Jeff Okun – vfxblog

SPHERE_V2 — Illustration by Aidan Roberts.

Barry Levinson’s 1998 film Sphere, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week, brought with it a diverse array of visual effects straddling both the practical and digital worlds. Its central ‘character’, the sphere itself, was a CG creation by Cinesite, and proved to be one of the toughest design challenges on the movie.

Overall visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun and Cinesite laboured for months over the appearance and textural qualities of the sphere, which needed to be other-worldly, ‘perfect’ and non-reflective – all at the same time. In this oral history of the sphere, vfxblog looks back with members of the visual effects team on the film at how the CG creation was realised – even actor Samuel L. Jackson hilariously weighs in.

Note: Okun’s comments are taken from the fantastic documentary appearing on the Sphere DVD called ‘Shaping the Sphere: The Art of the Visual Effects Supervisor’, while Jackson’s words are from those he made during the audio commentary on the Sphere DVD. Continue reading “‘We tried a million things’ – the oral history of Sphere’s sphere” →

freddie1

In 2005, a new show called Freddie starring Freddie Prinze, Jr. briefly made it onto US television screens. While the show’s one and only season may not have been that memorable, its opening titles were pretty cool – they featured a number of ‘Freddie’ clones getting up to mischief in one continuous shot.

Back then, I was able to interview visual effects supervisor Jeff Okun about that 24 second long clone shot. At the time, Okun graciously provided me with some nice concept and planning imagery relating to the work, but I never saw any final stills, or, crazily, even the actual opening titles themselves! YouTube had just started but there wasn’t much on there yet, and I was in Australia where I doubt the show ever eventually aired.

But just a few days ago I somehow came across the titles while flicking through YouTube, and remembered the fun notes Okun had provided to me about shooting the scene motion control, where the greenscreens would be placed to aid in compositing, and then on the challenges of post. Sadly, a previous incarnation of vfxblog was lost to a server crash, and only some of the site can be found on the awesome Wayback Machine. But the text is still there, along with a lone concept image. Anyway, I’d thought I’d now share the titles and Okun’s text with readers again for a fun look at how those neat titles were pulled off. Continue reading “Retro VFX: Cloning Freddie Prinze, Jr.” →