© Copyright 2010 by Entropy Enigneering Universal Soldier – Big Budget Movie OK, so it was a big budget movie, but not by the time I got called in. I’m sure that Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren were paid in advance.  Money was getting tight, but they still needed a pile of graphics. Like almost all of them. For this one, I had to pack up and move out west for a little while. The thing about Video Titler™ on the PC was that I had versions for all of the video overlay boards, and the boards. A pile of them came with me. Compaq gave me a shiny new 486-25 for the show and Quinn-Curtis gave me a copy of their graphing software to help with some of the screens. If you’ve ever seen the movie, Just about all of the computer graphics seen in the first half of the movie, before the big truck gets wrecked, was created using either Video Titler™ or one of my other custom programs. One of the cards I used allowed for some real time graphics effects. One day we got the footage from the gas station that got blown up with the people in fire suits on fire. Problem was that you could clearly see that they were in fire suits. Switch to Point of View (POV, remember, I’m working on a movie so I can officially use the jargon.) Universal Soldier and the gas station scene is heavily “computerized”. In my version, you can’t really see the fire suits any more. That saved a very expensive scene from having to be reshot. In those days, digital video didn’t really exist and each time you added a layer of graphics, things had to be re- recorded which degraded the footage. Scenes like the gas station had not only live video but also computer graphics overlaid on top of the video. If this was done in multiple steps, the video would have gotten quite crappy before it was done. For these scenes, I had four computers with video overlay cards locked together so that the effects and graphics could be done in a single take. I was on the phone to one of the manufacturers while setting the system up, and they assured me that it couldn’t possibly work. Maybe that’s why their sales were terrible and they were bought by Pinnacle. Fortunately, they were real wrong, and the system worked flawlessly. It did take a bit of a dance to trigger all of the machines on cue, but that’s why I got the bucks. True Lies – Extra Big Budget Movie with (now) Governor Arnold and James Cameron I didn’t get screen credit for this one, but you can still find my signature in the final movie. Dan and I had a few scenes to work on for True Lies.  One of them was for the scene when the Harriers take out the bridge. We did a nice tracking system for POV cockpit showing missile tracking. We got cut. Sniff. Apparently Digital Domain thought that rendering computerized missiles into the scene was more compelling than showing a computer screen. We also had a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis was being interrogated. They needed a voice stress analyzer for one of the computer screens. I wrote a program that took the microphone input and generated a voice print looking thing on screen, along with some reports. During the interrogation scene, you can find this screen to the left of Tom Arnold’s arm. If you look carefully on a widescreen version, you can see that it is an Entropy Engineering product. Isn’t Entropy Engineering the company that made Video Titler™? In that same scene, one of the monitors is showing Jamie Lee Curtis in what looks like a thermal camera. This is one of the other tricks that the system I set up for Universal Soldier could do. We didn’t quite get the screen time that the big effects house did, but our graphics did make it into the movie. And we got to hang out the set while they were filming in the DC area. Gotta love Craft Services lunches.