At right, Scott Townsend is able to bear a moment in the spotlight with his Oscar-winning supervisor, Bill Westenhofer (left), on the morning after The Golden Compass won the Academy Award for Achievement in Visual Effects.

By Hillary Bhaskaran

On a blustery day in early April, Scott Townsend sits outside a Westside coffee house, steam rising from the cup he holds firmly in his left hand. The Caltech graduate of 1995 is dressed head-to-toe in black. He looks very much the proud father following the birth of his second daughter just three days earlier.

Looking skyward, he considers the weather. “Yeah, it’s kind of cold. Maybe we should go in. Sorry.”

Once inside the coffee-infused establishment, between a glowing fireplace and an elevated television set, he considers his luck. Not only did he make it through Caltech, but he also landed a job in special effects (FX) that put him within a computer’s reach of an Oscar, or closer.

As an FX animator at Los Angeles’s Rhythm & Hues Studios (R&H), Townsend and his collaborators “handle all the tricky, computer-generated effects that can’t be modeled or quantified easily.” These include dust, smoke, and explosions, he recently told a reporter from the Orange County Register. His interview was published after Townsend created the “swirling, glowing mass of stars and dust” that helped the feature film The Golden Compass win the 2008 Academy Award for Achievement in Visual Effects.
But Townsend doesn’t want a big deal made about the Oscar. He figures it was his mother who first leaked the news to his hometown Register. When Caltech News tracked him down, he asked his mom if she had had anything to do with that as well.

However it happened, Townsend now finds himself talking about his favorite projects. “I really did like The Golden Compass,” he admits. “It was rewarding-ish.” He created an aurora borealis for the movie Frequency, which was released in 2000. And for one of Classic Coke’s now-classic polar-bear commercials, he made the Arctic waters ripple, splash, and bubble when a seal surfaced, and he made snow and mist rise as the polar bear plopped down in surprise on an ice floe.

Townsend jokes that his “most degrading two months ever” were spent concocting a stinkbug gas eruption for the 3-D movie It’s Tough To Be a Bug, which is part of the “Bug’s Land” attraction at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. Although modeling the bodily effusions of a rogue insect might not be everyone’s idea of a dream assignment, he has heard that “it delights audiences.” (More recently, he found that it did not delight his three-year-old daughter, who decided she’d had enough by the time the animatronic black-widow spiders descended from the ceiling.)

“I’m most proud of the work I did on Frank the Pug in Men in Black II,” says Townsend of the 2002 movie. “The pug’s cigar smoke was my favorite because I nailed it, and in just a few days. I wasn’t even using fluid-dynamics simulations at the time. I don’t usually give myself a pat on the back, but this one was special.”

To create the illusion of smoke, he used a computer to model layers of mesh that he could deform and roll past each other in a swirling fashion. He placed hundreds of “smoke” particles at the intersections of each of the tiny squares that made up his custom-designed mesh. Then he programmed them to rise at a particular velocity while subjecting them to artfully directed gusts of wind. As each group of particles rose and dissipated, it was replaced by a new group that also appeared to emanate from the pug’s cigar.

“The best effects aren’t noticed because they’re so naturalistic,” says Townsend. “You just think, ‘Oh my gosh, this dog is smoking.’” The dog in question is Frank, who also sings in Men in Black II.

The FX are both more complex and ambitious in The Golden Compass, which is based on a novel by British writer Philip Pullman. Both book and movie are a fantasy about humans whose souls exist in the form of animal-like “daemons” that follow them everywhere. Sometimes the symbiosis ends tragically, with the demise of both human and daemon.

DAEMONIC FX

“What had happened to the dead men’s daemons? They were fading, that was the answer: fading and drifting away like atoms of smoke, for all that they tried to cling to their men.”
—Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

Townsend was asked by his effects supervisor to “make it so,” to bring the so-called “daemon death effect” to life, as it were. “It’s not my vision,” says Townsend, who doesn’t like to hog the credit. He does acknowledge responsibility for researching and developing the daemon death effect and leading the six-person team that created the film footage.

