uh,you know, it was the eighties.
Everything had to be covered in electricity. It was kind of like the drizzle
you get on your dessert, soyou had to hand draw. I mean,

(21:15):
my daughter's watching the show and she'sa graphic artist, but an Julie.
These guys had a draw by handon film, right, you had
to draw electricity and well it's onpaper. It was on paper. Yeah,
it's on like sixteen inch wide paperwith animation cell pegs on them,
and then that paper gets put onthe animation stand lined up to match what

(21:37):
the the the roto was. Anotherway, we do a rough tracing of
his head so we know where wehave to animate in pencil, and then
in a light box we animate electricityover that a frame at a time,
flip it back and forth to seethe movement. When we're like it,
we then photograph it through the samecamera onto a high con stock, so

(21:57):
you end up with white lined electricityagainst a black background. So you know,
you get the you get the oppositeof that, and then that gets
double exposed in the optical prower.You guys had the patience of Joe back
in those days. Well, wedidn't know any better. Yeah, all
right, let's move on a littlebit, uh race, Let's do my

(22:19):
slide number three, please, therewe go. Star Trek six loved loved
that movie. Yeah I did too. It's really a and I'm not a
super duper treky, but I reallyliked. I really liked this this one
because this was wasus Nicholas Meyer.Again I don't remember. Once again,

(22:45):
I was not on set. Ido know that some of the stuff that
I did on this, more thananything was the transporter effect for VCE,
which uh, I think the picturesthat I have for U for Star Trek
or mostly transporter stuff. I think, yeah, raised can we try that

(23:07):
Star Trek? Yeah, And onceagain it was pencil drawings on paper.
They were just lines of pencil aframe at a time, like you know,
there's exercises you get when you're learningwell, hey, kids get the
when you're learning cursive yah. Yeah, Well it was kind of like that,

(23:30):
and every frame was never exactly thesame, so it gave it this
really neat, kind of scintillating kineticanimation to it. It flickered a lot,
and if Pete would go in andmultiple print, it layered off,
you know, out of sync,and it looks like a vasiline smear over
the over the gate with the animation, so that would basically like a smeared

(23:53):
lens. It would give it thisweird kind of fog going up and down.
And the coolest part about this wasI had to. I was doing
this with a broken hand because Iquit smoking and I punched a wall at
one point, and it really madedoing these transporters hard to do. As

(24:18):
I'm in the cast and as I'mas I'm drawing, I'm slowly like erasing
it as well, you know withthe cast. Wow, all right,
do we have another star trek race? Oh? Nice? I was instrumental
in helping kill Kirk a fake Kirk. This was another How do you know

(24:41):
which one was the fake? Theone? P told me? It was
right exactly. Your boss told you. That's how you, that's how you.
Yeah. Once again, it's aroad of reveal. I mean,
it's basically a matt that slowly revealserases the Kirk image and reveals the beast
background through and all the glowing stuffis when it Pete's Great Tricks, which

(25:03):
is on the stage they photographed abrillow steel wool burning and it gives you
this, you know, like theedge of a cigarette. Oh wow,
that's exactly what that looks like.Yeah. So you layer that stuff together
and you get this really great kindof look. You put a little glow
on it and stuff, and it'sso organic and complex. I mean,

(25:26):
you would take forever to animate somethinglike that. But this looks like a
real thing happening as opposed to somekind of graphic that looks Would they shape
it and his body shape so thatit kind of fit or could they just
move it around as they wanted toit would just build the whole frame and
the body shape is my matt that'skeeping contained right, and then all my

(25:52):
mat would open up and get ridof it along with the Kirk or Emon
in this case, that's who wasplaying the shape after. And yeah,
it was fun. It was niceto there's a little piece of history which
I'm lucky. There's a lot oflittle moments there where I'm lucky to have
been involved in these kind of things. That's super cool. That's a great
that's a great picture. Is therea number three? We've got one more

(26:17):
for a star Trek. Yeah,very quick. Weird little things he had
to do. The sniper is goingto kill them at some big conference at
the end of the movie, andhe has a glass cutter, some kind
of futuristic glass cutter thing built intohis glove. So that circle that he's
cutting into the glass, it wasn'tthere. That's just a piece of animation

(26:37):
that I had to basically add in, you know, and make it look
like it's got some kind of reflectivitylike the edge of glass and stuff as
he rotates his hand around. Youknow. A lot of stuff is that
we do is a little more invisible, which everybody seems to be impressed with,
but I don't like because then youdon't get you don't get famous doing

(26:59):
invisible stuff. It's been a goodliving for you, though. Yeah.
No, It's like I said,I love the movie. The movie is
great. Yeah, that was agood one. Okay, So moving on
race my number four. Let's seewhat we have here. Oh hello,
that's always a fun show, allright. Tell us about Adam's Family,

(27:22):
another great movie, there's I workedon both of these, doing mostly the
Thing shots. Best part. Theinteresting thing about it is the interesting thing
about Thing is the first Adams Family. It was all photochemical, meaning it
was all optical work. Matt's hadto be drawn to cut off the god

(27:48):
I can't remember the guy's name weplayed Thing magician. Anyway, his arm,
you know, they his arm isthere and it has to be gotten
rid of. So there's a Mattin a Rodo line that basically helps the
eliminate all of him and just leavethe hand. I animated shadows underneath.
I had to big kind of rotoanimate them to put them back because we

(28:08):
were dropping him into background scenes again. By the time we did Adams Family
Too, it was the first timethat we were using digital stuff. So
for the thing there's an actor onthe set. Yes, his hand obviously
hit. The rest of him iscovered, but his hand is acting live
on the set and he's the Alot of times he's like on a roller

(28:30):
skate of some kind and they're pushinghim along so that way he can.
He was very good at manipulating hishand. He's very expressive, really great
long fingers and stuff, and weused to just have to basically track the
roto line to the edge of hishand, which I think had a fake
stump makeup there, so that wehad a line to follow to help.

