The Lord of the Visual Effects

by Brad Stratton

Jim Rygiel thought his interest in a project in New Zealand would last a week. He stayed three years. And now he’s brought home three Academy Awards.

Rygiel (’77 BFA Painting and Drawing) was the visual effects supervisor on “The Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy. For each film in the trilogy, Rygiel was among the leadership team recognized with an Oscar statue for best visual effects by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The hardware on the mantel not only recognizes stunning work accomplished, but also is leading to new possibilities for his cinematic career.

England, Prague, New Zealand

In late 2000, Rygiel had returned to California after spending six months in England supervising the visual effects for the Disney movie “102 Dalmatians.” Rygiel was well established in Hollywood, with 20 films to his credit, including installments in the “Star Trek,” “Alien” and “Batman” movie franchises. Considering he and his family were building a new home in Pacific Palisades, Rygiel thought he’d like his next project to be closer to home.

The next offer, however, was to work on “Blade II,” an action-thriller-vampire movie starring Wesley Snipes that would have required a six-month move to Prague. Rygiel turned it down.

A month later, his agent, through his wife (Theresa, also a visual effects artist), suggested Rygiel consider a different project, “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy based on the legendary literary fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien. Travel, however, was still involved; the movie was being filmed in New Zealand.

“It was a crazy thing, but I decided, well, I’ll go down there for a week,” Rygiel said. “I stayed for three weeks.” He took the job and was told it would take a year to 18 months to complete the visual effects for all three movies. “After about a week – when I saw just how much work was involved in the project – I guessed it would actually take about a year to do each of the films,” Rygiel said. His estimate was just about right.

Land of penguins and whales

In Wisconsin, residents might have chipmunks living under the house. At the New Zealand home of the Rygiel family, there were blue penguins.

“Our house is right on the ocean, on the Cook Strait [the body of water that separates New Zealand’s North Island and South Island and connects the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea],” said Rygiel. “I remember I was reading a story to my daughter and she said, ‘Daddy, look, orca whales.’ I looked out the window and sure enough, there were five or six orca whales swimming by our house.”

Much has been made of the dazzling New Zealand landscapes that served as the setting for Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Rygiel said New Zealand is equally stunning for what it doesn’t have.

“The longest traffic jams last five minutes,” he said. And this even though he lived and worked in Wellington, the country’s capital. After 20 years of the super-fast pace of Los Angeles, New Zealand was just about as opposite a place as he could go to. “It was like going from mach 10 to zero.”

Much to his delight, something else was missing from New Zealand. The rampant consumerism of the United States doesn’t exist. Instead of 24-hour supermarkets, shops are open from 9 to 5. “If you don’t make it to the store in time today,” Rygiel said, “well, you just wait until tomorrow.”

“It’s very much like Wisconsin,” said Rygiel, who was born and raised in Kenosha. “The pace is slower. There’s a farming community feel. They take life easier.

“I thought three years were going to be an eternity. Now, it seems like we’ve been here a week, it’s gone that fast.”

Jim Rygiel (right) offers acceptance remarks at the 76th Annual Academy Awards from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Feb. 29, along with his Best Visual Effects co-winners (from left) Randall William Cook, Joe Letteri and Alex Funke.

The work of a visual effects supervisor

At the start of any movie project, Rygiel said, the visual effects supervisor works with the director to understand what sorts of effects shots are needed for the movie. Then, the supervisor translates that into what is actually possible, given the movie’s schedule and budget. “My main goal is to be the eyes of the director. When they say what they need, I see it in terms of effects. I figure it out economically.

”Over the course of the trilogy, 23,000 people worked on the movies. Of those, about 800 directly or indirectly reported to Rygiel. For comparison, he said “102 Dalmatians” required 40 to 50 people on the visual effects team. Most projects, in fact, are more like “102 Dalmatians.

”“The Lord of the Rings” visual effects crew was further subdivided into specialties, such as miniatures, digital effects and pyrotechnics. He added that his job frequently required coordinating the work of all the smaller groups, and communicating to these groups the goals and desires of trilogy director Peter Jackson. Rygiel shared with these groups the notes and drawings that he had made based on his conversations with Jackson.

Once all the elements of a scene are put together, it is reviewed by the director. After three years, Rygiel said he got better and better at learning what Jackson sought, achieving a 95 percent success rate on the first attempt. “My goal and his goal were to make everything look real, and not like a fantasy world.”

As the trilogy progressed, Rygiel received more responsibilities. For the third movie, “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King,” he spent eight weeks directing the live action sequences that were later combined with numerous visual effects to create the vast Battle at Pelennor Fields. He said they photographed about 20 horses and actors, which were the foreground characters. To that were added 20,000 digitally rendered horses and warriors, and to that were added the digitally created Mumakil, 50-foot-tall elephant-like creatures that stampeded through the battle scene.

Awards times three

While the third installment in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy swept the 2004 Academy Awards Ceremony, Rygiel and his colleagues were completing a different sort of sweep. Their visual effects efforts were recognized for the third consecutive year. No other team has ever done this in so short a period of time, and the only similar accomplishment was achieved by the original “Star Wars” trilogy, which won similar awards in 1977, 1980 and 1983.

Equally noteworthy is that the final film in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy won both the best picture and best visual effects Academy Awards. The only other films to accomplish this in the last 50 years were “Gladiator,” “Titanic,” “Forrest Gump” and “Ben-Hur.” Rygiel said, “I think it’s a testament to the effects being integrated into the story, to the point that the effects sometimes told the story [as opposed to always hiding the effects].

”And on the fun side, there are subtle advantages to receiving nominations and Academy Awards. “I’ve been going to the ceremony for 10 years,” said Rygiel. “When you’re nominated, you get to sit a few mezzanines closer to the stage, so the seats are much better.” There also are the infamous A-list Hollywood parties. “You don’t need an invitation – you just wave your Oscar. Really. There was this party that had a roadblock outside it. I waved the Oscar and went right through.”

On to directing

Finding a visual effects project as challenging as “The Lord of the Rings” may not happen for some time. “‘Lord of the Rings’ has every effect in the book,” Rygiel said. “It was amazing to work on. We all learned so many skills.”

So what is Rygiel’s next project? “I’d been thinking about getting into directing for years,” he said. “Directing involves a whole new set of disciplines. But I realized I’ve been dealing with actors for 20 years. And directing requires what I’ve already been doing for visual effects supervision – getting a good crew together.”

Then, Creative Artists Agency, one of the world’s most powerful talent agencies, called to ask if he’d be interested in directing.“I guess you have to be careful what you wish for.”

So, as he considers his future options, Rygiel was spending the spring completing “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” DVD project and moving his family back from New Zealand in time for his children to spend some time in their new California school. And he couldn’t help but think that even though many things had changed over the past three years, some things hadn’t.

“Three years ago, I sort of dragged them all to New Zealand,” he said. “Now I’m dragging them back.”