Tornado Redux

ILM's Oscar-nominated visual effects work on The Mask (1994) was a “keystone in the history of visual effects,” according to Mike Schmitt, visual effects supervisor at Giant Killer Robots (GKR), San Francisco. For Son of the Mask, he replicated some of the original ILM Mask effects from scratch.

Son of the Mask''s tornado emulates the original movie''s tornado but was created with an entirely new approach.

“I'm not even sure how ILM did these effects in 1994 with the software and hardware they had back then,” Schmitt says. “But what's cool and instructive about our industry is how, this time, a small company like ours could do the same kind of effects ILM did 10 years ago, with fewer resources.”

In particular, GKR handled two original, recognizable effects: the so-called tornado effect and the “gripping” effect when the mask attaches to someone's face. Schmitt says his team simply reviewed the original film and then came up with its own approach, with the tornado effect posing a major challenge.

“We built an animation rig in Maya (version 6.0) with many controls for our animators,” he explains. “Then, we brought the animation into a rendering rig in Softimage XSI (version 4.0). We rendered the rotating elements of the tornado with the new, rapid motion-blur feature in Mental Ray (version 3.3), creating a nice smearing effect. Multiple passes of different tornado rigs were rendered this way and lit by different colors and lights before we combined all of those elements in the composite (done in Shake 2.51). The trickiest part was getting the tornado to line up perfectly with the character that turns into the tornado. We solved that by deriving the tornado textures from the actual film plates shot on set. Live-action elements were the best way to quickly get proper color and lighting. We then hand-animated the most opaque part of the tornado to get the limbs of the character to line up to where the tornado begins and the character ends. That core element was therefore given more geometry than the rest of it.”