As a technical director, he first worked with programmers to refine fluid-dynamics programs and apply them to the creation of realistic-looking animation sequences. In the field of aeronautics, engineers use a variety of heavy-duty computer packages to map the pathways of air molecules as they flow around an airplane’s wing. Building upon this and other fluid-dynamics work, says Townsend, in-house programmers at R&H have developed their own software using similar algorithms and approaches. Armed with these tools, technically savvy artists can simulate swirls of smoke as a daemon dissolves into thin air.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to turn a wolf daemon into dust. But Townsend drew on his Tech background to refine and use fluid-dynamics software to create “the daemon death effect” (above), earning him his moment of Oscar fame. Readers can try this at home by Googling “free Houdini Apprentice,” but Caltech News cannot be held accountable for the resulting effects, special or otherwise.

For The Golden Compass, Townsend and his team developed a test setup of a dog running along a straight path at a constant speed. “The dog’s body is made up of a million points,” he explains. In each frame of the animation, these points slough off the dog’s surface, revealing a million more points on the surface of a now slightly smaller dog. These points in turn slough off, to be replaced by another million as the dog turns to dust from the surface of its skin inward, shrinking into a smaller and smaller shape surrounded by an ever-expanding ring of dust and embers.

Townsend says that in particle systems such as the daemon dust cloud (depicted in the three illustrations above), each particle or point can be assigned “attributes including position, velocity, and life.” In FX vernacular, the rarified “lives” of these particles can be described and modeled within a range of zero to one, with zero representing birth (life), and one representing death.

As the particle “ages” in successive frames, equations that link its size and opacity to its life cycle govern its evolution from robust and bright to expansion and fade-out. Tie these attributes together, says Townsend, and the particles will appear to fade away if opacity equals one minus life, and these fading particles will make up an expanding cloud of dust that becomes more and more transparent if size equals two times life.

“Then a sine wave can be used to cause the particle to pulse and flicker,” he adds. “It’s good fun.”

Texture and dimension are added as well. The points are enlarged into spheres that are manipulated to fake a three-dimensional texture. “In the past, we just gave the spheres a texture on their surface or shell. But now we use mathematical functions in three-dimensional space to fill the spheres with patches of high and low density. This creates a noisy pattern” that mimics the variable density of a cloud. In The Golden Compass, these enhancements lent a more volumetric look to the clouds of starry daemon dust, creating the illusion of depth.

Townsend struggles to clarify this Hollywood version of rocket science, which is apparently a blast for those who understand it. He asks for a pen so that he can illustrate the process on a napkin, tapping the pen to paper to make a loose cluster of points, assigning a radius to each, and tracing circles around the points to turn them into spheres. All the while he searches for a way to make his thoughts more tangible.

“If I don’t know a word, I say words around it,” he explains. “I like buckshot logic, probabilistic meanings, shades of gray.” A self-proclaimed perfectionist, Townsend spends his days capturing the imperfections of nature through art. “I’m suited to this line of work,” he adds. He likes designing effects that are “nebulous, undefined, can’t be put in a box . . . which is me. I don’t want to be easily categorized.”

CALTECH EFFECTS

Looking back on his student days, Townsend thinks he was a little strange, even by Caltech standards. But in some ways he fit right in. “I was the weird guy with purple hair.” In case that doesn’t ring a bell with his fellow alumni, he adds that he skateboarded around campus wearing self-styled Genie pants, and he had his arm in a cast for a while after skateboarding off a patio. The accident occurred near the Red Door during a student film night that he had organized.

While a student, Townsend also experimented with music. He played “percussive noises and additional rhythms” with a friend at the Red Door, and he organized two “musical” events: “Eve of Percussion” and “Repercussions.” These featured students beating on pipes in the underground Student Activity Center.

Years later he would release an album incorporating “overlooked, everyday sounds like the humming of a light fixture, the clicking of an escalator, and the creaking of a dock.” He’s proud of this and of his experimental music concerts in Berlin, New York, and elsewhere. But as a student, he was just having fun and getting a needed break from math and physics, which he found to be “crushing.”

His father had made it through Caltech, and his brother was doing well as a Techer, but Scott was not prepared for the fall he took from high-school salutatorian to “middle of the herd” student. “I was deriving proofs on faith,” he says. “I was out of my depth. By sophomore year, it got to me.” Townsend dropped some required classes and picked up a film class at Art Center College of Design. He started looking into full-time art programs and taking design and photography classes. “I didn’t want to stagnate,” he says.