(28:55):
But race do we have Adam's Familyfrom Kevin there you go, Yeah,
this is the this is Adams FamilyToo. Where it was a it was
a digital comp and we were ableto do much more tricky shots. He
flies around and flips on this rollerskate quite a bit, but it's digital.
But back then digital meant that Ihad to do these in Photoshop because

(29:21):
there was no software doing this stuffyet. Excuse me, every frame I
had to basically load into Photoshop,do my work, and then save it
and then go to the next frame, like one at a time. I
had a little script that I ranthat automatically loaded it, paused, and

(29:41):
then hit a button and it wouldautomatically name it and save it. Because
there was no compositing software yet,there was no Did either one of you
guys ever have some of those metalskates and real life? Yes, yes
I did. These were quite stylishat night. I don't know. I

(30:03):
usually only saw them when I wason my ass because I had some of
the kids in the neighborhood had some, and when we would go down the
hill there was a couple of streetsthat had heels beside us and at night
time they sparked like oh yeah,you were, you were you know,
you were real cool if you couldstay on them long enough to make them

(30:26):
spark. Remember, that's a goodimage, that's a good effect. The
lighting and everything worked. Yeah.No, And like I said, they
by this second movie they had toreally figured out in terms of how to
make it make it really look likea magicians trick, because you know there's
no place like where are they hidingthe guy? I mean, like I
said, it's just really it's justreally an amazing, amazing Alman Rowe is

(30:49):
the supervisor for this stuff and hewhich is a really nice effects design So
that's great. Race, Is thereanother Adams That was the only one we
had for Adams Family? Okay,and the additional images. Let's go to
my number five, Race, pleasemy number five? Yeah, Kevin,
I don't know this film. Idon't think I ever saw this. Tell

(31:11):
us a little bit about this one. This was working with my one of
my heroes, George Romero, whoI feel is the godfather of independent filmmaking,
who did the original Night of LivingDead right when he was a commercial
industrial director in Pittsburgh, and Iwas on the set in a location for

(31:33):
this for God, well they wereshooting for like God. I got like
five months easily in a a inthe armory in Pittsburgh, so it was
the military armory that they had builtfull sets New York Penhouse. I mean,
it was really the first time thatI spent a lot of time on
set, even though, the GulfWar broke out right in the middle of

(31:56):
the shooting and suddenly this soldiers thatwere standing around watching Hollywood make movies.
Everything got really serious and we allhad to be fingerprinted, and we all
had They had to check every everycase and everything that kind of came in
and out of that place. Butthe key to this was, and once
again I was working for Pete,we put together what I believe is the

(32:17):
very first motion control system to usethe the DPS, the Director of Photography's
actual panevision equipment. In the past, everybody would come in with their own
motion control system and had a Mitchellcamera and you know, bah blahlah.
This was the first one that wehad to basically use what the dp was

(32:37):
comfortable with, and that was thebig experiment. So we shipped all the
stuff out as symbol all of thisand did these scenes with Timothy Hutton,
who was a real method actor.So we had this machine that was making
noise and you know, it wasreally kind of a tough process. He
was very, very nice, theysaid, he was really nice to us.

(32:58):
There is there's a scene that Georgewanted for Christmas, Timothy Hutton handing
one of these babies over to TimothyHutton. That was that was the gag.
A few little blemishes on his faceapparently. Yeah, well, there's
the bad guy who comes out ofone of the one of the books that
the other guy wrote. It's aweird toppelganger movie. So but Tim played

(33:20):
both parts. What you're looking athere on the left side is there's a
stunt double holding both babies. Righton the left side of the plate.
They the head of the guy withthe with the glasses and everything. That's
actually Timothy Hutton and he's matted backinto the stunt double suit. I don't

(33:45):
know if you can does that makesense. It's a head, it's a
complete head replacement. And the keyto that is the black collar is actually
a collar that's on a piece ofillumine them that we made that's bolted into
the ground. So that way weknew exactly where they had to stand,

(34:06):
so we had a solid line thatwe could make sure that it fit on
the side of the plate and theb side of the plate. Wow,
yeah, it was. It wascrazy. The best part about this shot
the first take we did. Youknow, you shoot a bunch of takes
and George then picks the one thathe likes the best in terms of the
performance. Tim goes back and hedoes a big makeup change. So maybe

(34:29):
like four or five hours go by. I'm guarding the set. We set
up again and now the camera's playedback automatically to do the other side.
And at the end of the firsttake, it goes through and it's a
long, revolving take, like thousandsof frames, and then it ends and
George says, how is that?And I look at the monitor and I

(34:49):
look at all of the marks,and I look at the focus puller and
he goes he's shaking his head.So I go over and I said,
how how far off are we?And he says six feet? Really?
So I said, George, Ithink we got to go again. We
didn't know what to do, andI said, he's never going to use

(35:10):
the beginning of the shot. Builta six foot off set into the back
end of the shot, so weended up where we're supposed to be,
and that's that's what saved the shotfor this one. Then we spent weeks,
like another week just fine tuning themost control system, and the next
split shots we did with that systemworked great, but this first one was
a freaking nightmare. And I nevertold George this story, and unfortunately he's

(35:36):
passed away, but he's listening someplace. I think I've got two more for
the dark half. Hy what else? Let's see what else we got there?
Is that Michael? Is that MichaelRooker. Michael Rooker burst through this
door. We had about twenty fivehundred finches. Every set was engaged in
a mesh to keep the birds becausethey wanted to have real birds flying around.

(36:00):
There's a whole bird attack at theend of the movie. Like the
birds problem was, as soon asyou slated and the camera rolls, the
finches basically all decided to go finda piece of a place on the net
to sit down and relax. SoMichael Rooker breaks through the door. Two
birds come through, and he says, you better put some more birds in

(36:22):
here. I'm gonna look really stupid. So fourteen layers of blue screen birds.
A lot of these shots took reallywe photographed at least I don't know,
fifteen thousand foot of just birds againstblue screen. And we made elements
in layered and layered and rowed andlayered. Excuse me. So this is

(36:43):
a tough This is a kind ofa tough one to pull off as well,
where you start to show and yougo, I don't know how we're
gonna do this, but we gotto figure it out. I've met him
a few times. He's a reallyfunny guy. What I used to look
like when I talked to George isthat you on the left. Yep.
Wow, that's been great. Yeah. Yeah, I think George is trying

(37:07):
to decide why that camera was sixfoot off and I didn't tell him.
Look at the mass trays. That'sa great picture. I never seen that.
Yeah, there's the ash tray,the famous ash sorry, the really
great one. Yeah. I lovedNight of the Living Dead. Scared Heale.
I think I was twelve scared.That scared me and my friends.

