With his FX firm Cineffects, Cosgrove has for two decades been giving film and TV producers a bang for their buck. His credits include The Whole Nine Yards, La Femme en Noir, Screamers and The Covenant, not to mention TV's Les Gags and The Neverending Story.
Physical effects are still in demand, however, and used more and more as raw material for bluescreen, cut- and-paste computer artistry. Such is the case with Journey to the Center of the Earth/3D, the current Cineffects project. Now that the ACTRA strike is history and a truce has been declared in the turf war between technicians unions, Cosgrove is confident that Quebec will regain its share of Hollywood film shoots. That's essential for many in this province's film and TV business - from stuntmen and extras, to Quebec's renowned post- production industry (whose latest triumphs include the box-office hit 300) and FX companies like Cosgrove's. Homegrown productions are not enough. A physical special-effects co-ordinator needs to be a jack of all trades. It's a smoke-and-mirrors business, as a tour of the two- storey 930-square-metre Cineffects workshop will attest. Located in an industrial area in southwestern Montreal, it's a metal shop, wood shop and house of horrors rolled into one, where dummy heads are fitted with synthetic jowls and others, like bloody jack-o'-lanterns, are missing their upper craniums. Indeed, Cineffects deals in gore, such as blowing up heads in Scanners II (1991). One-off items have to be crafted, often from scratch. Equipment includes "a spider," an apparatus suspended from a construction crane that causes rain to fall on actors. Shelves are lined with metal boxes labelled things like "low fog" and "blizzard." There are bottles made of sugar you can break over someone's head without hurting them, air cannons, and a giant rat's head that was used in the YTV show Prank Patrol. A few small boxes marked "flies" contain remnants of Island of the Dead, a long-forgotten 2000 horror film. Explosives are kept under lock and key.
An air of secrecy hangs over the site. It concerns the film's use of prototype 3D cameras, in which Canadian director James Cameron of Titanic fame has a financial interest. Sets are mounted on platforms and flanked by banks of lights. A beeping sound fills the enormous room. Workers perched high atop a building crane fix up a waterfall set. Two massive blue screens are part of the tableau. Cineffects technicians examine a blue, featureless dinosaur head that is mounted on a contraption they've taken weeks to build. The scene calls for the dinosaur to come smashing through a subterranean archway in pursuit of human prey. There's a lot of standing around on the set and chatter, in English and French, between special effects crews. Martin St-Antoine, head of Altitech Rigging International, looks on from behind a console, shifting from one foot to another. Altitech's role is to send the dinosaur head along a dolly track until it slams into the arch. The tunnel, one-third of the size it's to appear as in the film, is the work of miniatures specialist Ronny Gosselin. At last count, he's rebuilt the arch 14 times. Finally, someone calls "Quiet!" St-Antoine, still shifting from foot to foot, pushes a button. The reptile zooms down the track and smacks the tunnel roof. Results are filmed to be fired off to the studio. Once the scene is deemed right, CGI wizards will use it to breathe life into their version, and the Cineffects dinosaur will morph into a digital one, the one movie audiences will see. The interplay of falling earth and rocks will be realistic thanks to what transpired on the Point St. Charles set. For all that, the scene will be over in the blink of an eye. Overseeing the work is Joe Viskocil, Hollywood's man in Montreal. A self-taught expert in miniatures and pyrotechnics, Viskocil won an Oscar for "blowing up the White House" (Independence Day). He has worked in Montreal a couple of times before. He's enamoured of the city (the food, the festivals, the femmes, etc.) and appreciates working with "real people." They're not phoney here like they are in Hollywood, he says. "They're willing to learn and they learn fast." A kind of "I-ran-off-and-joined-the-circus" feeling pervades the special effects business. Pneumatics specialists used to handling more mundane industrial tasks are like 60-year-old kids when they get called in to rig up a dinosaur, Cosgrove says. There's also an esprit de corps. "Working here makes me feel like I'm in the field again," says Cineffects technician Andy Antoine, a 36-year-old former Alouettes player with an industrial engineering degree. "It's all about teamwork." Longtime Montreal special-effects coordinators like Cosgrove and Louis Craig, who launched Productions de l'Intrigue 25 years ago, say they still get a bang out of the challenges thrown at them by the FX biz. And it was literally by accident that Cosgrove found his movie metier. He was in his first year in a forestry program at the University of New Brunswick when a car crash put him in a wheelchair. Back in Montreal and recovering at his parents' place, Cosgrove enrolled at Vanier College. He became enthralled with an elective film and media course, and inspired by his teacher, Chandra Parkash. Using a 16mm camera his father won in a poker game, Cosgrove began experimenting in avant-garde film in the family garage. Later, walking again, he graduated from a film production course at Concordia. It was 1976 and Montreal was staging the Olympic Games. "There was a whole buzz to the city. CBS and all the heavyweights were here. Anybody who wanted a job had a job." Cosgrove found himself in pre-production week typing Olympic athletes' names so they would appear on screen during live television broadcast. In the early 1980s, the Canadian film industry was growing and Hollywood started looking north. Cosgrove found employment as a prop man. U.S. productions brought in their own special effects guys, but when they needed another hand, Cosgrove raised his. "Once the big boys had gone home, I thought: 'I can do that.' " He worked with action props - anything handled by an actor. That included guns, and when they wouldn't fire, someone would ask: "Ryal, can you make it work?" He learned. "They also wanted the effect of a bullet going into a wall, and I kind of slipped into that." Cosgrove honed his pyrotechnic skills on New Hampshire's stock car racetracks and drag strips when he and other Montrealers put on Evel Knievel-type stunts. In an old wreck, stuntman John Walsh would soar off a ramp over a series of cars. "I'd put a bomb on and blow off the back," Cosgrove recalls. Eating and sleeping took a back seat to putting on a fiery - albeit dangerous - spectacle. "One of the wives put a stop to it," Cosgrove says with a smile. With Walsh and Andrew Campbell, who specialized in weapons, Cosgrove formed Cineffects in 1986. (Walsh and Campbell would later go out on their own.) Twenty-one years on, Cosgrove and Cineffects are survivors in a roller coaster business. "It's very cyclical," he says, adding that his company has pulled off some stuntman-like escapes during lean years. "You do it for the challenge; each production becomes a learning experience. Our revenues are never consistent year to year. With 15- to 18-hour work days, you definitely ain't doing it just for the money." Next up for Cineffects will be work on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. It won't call for exploding heads or fearsome dinosaurs, but there will be fake snow. |
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