He had also discovered that he didn’t like majoring in mechanical engineering. Building robots had sounded cool, but the “perfect engineering” it required was agonizing. “I didn’t want to build something that worked merely because it had been engineered to perfect tolerances,” he explains. “I wanted a robot to be able to adapt if it had a rusty limb. I like imperfections.

“I needed to reevaluate my life,” he says. Halfway through his Caltech education, he “sort of dropped out or took a leave of absence.” Around that time, a waitress told Townsend about the San Francisco Art Institute, and within a month he was living in the Bay Area and studying film at “America’s last pure fine-arts school.”

At the Art Institute he found “a lot of people trying to say something who still had their lives to live before they would have something to say.” But he found no classes in directing or lighting. “I liked the technical emphasis at Pasadena’s Art Center and Caltech,” says Townsend, who returned to Southern California after a year away to “get practical and be more grounded.”

Back at Caltech as a veteran sophomore, Townsend switched his major to engineering and applied science with an emphasis in computer science. He says he was fortunate to be awarded two Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships with Professor Nate Lewis ’77, MS ’77, with whom he worked on Caltech’s Chemistry Animation Project. “That introduced me to professional animation packages and ultimately gave me some material for the demonstration reel that I would bring to Rhythm & Hues.” Without that experience, Townsend says he might have become a programmer—perhaps “a rich guy working at Google,” he jokes. But as it turned out, he says that he’s “much richer inside” now that he’s an animator married to a “beautiful programmer-turned-graphic-designer” from the Bay Area.

Forays into the worlds of art and science give Townsend a unique perspective on both. Taking a year-long break from the Institute to attend art college in San Francisco, he discovered that students there were not that different from those at Caltech. His fellow Techers were pursuing reality through science, he noticed, while his art-school peers were pursuing their own version of reality.

After graduating from Caltech, Townsend showed up for an interview at R&H with everything he could think of that might lead to a job there. He brought his Art Center and Art Institute films, his Chemistry Animation Project videos, self-styled clothes, musical recordings, and photographs. He left his nose ring at home.

“I was incredibly lucky to get a break,” he says of landing a job. “Still, I didn’t know what kind of work I was getting into. Upper management tried me out in FX, and it was a perfect fit.

“I’ve always straddled the art-technical line,” says Townsend, who seems most at ease talking about the artistic aspects of his life. He is thankful that his job “relies more on artistry than computer science.” He is also more likely to call himself a miserable programmer than an Oscar winner.

Does he even feel like an Oscar winner? “No. But I do feel like part of a team that won it. I’ve been thanked for my contribution. But everyone worked so hard.”

Townsend points out that he was part of a group of 20 FX animators and a swirling mass of creature animators who made up the “hundreds of people” who had a hand in the high-tech fantasy film. The statuette was presented to Bill Westenhofer (the R&H visual effects supervisor) and representatives from collaborating companies in the early part of the televised Academy Awards ceremony, before Townsend tuned in. (When it comes to publicity, Townsend and fellow animators tend to be out of the media loop. “We’re used to being listed after the caterers in the film credits,” he says.)

Townsend did have the honor of being called “the galloping gourmet of special effects” at another Academy Award function, at which his explanation of The Golden Compass’s fluid-dynamics tools did help four of his colleagues win a Technical Achievement Award certificate. The movie also won a BAFTA for Special Visual Effects, awarded by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

While creating special effects, Townsend doesn’t dream of golden statuettes. “I’ve never worked on a job and consciously thought that it could get us an Oscar. I always try to do my best work,” he says.

His long-term dreams lie in creative ventures. He’d like to find a market for his photographs, like the ones he took of paint-splattered curbs and streets. He continues to take classes in furniture design and welding in hopes of starting companies that would reproduce and sell prototypes that he designs. “My fantasy is to someday support my family by making money from any creative impulse I have.”

That said, Townsend glances at his watch, takes a last sip of coffee, and rushes off to tend to his newborn baby.

Watch for Townsend’s effects in the upcoming Mummy sequel. If you’d like to tell about your work in the biz, please e-mail hillarypb@earthlink.net, and note that you don’t have to be an Oscar winner to do so. (Caltech’s two known winners were already featured in 2007—Ray Feeney ’75—and in 1992—Eustace Lycett ’37.) Mothers are also welcome to contact Caltech News, but for the record, Townsend’s mother did not.