(37:30):
He was And he was such asweet guy to work for him, Yeah,
he really You really wanted to doeverything to make it work out.
He was always kind of in turmoil. This isn't working out, and what
do we do and blah blah,And you really wanted to and and Orion
was at the process of the movie. Studio was in the process of going
down the toilet at this time.So, I mean I had a great

(37:51):
experience working with George, and Itold him, unfortunately I worked on his
toughest movie experience because he didn't evenget to score the last reel. He
just had to use music from theother reels because Orian ran out of money,
which for for the Dark Half,for for just I think, yeah,
for the Dark Half, and forbeing a studio, so they were

(38:13):
they were circling the drain at thatpoint. I got you, Kevin.
My daughter has a question. Doyou enjoy using digital programs now like all
of the Adobe Suite or do youmiss the days of photoshopping one thing at
a time. It's kind of amixed bag of blessing in a curse.
I was working on. I wasworking on a movie and the director,

(38:37):
it was Steve Norrington for Blade,said isn't it a lot easier now that
the computer does all this stuff?And I said, it's midnight and you're
still here. So the optical partwas fun because by eight o'clock you had
to have a film in the labso they can process it, and then

(38:59):
you had dailies in the next dayto see if anything turned out. You
got to go home. Now it'sa never ending clock that you there's always
something else you could do. Butfilm was really kind of a drag.
But like I said, at leastthere was more of a schedule involved.
Now it's just kind of this.It's a factory because you can do anything

(39:22):
on the computer as long as youwant to spend the time on it.
So well on the clock. Now, aren't you glad you came up through
the you know, the old daysof art. You had to create art
with your hands, really and youdid, and as digital came in,
you evolved and evolved and learned.But you know, I think kids today
who just do digital they can't appreciatethe hard work you and John Day have

(39:44):
laid and Peter Currant did forty yearsago. They could never have dreamed of
doing that kind of stuff. Well, it also seems like it should be
easier, but to be honest andmentally, it's like it's harder because it's
like the computer software is like ariver that's flowing really quick, and like,
where's the beginning anymore? I meanI was there when it started off,

(40:05):
so I could kind of, youknow, get my feet wet.
But now you've got to just jumpin and there's so many opportunities and possibilities.
It gets it gets confusing to Ithink it gets confusing to young people
to go, well where do Istart? What do I do? You
know, Kevin, it was likeyou guys didn't have to obey laws.
You were creating them, you weremaking them. We were cheating a lot.

(40:30):
You guys were literally inventing the marketplaceback then. We were inventing ways
of doing stuff, and that wasreally the exciting part. I mean,
especially right on the cusp when thedigital stuff started. You know, it
was like you could see the possibilityand rather than well, ask not what
the computer can do for you?I had things that I always wanted to

(40:53):
do when the computer came along andsays, oh, I already had that
idea, but now I know whatI can do, How I can use
the computer to do what I alreadywanted to do, as opposed to thinking
well what's this going to give me? So I think you learn that from
doing the organic hands on stuff.Yeah, you guys paid your dues.
Yeah, absolutely, Race. Let'smove on to my number six, Dan

(41:16):
six. Okay, so, Kevin, you helped pioneer desktop visual effects for
TV shows. Tell us about Babylonfive. Babylon five is really a great
you know that, like you knowthe movie the Perfect Storm. Yes,
yes, in terms of visual effects, I think Babylon five was the perfect

(41:36):
storm for a lot of things.Ron Forton was desktopping all of the digital
spaceships for the first time for television, using a to start with twenty three
amigas that they were networked through thewalls of him and his partner's apartments.
They were Paul bag O'Brien. Yes, they were basically trailblazing. The fact

(42:02):
that you did not need to havesilicon graphics computers that cost a fortune to
even think about doing this stuff.LightWave and new tech and the Amiga were
a great combination to make this stuffhappen, and Ron always had the forethought
to do that. Early on,when Ron was working on that movie Robojocks,

(42:23):
he showed me a little test hedid on the computer of like a
tie fighter going through some asteroids,and it really looked like a video game,
and to be honest, it reallylooked kind of shitty, and I
felt bad for him, But Ronknew that this was going to take off
and whatnot, and he stuck withit. So I was the idiot for

(42:44):
not paying attention. When Babylon fivecame along, they had spent a lot
of money on the online one ofthe online bays doing some paint animation,
and Ron said, can't you dothis now? And I said, yeah,
I think so, because after effectshad just come out and I was

(43:05):
playing around with that, and yeah. I made a deal that if they
put me on salary, I couldbasically hand animate all of their you know,
animation effects and compositing. I woulddo more work for them than they
were getting. I would not beas fast, but I promised that I
would keep up. So for thefirst season and a half, I was
just kind of making the glows onthis eye this eyeshot as an example,

(43:30):
as a slide projector and a beermug photographed off a wall on my high
eight camera so I could get sobecause there was no sims, there was
no you know, but I wantedsome kind of organic. I loved photographing
real elements and real stuff. Soit was fun. And back then I
think everybody was just like pleased withwhat they what they got and what they

(43:52):
saw because we were everybody was kindof raising the bar for TV. Back
then, when Star Trek had likeone, you know, one phaser shot
and it had to be approved bytwenty three people and then come all the
way down again and with one note. And you know, they may they
probably cost I don't know what theycost per shot, but that's why you
didn't see a ton of stuff,and Babylon five wanted to see a lot

(44:13):
of stuff in the show. Soit was a fun place to It was
a fun place to be. Didyou work or were you an employee of
Foundation Imaging? No? I workedfor the production, Babylonian Productions. And
they found that out when they realizedthat the DVD set came out and there
was a promo piece where they interviewedme, and they realized that they had

(44:35):
absolutely no paperwork from me signed becausethey assumed that I worked for Ron,
but I didn't. I worked forthe production. I just jump right in
and I never signed work for higherpapers or anything. So I had to
give them a okay to use mylikeness. Wasn't there a guy named Netter
Doug Netder, Yes, Dugntder right, Ye, he was the main producer

