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Two years after "Final Fantasy,"
the legacy of Square USA still
looks over Hawaii's small
special-effects industry
You probably haven't heard of Kai Bovaird yet, but you may know of his twins. The 31-year-old computer animator was the special effects wizard responsible for making the dread-locked, albino twins in the second "Matrix" film fly through walls and morph into jellyfish-like creatures.
It was work that was as painstaking to do as it was dazzling to watch.
"It happens in a flash in the movie, but there are so many elements that go into that split-second shot," he says.
But Bovaird's next project is likely to tax his magic-making skills like never before.
In January, Bovaird and his partner Paul Almer-Ryan set up Cause & F(X) Pictures, a local special effects house that does everything from computer-generated movie effects to the cinematic sequences that appear in video games.
They're 2,500 miles from Hollywood as the gull flies, but Bovaird's not worried about that.
"Why go to L.A. and be a little fish in a big pond?" says Bovaird, who was raised in California but has local roots and wants to position himself for what he expects will be a growing industry for computer-generated imagery, or CGI, in Hawaii.
Some might question his timing. Two years ago, Square USA studios, the producers of the computer-animated film "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," collapsed under losses of more than $100 million. Just last month, local effects house Sprite Entertainment, which had employed about a dozen people, packed up and left for Los Angeles to be nearer to the action.
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But like Bovaird, other experienced special effects artists are making a go of it here in the islands. Several of them are former members of the "Final Fantasy" team and all are turned off by the L.A. scene.
"You don't have to be in Hollywood anymore," says Mike Rivero, a computer effects artist and "Final Fantasy" alumnus now living in Kailua.
Rivero and his wife, Claire, use powerful PCs in their home to produce effects for local commercials through their company Home Baked Entertainment, and have a pocketful of movie credits that include "Stargate" and the "Star Trek" movies.
"The technology has changed so much in the past few years that you can now get extremely powerful effects software off the shelf," Rivero said.
But this is a business script that's still in development, and any discussion of the industry's prospects in Hawaii invariably turns to hope and despair that accompanied "Final Fantasy."
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In 1997, Square USA, the movie subsidiary of Japanese game-maker Square Enix, chose Honolulu as the production site for "Final Fantasy," building an expensive studio and raising hopes that a new local high-tech industry would result.
More than 200 creative artists from around the world converged here for the production and a number of local talents were nurtured.
"We had the talent here to be another ILM (George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic)," said Rivero.
The film's photorealistic quality broke new ground in animation, but with a price tag of $137 million and ticket sales of just $30 million, it also broke Square USA, which had no long-term plan for producing more content and eventually brought the curtain down on the studio in 2002.
"We were in heaven. Working in paradise, doing something exciting -- then it fell apart. It was heart-breaking," said Petra Evers, another Kailua-based effects artist.
The talent mostly moved on, back to Japan, California, or to New Zealand for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
But several are keeping alive the dream of putting Hawaii back on the special effects map.
"The dream for us is to make it work here in Hawaii," said Evers, who is married to Remo Balcells, former visual effects supervisor for "Final Fantasy."
For now, that means an occasionally nomadic life. The couple are in negotiations with a major studio to produce an animated movie they're developing. But to pay for that they have to travel to job sites, as when Balcells commuted to the West Coast earlier this year to oversee visual effects for the action film "Day After Tomorrow."
"We go make the money elsewhere and then burn it on our own project," she said.
But she and others are heartened by the establishment of the University of Hawaii's film school and the creative media faculty and curriculum in place there under its chairman, Chris Lee, who was the producer of "Final Fantasy."
"We have the talent here. I don't think there's any question. We're just not all under the same roof," said Roy Sato, a former "Final Fantasy" and Sprite CGI artist who is now with games maker Konami Corp.
Even UH's Lee, however, warns that a sustainable CGI industry will have to be built like the "Matrix" stunts -- one painstaking frame at a time.
The first step is to nurture an indigenous talent pool, something that looks promising, he says, noting that the biggest major at UH is computer science.
"The thing is to get some of those kids away from working on spreadsheets and get them on special effects," he said, adding that success can come quickly under the right circumstances.
"You might start with one little effects shop working on a TV show like a Sponge Bob or the PowerPuff Girls and it can take off from there," he said.
Lee said that Hawaii's current positioning in the film industry as a live-action shooting location is all well and good, but that the profits from those films will always leave the state until a production base is set up here.
But the establishment of a self-contained production capacity might come easier in an area like special effects.
"This really is the only kind of manufacturing that's made sense in Hawaii, because of the physical limitations here. The reality of this kind of intellectual property is that it comes out of your head, or out of a laptop," he said.
Others are less hopeful about the effects industry's prospects here.
"It's a pipe dream," says Patrick Kennedy, a Punahou graduate and "Final Fantasy" editor now working for Pixar Entertainment.
"There's definitely skilled people (in Hawaii) but you need serious and aggressive action by people with a lot of money to get things started," he says, calling Final Fantasy and its huge budget a "complete anomaly."
Still, Kennedy adds that he's part of a close-knit West Coast community of former "Final Fantasy" artists and other effects whizzes who would "move back in a heartbeat" to staff up any sizeable projects in Hawaii.
As for Bovaird, his business model is aimed at smoothing out the movie industry's boom-bust migration by offering a varied line of services ranging from software development to animation for video games and even live-action filming.
So far so good. He'll soon begin working on a pair of TV pilots and is close to a deal on a feature-length film to be shot here in the islands (his lips are sealed on the details).
He and his partner Almer-Ryan also plan to move their local staff of four from the two separate Restaurant Row offices they now occupy to a single, custom-designed space nearby in Kakaako.
Bovaird's looking long-term, too. He's putting the finishing touches on a Web site that he hopes will serve as a contact point for the local effects industry, to everyone's benefit.
"In L.A. two effects houses would never have any contact," he says. "But Hawaii is more about community and we need to stick together. If we're divided, we fail."
