Forget business tycoons and the kung fu fighters, typical protagonists in Hong Kong movies. The hero of one recent film whose producers used lots of special effects is a tech visionary. He heads Hong Kong's most powerful telecommunications company. His special accomplishment: He pioneers on-demand Net video. The villain in the movie, Armageddon, is the chief executive of a software company bent on destroying the world.
Techie heroism can only work in the movies with a real techie making sure that the movie has the right dose of special-effects spark. For Armageddon, that person is Stephen Ma, owner of the fledgling Cubists Limited.
While other Hong Kong multimedia shops are focusing on the high-paying advertising market, Ma has been producing special effects solely for feature films since he set up shop in 1993 with secondhand animation hardware and US$13,000 in start-up capital.
At first, Ma ran smack into the local industry's reluctance to spend on special effects. In his first year, he handled only 10 low-budget projects. But since then, his work load has swelled. Last year, Ma worked on 40 films, including 10 medium- and high-budget films.
Few city productions approach the magnitude of this year's big special-effects event: Storm Riders, a kung fu epic. Centro Digital Pictures is using a crew of 25 animators and programmers, and will include more than 200 digitally enhanced scenes. Old news in Hollywood, eye-opening in Hong Kong.
Ma said that while conservative movie studios are still unfamiliar with technology — most have yet to even create Web sites — the new generation of filmmakers is more willing to experiment.
"The demand for computer graphics for films now is certainly good, especially among the younger directors," he said.
Filmmakers like Gordon Chan, who produced and directed Armageddon, are growing familiar with computer-assisted special effects. They're also willing to spend more for the technology: Chan's special-effects budget of nearly US$260,000 was almost six times the norm, he said.
That's hardly a lavish sum, though, and Chan said he prefers to take a judicious approach to using effects. "We talk about special effects that nobody notices. They become part of the story instead of being some kind of gimmick," he said.
In a way, directors like Chan embrace the less-is-more style out of necessity. Economics, as well as unfamiliarity, make technical pyrotechnics a tough sale. That's especially true when a movie like Centro's 1995 production, The Umbrella Story, fails to produce big box office. The film, Hong Kong's answer to Forrest Gump, cleverly used archival footage to create scenes such as one in which a modern actress dances with a young Bruce Lee.
OK, maybe it wasn't such a great idea. The film sold less than $1 million in tickets.
"Special effects are very expensive, but just because you have special effects, it doesn't mean that you can make more money," said Titus Ho, the director of production and development for the Shaw Brothers film company.
Greg Chang and Saidah Said write for Wired News and Dataphile, a print and online cyberculture magazine in Hong Kong.