(44:55):
for appropriately named Rattlesnake Productions. Yeah, I heard things about him from you
know, I represented Ron and foundationfor a little while. Yeah, nice
guy. He passed away a fewyears ago, he did. Yeah,
it was really really kind of sad. I'm sad about that. Here's a
sweet guy. All right, racemy number seven. Please. Now we're

(45:16):
gonna launch Lurch forward. Here wego. So, Kevin, I met
you first in ninety six, shortlyafter you launched Flat Earth Productions. Worked
on two of the probably the biggestTV shows in history, Hercules and Zena.
This is when I first met you, and what do you got for
us? For Hercules? Right aroundthe time the Bebylon five was I sat

(45:37):
down with Joe Strazinski, who wroteyou know, was the show runner for
Bebbylon five, and he was explainingto me at lunch, well, you
know, the long arc is goingto start kicking in now and we're in
Besially, what he was telling mewas we're not going to be having like
the alien or monster of the weekanymore. Around the same time, Kevin
O'Neill, who was working for Peteat the time, called me and said,

(45:59):
hey, uh, this Hercules show, they wouldn't try to figure out
how to do a centaur. SoI switched shows and I went over to
try to figure out how to dothat, and ultimately Rob Tapper decided to
beef up Hercules more and more,to the point where he said, I
don't want to run effects company,so if you guys put one together.
So we did. That's how weformed Flat Earth, and we basically tried

(46:22):
to load as much stuff into theHercules show, especially as possible. Rob
was also Rob Tapper was also abig Harryhausen fan, you know, like
us, so he was a reallyso he would come up with these crazy
ideas and he even pitched to us. He said, what do you guys
want to see? It's like,I want to see Hercules fight big giant
monsters. So so that's what wewere kind of let loose to do and

(46:43):
it was really it was really fun, and you and Kevin O'Neil both came
through. Peter Curran. I didn'tknow that, Yeah, okay, I
mean they would build the bottom partof the set here and shoot some elements
of crowds and that's a Matt paintingI did basically just like putting together what
I think the arena might look likethe same here. We had to build

(47:04):
the background and the animated Steak asa giant you know it's a CG thing.
Very early on from us in adone and LightWave. Is they still
desktop? Yeah? We never,we never. We kept moving more and
more desktop. We tried to hireartists as opposed to spend money on equipment
and software. Maya Maya used tocall this and say, hey, how

(47:29):
come you're not using our software?And I said, because I haven't seen
anything from you guys that looks betterthan what we're doing. Yet they said,
well, when when the new StarWars movie comes out. It's like,
well, call me when that comesout, you know so, But
it was like twelve thousand dollars aseat back then, what are we looking
at with this pretty girl here?What's that? Oh, that's my vacation

(47:50):
picture. That's one of the things. It's like, well, we want
to have a snake lady, soyou know, we basically have had her
shot against blue screen. We mattat the bottom part of her out.
We had a CG snake and thenwe kind of tracked by iye, there
was no tracking software by eye.You had to kind of move her body

(48:12):
to, you know, match whatthe CG snake was doing and tie them
together. It's a little strob becauseyou know, it was kind of you
know, infancy of this kind ofstuff, but it was fun stuff.
It's exactly why I got into thebusiness. I wanted to do stuff like
this. Yeah, he certainly did, did a great job. All right,
race my number eight please all right, Sina my girlfriend. I met

(48:34):
her at Mussou and Frank once.Very nice her and Rob Tapper yep,
yeah, no, she's the sweetshe's a sweetheart or Japper. It's really
really great. Also, he justdoesn't leave New Zealand anymore. So yeah,
so do you have some zenas forus? Yeah, I think there's
some. I think there's some thereto be at the bottom of the list.
Yeah. Rob said, hey,we're not gonna have as many monsters

(48:57):
here, but I need something forthe opening title sequence because we know that,
you know, I mean, weknow what we do, and we
we make eye candy for the trailersand then the writer, the writer and
the writers, uh and the charactersor what hooked the audience into coming back
week after week. But our stuffis like the shiny little lures that excited
like cats, you know, sothey see our stuff. So he wanted

(49:20):
something showy, so he said,so he said I do something Poseidon so
and he always kind of left usto our own, to our own devices
to come up with stuff. Anduh, very rarely did we have a
problem. I mean they were wewere trying to push as much stuff in
to the show as possible, youknow, animate and once again animated flying

(49:42):
skeletons. It's like, who wouldn'tlove doing this? You know? That's
that's my first chak room shot.It's CG. I went to Costco and
I bought a PC because LightWave isPC only, and I built the Chakrum

(50:04):
inside of a LightWave and I wentinto my backyard with a high eight camera
and I videotaped spinning around and thenI put this comp together in after effects
in about a day and I seeit and they must have used it like
fifty three times and had different episodes. It's just the panning through the jungle

(50:25):
shot shot primarily in my backyard.And I always thought, well, this
is the way that I always thoughtthe movie should be made, because this
is the way Pete and I madethem when we were kids. So you
know, what is that silver diskI'm looking at? That's the Chakraum.
That's Zena's weapon. Oh, Okay, I never saw it, Dan,

(50:46):
it's not a UFO. I waslike, and speaking of Zena and Kevin,
Kevin, Kevin and Lucy right now, I pretty yeah. But Rob
took us out to this really niceplace in Beverly Hills the Effect crew and
pitched the show to us by bringingthe two stars of the shows with him
and said, we want to reallydo this, and what you know,

(51:07):
I mean, Rob treated us really, he spoiled us, really, you
know, so it's really great.The only thing is, if I remember
correctly, somebody's pinching my butt andI don't remember who it was doing it.
I'm not well, I think it'sLucy. It might be so Bo.
I'm not sure. So wait,hold on, So you met these
two superstars before you even started workingon their shows. Well, Xena had

(51:28):
already started, so it must havebeen well into Hercules, but Xena was
probably just starting, okay, andwe were just forming, like I said,
we had just probably formed flat Earth. And Rob wanted to you wanted
to keep us in the in theloop with this thing. So, like
I said, he really, reallyhe spoiled us. Because everybody since that
is you mean, Rob is justreally great. What can I say the

(51:50):
capture for this photo was can youspot the man from New Jersey in this
photo? Yeah, it's not theit's not the attractive Nordic, blue eyed,
six foot three guy or the reallyattractive news It's pretty obviously who the
New Jersey is. It's the guywith the Italian hairline on his chest.
And yeah, right, you looklike Vinnie Boombots from Act Sopranos or something.

