Make Sticky, Morph!

By Guy Garcia

The creature's arms elongate into gleaming spikes that impale people and latch onto moving cars. It can appear as a bulge in the floor, transforming itself into a humanoid that then proceeds to walk through a steel gate, its artificial skin oozing between the bars like melted butter. Frozen by liquid nitrogen, it is shattered into a thousand pieces, but its fragments congeal again into a glistening body of liquid chrome.

To the wide-eyed audiences of Terminator 2, the android called the T-1000, with its ability to assume the shape of anything it touches, is a state-of- the-art killing machine sent from the future to do battle with Arnold Schwarzenegger. But to the special-effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic, the T-1000 is a technological marvel that represents, in the words of coordinator Dennis Muren, "the beginning of a new period of filmmaking." The San Rafael, Calif., firm, which director George Lucas founded in 1975 to design the special effects for his Star Wars, has crafted dazzling sequences for dozens of movies, including current releases like Backdraft, The Rocketeer and Hudson Hawk. But its work for Terminator 2 sets new standards.

The T-1000's protean forms were achieved through a computer technique called digital compositing. The technique breaks a film image down into a complex numerical code that a computer can manipulate in nearly endless ways, thus altering the image. To change the T-1000 from a robot to its human form, ILM employed a process nicknamed Morph, as in metamorphosis, first developed in 1988 for the film Willow. Footage of the robot and footage of actor Robert Patrick were coded and fed into the computer, which blended one into the other. The illusion of walking through steel bars was created by another pioneering method that ILM technicians have dubbed "Make Sticky." Footage of Patrick walking unimpeded down a corridor was layered over a computer-enhanced three-dimensional image. As the computer image "melts" to simulate flesh deforming between computer-generated "bars," so does its onscreen counterpart.

ILM is hoping to surpass even these triumphs in such upcoming films as Star Trek 6, Memoirs of an Invisible Man and Steven Spielberg's Hook. Special- effects fans can look forward to more strange, mind-boggling characters; worlds that alter their shape, color and form; and, perhaps most amazing, flights of fancy so realistic that audiences won't ever suspect they're seeing an act of industrial imagination.

With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles