THE ILLUSIoNIST

OVER THE WALL

Few electrical engineering graduates today enter the workforce with the goal of becoming digital effects artists. This was doubly so when Spears first began his career, when digital effects were as experimental as they were extravagant. He believed that competition between movie studios to produce more dazzling effects would lead to rapid advancements in computing technology. “Early digital effects captured the imagination of the world, because we saw things we could never create before,” Spears said. Art was being re-engineered, and he wanted to be on the ground floor.

Upon graduating with his bachelor’s degree from Texas A&M in 1991, Spears made a beeline toward a position at Silicon Graphics and immediately ran into a brick wall. Soon after he applied, the company entered a hiring freeze. Undeterred, he worked odd consulting jobs until he found his way back into Silicon Graphics through its software development division.

When his team was brought on to help develop a pioneering digital compositing system for Kodak, Spears saw a way in. “I talked to people from Kodak’s visual effects arm, Cinesite,” he said. “I got a job there by promoting my skills at a much greater level than I was actually capable of.”

He moved to Los Angeles and acted as a computer graphics supervisor at Cinesite for three years. By 1999, Spears was a visual effects supervisor at Rhythm & Hues, where he worked on various blockbuster movie and TV productions, such as “The Sum of All Fears,” “Superman Returns,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past” and “The Walking Dead.” He and his team created magnificent effects that integrated digital models and animation with live-action footage to create images that could never be realized with practical on-set trickery alone.

CHAOS IS A LADDER

“You know the dragons aren’t real,” Spears said, “and thanks to the behind-the-scenes features on the DVDs, you know how they were made. But if the effect is done well enough, you can look past all that and still be fully engaged in what’s happening.” This is the biggest challenge of working on a show like “Game of Thrones”: sustaining the audience’s suspension of disbelief, or their willingness to accept the impossible for the sake of enjoyment.

Film editing has often been called an “invisible art” because when it’s done well, it’s almost unnoticeable. Cuts from one shot to another happen seamlessly in rhythm until the audience forgets the cuts are there. Spears thinks visual effects artists can benefit from measuring their work by a similar standard. “You have to get out of the way,” he said. “You have to let the story play out without distracting from it. People don’t go to movies to see visual effects; they go to see characters and a story. We have to support that.”

In 2017, Spears left Rhythm & Hues for Pixomondo, where he is working on the upcoming Roland Emmerich-directed World War II film “Midway.” In between his usual work, Spears is also exploring augmented and virtual reality technology that could change how effects are executed in the future. Instead of acting against a blank blue studio screen, for example, actors could interact with laser projections of digital characters and elements on set before those effects are finalized after the fact.

HOLD THE DOOR

Spears never lost his homegrown affection for Texas A&M. The football team remains especially close to his heart, as he fondly recalls camping outside G. Rollie White Coliseum waiting to pull tickets to Aggie games. “One time, my friends and I camped out for tickets to the Texas game, and a photo of me made the front page of The Battalion,” he remembered.

“One of the great things about Texas A&M is that there are so many opportunities as a student to look beyond your core education,” he continued. “Even though the visualization program was just developing during my time at Texas A&M, I was still exposed to many different experiences, technologies and ideas." For artists and engineers alike, Spears has one lesson from Aggieland he wants to pass down. “There’s a tremendous number of toys out there,” he said. “Go play with them.”