(52:16):
Let's see where are we now?Race? What do we got?
Do we do? Ten? Eleven? Twelve? We're down to thirteen?
Here, let's see thirteen? Ohyeah, so, Kevin, you and
I did in Evan a couple ofyears ago, right, and why don't
you talk about this one? Yeah? It was really fun to contact the
the Zena. It was a Ithink one of the anniversary for Zena,

(52:42):
and I talked to them about,hey, could we do an effects V
effects panel? And they were verythey're very open to that. So I
came with the guy to my rightas Andy Klement, who is now a
makeup effects art well he always wasn'tmaking a Fox artist, but he was
one of the flat air of guysback then. And then Brian Blevins excuse

(53:04):
me. On the other right isthe guy who kind of digitized our models
and upfront or some of the themachetes we used to use. We used
to sculpt these things by hand andthen use a digitizer to get them into
the computer because modeling software was notreally great for organic stuff. It was
good for like, you know,solid body things like tanks and airplanes.

(53:27):
But uh, yeah, we didthat. We did a nice talk.
The crowd really seemed to like it, and you know, it's really it
was just really fun to see that, you know, when you work on
something and like, you know,thirty years later, there's there's still this
huge fan base for this, forthis especially Xena. It's really great.
People lined up to meet you.So did you have a fine artist to
create those macats? Uh and andAndrew Clement did some of them. I

(53:52):
think whoever was sculpting at the timeat can B did some of them,
you know, because they were basicallythe makeup effects prow for New Zealand.
They were the guys who were onset. So it was just whoever,
basically, you know, could canhandle the thing the best. We did
most of the creature stuff though,Okay, Race how are we on time?

(54:13):
Race? How much more can wego? You know what? I
want to go another twenty minutes.If you guys are up for it,
I'm up for it. We've stillgot a number we need to go through,
Blade Lost. We've still got afew a few images here we can
run through really quick. Yeah wecan, we can. We can put

(54:37):
this on hyperspace. Okay, let'srock and roll all right? Blade?
Blade? What do you got forBlade? A good A good example of
us trying to push what we wereable to do. Steve Norton, the
director, came to us. Hesaid, I have to come to a
smaller company like you, because ifI go to a place like ILM,

(54:57):
They're not going to listen to me. But you got you guys, I
can push around. That's a quote. But I get to basically shotgun Tracy
the Lord's head off in this shot, which was really made it really made
it worth awhile. Yeah, prettygreat stuff. I never met her,
see you know, I haven't.I haven't either. I'd love to have

(55:19):
her signed a still with this,but uh, we did the We did
the whole opening club blood scene whereBlade first shows up and he starts,
uh, Blood's raining out of thesprinkler systems. It's a big rave and
he just starts shooting all of thevampires and they disintegrate in front of your
eyes, like you know, likea cigarette ash and flash paper. So
it was really stretching what we haddone before in uh in Lightweight especially,

(55:43):
but man, we had a blaston it, and I think it was
really really good stuff. A lotof exploding hands stuff. I mean,
this is this is my this ismy wheelhouse right here. So I love
I love these kind of effects.Can you remember what the next one is?
Is there a second? Is therea third one? Yeah, there's

(56:04):
two two disintegrated two centigrade guys onthe ground as Blade basically is just showing
that he's the badass of the Marveluniverse and it's the first Marvel superhero R
rated. I mean, everybody thinksit's Deadpool. Wesley Snips Wesley Snipes?
Was he black? Was he thefirst black comic book hero on film?

(56:25):
I don't, I don't. Idon't see color Dan, I don't know.
You're color blind, right? Colorblind? Yeah? I'm not.
I'm not sure. All I knowis I thought the movie was was really
freaking great. I mean, Ireally, I really thought the movie was
very cool. It still holds up. It's pretty big, pretty awesome.
Did you get to meet Wesley?No, we we They come to us

(56:46):
after they've done shooting, and theycut the a lot of times, and
they cut the film together so theyknow how many shots they have and all
of that stuff. If I wereif we were like a bigger company other
than a boutique company of maybe tento fifteen people, we might have been
on set for stuff and what not. But very rarely does that happen.
And also a lot of times theyshoot, they shoot in other countries now

(57:07):
and I don't I don't like traveling. I got you, okay, Moving
on number fifteenth, Grace my fifteen. Please going from Blade to Scooby.
Scooby bullets, you know for Scoobydo there you gotta have range. Yeah,
you're very diverse. Scooby was greatfriend of mine that I worked with

(57:30):
up at ILM on Ghostbusters two wasPeter Crossman, and he was the supervisor
on the first Scooby and the secondScooby movie, and we they were going
to do the Spooky Island Amusement Parkas a miniature set with Ian Hunter and
New Deal building these big giant miniatures. But they realized they had too many

(57:53):
shots that would they would need andthey would just be too much and set
up and shoot that much menture photography, so they decided to do some CG
stuff. But so they came dowUs with a lot of things that I
think normally would have been maybe miniature. I love this boat shot. This
reminded me of like a Ghostbuster shot. This ghostoot going down the street was

(58:15):
really like that, really really niceBill Arons. It does have that yeah,
I mean, and like I said, I'm running a little company of
ten people and we're pulling off likethings like this, which I was really
proud of. I had really greatguys working for me on when I started
Him and I Productions, which wasthe second company after Flat Earth. This

(58:36):
was a cool shot. This isthe this is the Villain's basement. They
had a scene of the the ScoobyCrew ringing a doorbell and falling into a
trap door, and then there wasa sequence of events that they didn't have
time to shoot, so it justended up where they're in a big iron
ball and it rolls to a stop. That's the other photography they had,

(58:57):
So I said, well, didyou ever see did you ever play the
aim mouse Trap? Sure? AndI said, why doesn't he have some
kind of weird rollercoaster thing in hisbasement that takes them from up above and
it takes them to the deposits themdown below. And the director said,
pitch that. So he did ananimatic of it whatnot. He thought it
was really fun and we went towork on it. So we have this

