Behind the Golden Compass
Fri, December 21 2007
By Angela Lee
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One of the daemons created by Vancouver
Film School alum for the film |
Whatever the debate, the film is significant to a group of Vancouver Film School graduates for an entirely different reason – 11 of them got to work behind-the-scenes on the celluloid fantasy.
The VFS alums are graduates of four different VFS programs: 3D Animation & Visual Effects, Digital Character Animation, Houdini, and Film.
For Pearl Hsu, who joined the film’s visual effects team, Rhythm & Hues, right after college, it was “truly humbling to work alongside talented individuals, some of whom have won Academy Awards for their work in visual effects.”
Hsu, an effects technical director and first runner-up at the 2004 Miss Chinese Vancouver pageant, was awed at the amount of work that went into transposing flesh and blood actors into a 3D world. “It was amazing to be a part of that process, and gave me a newfound appreciation for how hard it must be for the actors to act against thin air,” she says from LA, where she’s now based.
Most of Hsu’s work didn’t actually make the final cut, but in these days of DVD extras and blockbuster trilogies, there’s always the chance it may still see the light of day.
Fellow alums Ben Sanders and Adam Yaniv worked on all the animals in the film except the polar bears. They concentrated on the Golden Monkey and Pantalaimon, the shape-shifting daemon of the movie’s lead character.
Other VFS alumni who worked on the film include Tony Etienne, Justin Hammond, Aruna Inversin, Andrew Lawson, Matthias Lowry, Chad Moffitt and Fion Mok.
The movie has come under fire from New York Times bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza for “aiming to indoctrinate young people against the religious beliefs of their parents during a time when most Americans are celebrating religious holidays.”The film, about a girl’s quest to save children from an oppressive regime, opened across Canada last Friday to mixed reviews.
