David Ridlen
Master of the unnoticed
Could you briefly introduce yourself/Company and describe your current role in the animation/3D/graphics/VFX/CGI industry?
I am a visual effects generalist of 28 years, primarily using LightWave, Fusion and RealFlow. I have also worked as a CG and FX supervisor in features, TV and commercials. My expertise is mainly in photoreal integration, and diagonal problem solving. I currently freelance, mostly for Pixel Magic who I've worked with for 20 years. I also worked for "The Box" at Rhythm and Hues, Nickelodeon, and CafeFX.
Red Cliff (2008)
How did you get started in VFX?
I drew a lot since I was a kid, always wanting my imaginings to come to life. Most animators have a compulsion to draw and a productive form of OCD, commonly referred to as perfectionism. You pursue this line of work for one reason because you HAVE to.
I was lucky to have known what I wanted to do since age 11 when I first saw Star Wars, and I started experimenting with Super 8 stop-motion animation and timelapse. In 1979, Dad brought home an amazing gadget called a video camera, that was WAY cheaper and easier to use than film. I gradually failed most subjects in school as my interest was consumed with generating homemade "epics" with other wannabe filmmaker friends. In the 80s, I was a videographer, managed video stores, and pencilled portraits. I also dabbled in music, script peddling, and mixing trippy visuals for clubs and plays.
I turned down a USC film school acceptance when I was turned off by the vibe on a campus visit. I ended up studying video production with friends at a well-equipped Texas junior college where they used an early Amiga, mostly as a character generator. However, I quit when teachers started asking us, "How did you do that?" instead of it being the other way around. I realized that we could learn more by ourselves than in school and that prosumer gear was more versatile. I knew film school grads who had barely touched equipment or produced much. With creative endeavours, I am a big advocate for teaching yourself. Even so, it was nearly impossible to create decent visual FX with analogue video.
In the late 80s, I read an article comparing the graphics capabilities of the Amiga and the more expensive Macintosh. My mind was blown when I read there was a way to digitize frames of video one at a time and load them into a paint program. I saw "the light!" of digital - you could create virtually anything you could imagine, without clunky, expensive film gear. I started animating in 2D in Autodesk Animator; and digitizing video on a home computer.
Wind River (2017)
In 1995, I had an odd health scare that led me to quit some poor habits and a soul-sucking job, and I finally got around to teaching myself LightWave 3 on an Amiga Video Toaster that belonged to an art director friend. Another friend had been earning decent money rendering logos in LightWave. I was always into realism, so CGI was the ideal addiction I had been looking for, blending my experience with illustration, animation, shooting and editing. The affordability of desktop production became a way to bypass the more traditionally exclusive route into the movie industry. I rode the digital wave from when Jurassic Park transformed VFX, and Babylon 5 turned heads to the practical accessibility of LightWave.
Back then, everyone wanted CG and flying logos (chrome and lens flares were all the rage), but did not know exactly where to get them. A friend and I mocked up a little computer animation and speciality prop biz in a grungy downtown Dallas industrial space that we lived in (my bedroom was an actual walk-in vault with a big iron door and 2-ft thick concrete walls). Since there were so few places to meet the demand for CG, we stumbled into far-stretching connections that led to doing stuff for clients like HBO (I did their first CG logo), Disney, EDS, TX Instruments, Philips 66 and more. It probably also had something to do with me charging way less than I realized more established places were.
I was determined to create the greatest demo reel of all time and mailed out over 50 copies around the country, plus a few overseas. Recruiters were still mistakenly looking for education on resumes (Rhythm and Hues asked if I had a degree in physics!?), and LightWave was usually regarded as the red-haired, freckled app. But there were no schools for this stuff and SoftImage was about $10 grand! Many obscure monkeys like us were teaching themselves LightWave or 3D Studio skills in their bedrooms. I received only one invite from a place in Burbank called UFO, which produced direct-to-vid genre movies using LightWave to churn out high-FX counts on short deadlines. We had to learn to be fast and efficient. I've never had trouble finding work since.