(59:17):
steel ball that rolls all the waydown to camera with his iron ball and
it really covers from you know,where they were point a to point b
oh wow. And Bill Bow's theart director, brought all of his designs
that he never got to use becausethey didn't have time to shoot it,
and he just sat with us everyday and basically helped make our stuff like
look so much better because he wasreally really helping to kind of raise the

(59:39):
bar on what we were doing byshowing us his artwork and stuff. It's
really really between Ian Hunter for theminiature miniatures and Bill Bo's and Peter Crossman,
we really kind of up the anteon the on this this stuff,
especially on the second one. Scoobytoo, Oh, that's the first one.
That's the spooky island. That's great. I like that. So what

(01:00:01):
if any if anything that we're lookingat there really existed? Look at the
Look at the roller coaster with theskull on it. Who would go off
that? And the mountain that lookslike a skull? Yeah, that actually
was the only piece of miniature thatthey built that we photographed and been built
into our composite. Yeah. Soit's a nice amalgam of a lot of

(01:00:23):
things. So live action, acouple of miniature pieces, Bill Bo's designs.
My wife designed one of the skullroller coaster right on the right side.
He designed that for me, soit was I mean, it's very
collaborative. It is really a funshow, and I would have got away
with it if it hadn't been foryou meddling kids, it hadn't been for

(01:00:44):
Warner Brothers. Okay, sixteen sixteen, hell Boy, Hello, hell Boy,
hell Boy. Very lucky to havelanded this one because this was really
really great. Germo de Toro wasonce again reminded me in a way of

(01:01:06):
Romero Itch is an awesome guy towork for. Really can really kind of
consider it, really really creative.The movie is like I love this film,
and once again we got to dosome stuff that normally a bigger company
would be doing. But uh,I know, like hundreds, hundreds or
thousands of cockroaches for that scene thatwe're looking at as he picks up this

(01:01:30):
manhole. Oh, I couldn't havebeen there for that shot. They're all
CG so it doesn't matter. Ohokay, yeah we we really you know.
Uh. The other nice thing aboutit was we had a couple of
VFX shots that we're having problem aproblem with and then I think it was

(01:01:52):
I can't remember who the other companywas now I'm sorry, Oh would have
come to me. They were havingan issue with another set of So anyway,
we ended up swapping, well,you guys do this and we'll take
that one, because you know,I had people in place that said,
oh, I can handle this better. So I mean it was once again,
it was just a really nice creative, collaborative situation with another man hole

(01:02:19):
cover. Yeah. You know whythey make manhole covers round? What No,
I just learned this the other dayafter living fifty five years. So
they won't fall in their own holein they cannot fall in the hole they
cover. If they were square,they could and they make them still to

(01:02:43):
this day, square in France insome places really, but I learned that
just the other day, and Iwas like, man, after all the
manhole lids I've seen in my life, I felt quite stupid learning that.
Now. I wonder if Ed Nortonwas the one who that's why it's a

(01:03:05):
part where was so much nicer thanRalphs. Yeah, right right, he
had so much more. All right, what is Russian airspace? But they
had to have this. I don'tknow what model airplane, I mean model,
what type of airplane? Yes,it is, it's a very specific.
And I had Bill aron Say,who was where He is an airplane
expert working for me, one ofthe guys who usually like a long time
worked for Van Vliet. He lovesaviation and stuff. So this is one

(01:03:31):
of the shots where we switched.I said, hey, I got a
I got an airplane guy here thatcan really make this thing fly literally,
And so we picked this shot up. And it's just a transitional shot that
just flies by from the ocean andthen it flies by camera. There's a
wipe to the next shot. Butyou know, we got to get really

(01:03:52):
really close to the camera and seethe uh and see the hell Boy logo
on the plane and whatnot. Soyou know, it was a once again,
it was a nice It was anice one off that you know,
we we were able to kind ofshow off what we can do. Okay,
right, monster tongues coming through punchingits way through a dumpster. What

(01:04:16):
other business are you going to beable to say that sentence it's about to
say. I don't think I've everheard those words put together before. But
you know, I once again,it's the kind of fun stuff that I
really, I really like to do. It's like, you know, it's
kind of cool monster stuff and it'sa really kind of uh out of left
field, and uh, I knowthe movie. The movie was just really

(01:04:40):
like I said, it was,it was really fun to look at it
all come together. Yeah, itwas stacked with stuff like that. Yeah,
and it was fun. I meanthere's a sense of fun. It's
not so serious that you just sitthere and go oh for crying out loud.
It It really was a fun watch. So yeah, once again,
we're lucky to be here. Thisis a practic full sam al the monster.

(01:05:02):
But the tendrils were usually puppeted,like you know, they were cable
controlled, but they didn't work upsidedown, So we added the CG tendrils
on these couple of shots of themundulating and stuff, because they found that
the cable ones did not want towork when he was suspended upside down,

(01:05:23):
so we kind of matched their designand you know, put them in so
nobody would really know that something wasbeing faked here. That's awesome, Okay,
seventeen would be that a television seriesthat I loved and I hated to
see go away. My wife hustthe network for months. Yeah, Lo,

(01:05:50):
do we have effet shots from Lost? I've got some behind the scenes
stuff. I know he had amovie file, but I can't. There's
a the primary big effect that wehad to do in the pilot. We
worked on and off throughout the wholeseasons of Loss, but the pilot was
the camera rotates around. There's thisblue screen shot, and what they wanted

(01:06:15):
was something is breaking through the treesin the forest towards them. Those are
the shots we did. And Ikept saying, is it like when King
Kong was kind of coming through?Oh? Yes, I remember the whole
forest was threassing around and there.They said, yeah, something like that.

(01:06:36):
And I said, well, whatis it? And they said,
we were not telling you what itis. And I think the reason is
because they hadn't figured it out yet. But the background this that we're looking
at now is actually a vacation slideof mine from Hawaii. That's what I
used for the background of this,and those blue screen trees we saw earlier.

(01:07:00):
I basically populated thousands of these treesto to foliate that still and then
added CG palm trees breaking. Theyalso had some real blue screen palm trees
that like some big Hawaiian guys wereshaking. So I had a lot of
material into whatnot, But it reallywas a composite of thousands of tree elements.

(01:07:24):
That was a powerful scene Kevin inthe movie, in the in the
series that was I remember. Thatgave you among some of the first clues
to what they were up against.And the sound was really the thing we
never see. We never see anythingwith the sound because they wait to see
what we do. That really soldit because it was just really really great.

(01:07:45):
And uh, I think we wereup to like take thirty two or
thirty six for for this, forfor that, for that one shot.
We worked for Kevin Blank, whowas the supervisor on this and that's that's
the that's the show. We wonthe Emmy for right Raise eighteen. Please
there it is. That's my Emmy. That the best part. Where's where's

(01:08:10):
your emi? Kip Oh? It'sa it's in a living room. It's
on a litch shelf, as itshould be. The cool thing about it
was my folks had their fiftieth anniversary. My brother flew in from New Jersey.
We all flew into Hawaii and renteda house and we stayed there for
their anniversary fifty years. And whenwe came back, they were going to

(01:08:31):
stay for a couple of days andI got the announcement that I was I
was nominated for the Emmy. SoI told them, I said, why
did you stay another week? Andyou can watch me lose to battles Garglakaka,
which was doing amazing effects and stuffat the time, but Lost was
like a juggernaut. I mean lostat that point, it's all anybody cared

(01:08:54):
about. And uh, once again, I I made the work. Look
the work that everybody else did onthe show too, is right. But
I just think that you know,that show would have would have would have
taken over everything because it was youknow, it was it was a behemoth.
Nobody cared about anything else. Soonce again, the right place at

(01:09:15):
the right time. You know,I'm very I'm very lucky that that you
know, that thing came along.You know what it is. I remember
Kevin Blake said he was working onthe show and he showed me a scene
of that guy get at the pilotgetting sucked into the airplane engine, like
when he's on the beach. Yeah, and I said, I want to

(01:09:36):
work on this, and you did, and you did. It was so
cool. Great job, Great job, Race number nineteen. Okay, So
more recently, Kevin, you workedon the Flash senior visual effects artists or
brothers. What do you have gotthere for the Flash started off working on
the fixing up the pilot, mostlydoing tempts, I mean editorial they were

(01:10:00):
taking I saw them. They haveto put temps together when they're cuttings to
figure out how long do we wantthe shot to be? You know what's
Flash doing. He's running left toright. And they were some of the
people, some of the editors werestealing like artwork off like dev and art
to be able to Matt like stillsin a flash running back and forth,
and I went, well, Ican basically make stuff specifically for the shots.

(01:10:27):
And I said, listen, I'mgoing to try to bring everything up
to Roger Corman level of visual effects, you know. So I brought in
I brought into a CG flash running, we textured tracked it into the shots.
I mean, we started to makethe tempts look like you could tell
really what's going on. I mean, they were really really good informing the

(01:10:47):
story of the stuff. And GregBurlanty, who did all of these shows,
what I said, this is worthevery penny because since the temps have
cleaned up, we're getting almost nostudio not anymore, because they understand.
I guess the studio has to bereminded that it's about a guy who runs
fast. I don't know, butyeah, we tried to do and then

(01:11:08):
eventually we got into just you know, doing more and more finals cleanups,
production cleanups. And with every TVshow I've ever worked on, it's the
same process. The beginning is sogreat because you're inventing ways to do stuff
right, and then when it becomesa success, more and more people get
involved in the middle, and thenyou're like like on a raft in an

(01:11:31):
island someplace and going what happened.It's like you're not making decisions anymore.
There will take care of this.So it's a diminishing return for me.
At least. I felt that Iwas not doing as much fun creative stuff.
But everybody was really nice. Thepay was decent. It's in town,
and man, it was steady fornine years pretty much, and that's

(01:11:53):
crazy, so I can't complain toomuch. It was just really comfortable.
Yeah, And it's like you gavebirth to the baby and then other people
raised it for you. Yeah,I guess. I mean, I think
they were appreciative of it. Butlike I said, everybody's vying for their
own little territory on a successful show. Sure, and you know they're all
younger people, and you know theycan run faster. So all right,

(01:12:17):
Race took number twenty. Please thisis in praily new show legs. I've
not seen this one, but whatcan you tell us here? Same deal.
As we were doing twenty two episodesof Hercules, we were also basically
on and off doing twenty two episodesof Legends of Tomorrow for the CW,
which is a bunch of DC offcastsfrom either Arrow or from some from Flash.

(01:12:46):
They just assembled their version of kindof like an Avengers team. Let's
say there were time travelers that spenttheir time basically trying to fix time anomalies
because people would time travel and changehistory, and these guys make me we'd
go back in time and generally kindof like make things worse. So it
was a very funny show. Theyput some of the most crazy things in

(01:13:09):
this show story wise that were nuts. This is a fun shot. This
is the kind of stuff that Idid every once in a while. They
had a scene where this this steelcage had to drop and contain these guys.
But you know, they didn't havethe wherewithal, They didn't have this,
They couldn't do this on the setwithout killing anybody. So this is

(01:13:30):
just a cg. This basically fallsaround them and it's just one of these
one off shots where rather than goingto a facility, it's been you know,
having somebody to have to build amodel and spend a lot of money
and blah blah blah. You know, we have in house guys, So
I mean, I built this thingmyself and comped it. But a lot
of these one off shots that wehad four people working on these two shows.
And yeah, we would pick upa lot of other things. It's

(01:13:53):
just like, ah, we needon an airplane shot. They wanted to
charge I don't know, thirty thousanddollars to build airplane. It's like,
well, I got a model,you know. I mean we were still
trying to problem solve at the beginningof these book shows. So, but
Legends was really fun. I meanit's a very very silly, crazy stuff
happened on that show. I startwith, see if people want to check
it out, start with season two, because that's when they realized we're playing

(01:14:16):
it too serious in season one,we're gonna get canceled. So they just
went camping at the limit and itreally took off and became crazy fun.
Yeah, I need to see that. We have to wrap that up pretty
Your wife, Kathy has been asuperstar animator for Disney DreamWorks and The Simpsons.
What what have your dinner conversations Kevinbeen like these last thirty five years,