Green Book (2018)
Who or what are your biggest influences and inspirations in your work?
There are too many to name. I grew up loving the old-school, analogue FX that I hoped to work on, but digital became the thing, although I don't respect it as much. It sounded like the funnest job in the world to invent tricks for constructing actual things to arrange in front of a camera to simulate a convincing spaceship crash landing and such, and have people say, 'How did you do that?!" I still get emotional watching the vintage artistry of Karel Zeman, Harryhausen or Trumbull. A particularly rewarding experience for me was developing practical miniature water FX for a low-budget movie. But we are usually stuck in a dark room pushing a mouse.
With a lifelong obsession for movies, and having worked in video stores for many years (and a theater), I absorbed the full gamut of cinema, and much of music and art outside the normal. I explored underground musicians and artists and resided in a bohemian compound in Dallas's Deep Ellum arts district for several years when I first started with LightWave. There, you could live/work in a 20,000 sq foot warehouse for about $800 a month with other eccentrics (my rent was $160 after splitting), and do anything you wanted - make industrial art, splatter paint everywhere, make noise, blow things up, build sets, put on shows, and sample a mutant mix of media and impulses. But my passion has always been for filmmaking.
LBJ (2016)
What are some of the milestones or key achievements in your career so far?
I find most projects I work on to be hokey. For me, the most meaningful movie I contributed to was Wind River.
But Sin City was an ideal situation for me as one of the CG supervisors, where it was rare for any client to invite such creative freedom. I think that was the most extensive use of LightWave for any feature, where CafeFX handled over 400 FX shots for the middle part of three segments, using mostly LightWave 7.5 and Fusion. I read a lot of comics and was very familiar with the gritty world of Metal Hurlant and Frank Miller. Years prior, an art director friend and I would talk about producing an independent Sin City movie because I didn't believe a studio would ever associate with such graphic content. I wanted to do it as a "digital backlot" from before that was a term. But it was right up my alley.
I learned that it is ok for a client to not always know what they want when they trust the people they hire to bring ideas. That can motivate the crew to prove themselves and go the extra mile for an interesting project. It's only a problem when they micromanage your ideas, without knowing what they want. With many of the all-green background shots, the director was open to ideas. I love it when I can fill the space with my ideas for a sequence. Usually, the director liked what we came up with, as we were eager to impress. I was surprised when Sin City took the Palme d'Or, I think mainly for its unique style. An online critics group awarded it "Best Cinematography," not realizing how much of it was actually CG. The overall look was influenced by the severe black-&-white look of Eraserhead (I screened my copy for the crew), and the Tornado scene in Wizard of Oz, which I still consider the most awesome special effect of all time.
At that time, I nearly had an opportunity to produce projects. But that was also when my health started to decline due to an unusual autonomic disorder. So I was not able to move on to bigger challenges. I became disabled by 2009, and since then I have only worked part-time, mostly off-site.
Raised by Wolves (2020)
What Projects have you used Lightwave 3D on?
Everything on my IMDB page, and several commercials and music videos
What are your favourite features of LightWave 3D, and how do they enhance your work?
I don't really have any favourites. It's easy to quickly set up realistic lighting, and I like that the buttons have remained named, instead of covered in cryptic symbols ("what does that button with a picture of two Dutch men hanging each other do again?").
LightWave has been well suited for hard surfaces and set extension in production, but it could really benefit from a crowd sim tool. There are so many shows (particularly sports-oriented), that regularly need to fill period locations or stadiums with cheering crowds. Pixel Magic has done tons of that.
But I am in an unusual circumstance, where I only work on isolated tasks, and LightWave is what I know best. I have accumulated an ENORMOUS archive of LightWave assets with decades of work to pull from, so I don't start many tasks from scratch. These days, I am usually the guy for snow, snakes and helicopters. Be careful what you get good at. That's what you wind up getting called for.
-Sin City was an ideal situation for me as one of the CG supervisors, where it was rare for any client to invite such creative freedom
David Ridlen