(01:14:40):
and congratulations of thirty five years.It's it's well, recently it's been
completely about work. This is thebusiness we started in and blah, blah
blah. But I don't know.We we most of what we're doing is
we each have our own personal projects. Kathy's doing a lot of our own
artwork and stuff. Now, youknow, we're making we're making plans and

(01:15:02):
trying to just kind of continue,you know, always get to continue to
work, but we want to getsome of our own passion projects kind of
together, you know. So she'sdoing a lot of drawing and painting and
whatnot. I'm still partners with LindaDrake for a sheer force of will.
We're gearing up to do a coupleof micro budget features, one horror,

(01:15:27):
one science fiction. So you know, uh yeah, so it's uh,
it's the life of the life ofthe commercial artist. I guess the last
question I have to ask you totallyoff the whole question. Do you believe
in extraterrestrial life? Do you thinkthey've been visiting the Earth? And if
an alien knocked on your door,what would you do and what would you

(01:15:49):
say? There you go, they'reall here. So you believe you're a
believer like me? I you knowwhat, I was really quickly when I
was a kid. I mean,I don't remember how young of a kid
and you know, I read Ericvon Daenikin's Chard and I thought that that

(01:16:12):
was just like such a cool thing. Between that and when I was younger,
I think the books were like FrankEdwards is. I think I used
to write these kind of paranormal supernaturalbooks, like you know, the the
urban myth stories and stuff like that. They were a collection of paperbacks,
and I was fascinated with like theghost stories. So I want to believe,

(01:16:32):
I really, I really am hopingthat that you know, this stuff,
this stuff is capable of happening.I remember, even as a young
kid thinking ghosts may just be peoplewho are vibrating at a different frequency in
another dimension. I mean, Iwas thinking this when I was like in
grammar school. So you know,so I think I invented the metaverse.

(01:16:58):
Well, you know David Grush whenhe testify in Congress last a lot he
said some extraterrestrial life are interdimensional,and then he backed away. But I've
been hearing that from a lot ofexperts as well. I would love it
to be to be true. Ijust, on one hand, I think
if people were able to travel thesegreat distances, why would they be interested

(01:17:20):
in us? Because it's like lookingat an ant hill, you know,
but I don't know. I mean, I'm I'm keeping an open mind.
I put more faith in the paranormaland the uphiology than I do in religion.
I agree, But to me,these things have more basis, less

(01:17:44):
basis and fantasy to me, Andthat's just my personal opinion. I think
they explained the Bible quite frankly,well, the moment most partying the Red
Sea, there was a craft abovethem. It's in the Bible. There
was a craft above them, right, yeah, Well, I mean it's
I don't know what really what theBible is, because you know, once
again there's that famous Bob Odenkirk wherehe's in Mister Show where he's playing God

(01:18:12):
and he's doing the Bible audio book, and he says, I'm doing the
audio book for my book the Bible. You call it the Bible. I
call it too many cooks. SoI don't know. I would love,
I would love some day for tohave an experience. Two friends of mine
are certain that their houses at onepoint have been haunted. One of them
had a pretty I believe, hada cleansing just to make sure because he

(01:18:34):
kept having he kept finding a quarteron his table in the hallway, sitting
on edge. I mean weird stuff, footsteps. I believe that. I
believe in that and that kind ofstuff. But uh, I don't know.
I'm hoping that with the plethora ofcameras that are available in everybody's pocket

(01:18:56):
now, that we can really kindof get some get some really recent solid
stuff happening. But then again,maybe the aliens know that, you know,
we're trying to steal their soul.I don't know right well, according
to my partners in HDA, disclosurescoming and it's imminent. I've had ghosts,
Kevin, I'll talk to you offline, but my dad visited me after

(01:19:18):
he died several times in my bedroom. My grandfather was a poltergeist in my
house, broke things and smashing thingsand slamming doors. And so I've experienced
and I've seen three UFOs, SoI've experienced this stuff. Very cool.
My kids are pretty sure. Myyoungest daughter is pretty sure. They were

(01:19:38):
in a hotel someplace and she sawI don't know what it's called. What
if this ball of light just shootsout a window across the room, there's
a name for that. I don'tknow, but she she just turned and
she was really young. She saidwhat was that? And my wife was
like, what did you see?So that's kind of spooky, I mean
an or Yeah, some people thinkmaybe those are like scouts from a from

(01:19:58):
a craft. They're like scout balls, like looking around, Hey, who's
out? Who's out? The playto them? Yeah, Well, I'm
tired of being a doubting Thomas andI need to put my finger in the
wound and see a UFO. Whatcan I say? Well, I may
have Actually next week I'm going somewhere. I can't talk about it yet,
but if it pants out. Ifit pants out, I'll invite you.
I'm going somewhere with it. Apparentlythere's a lot of UFO activity. That'd

(01:20:20):
be awesome. How can people thankyou very much for tonight? How can
people reach you if they want toreach out to you? The uh my
email uh Kevin at sheer force ofwill dot com. All one word shere
s h e E R f Or C e O f W I l
L dot com. Because I feelthat that's what it takes to succeed in

(01:20:45):
any business. You just have toreally really have a passion and want to
do I want to do what youwant to do, and uh, you'll
succeed out of your out of youryour passion for loving what you do.
I thank you certainly have proven thatand to maybe a little degrees so on
because I wanted to be a standupcomedian and a comedy writer, so that
didn't happen. But anyway, thankyou, Kevin Kochav. Thank you very

(01:21:06):
much. Anybody wants to thank reallyfun, it was really fun. Thank
you for doing this. If youwant to reach me, Dan Harrariauthor dot
com, danhrari author dot com orHollywood Disclosure Alliance dot org. Thank you
very much, Kevin Kouchaver. Nextweek, my guest is my friend Karen
Richmond, who is the new Gidgetor was the new Gidget in the eighties

(01:21:30):
on TV, and she's still almostas adorable now as she was forty years
ago. And I've had a questionat her for a very long time.
So anyway, thanks for watching andstick with us Paranormal Tonight every Thursday Night
Live and right to Kevin at CheerForce of Will Doc and I want to
believe. I want to believe.I want to believe. Nice. Thank

(01:21:51):
you see you now. Bye.Story Stone Stone Sis sing s,

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}IT's PARANORMAL TONIGHT - Kevin Kutchaver