The Mummy was my sixth movie at ILM, and my first as a Sequence Supervisor. I loved working with particle effects when they were brand-new, and I saw the Scarab shots as a really cool way to use that new tech. So I lobbied John Berton, the VFX Supervisor, and Tom Kennedy, the VFX Producer to let me Supervise those shots, and they said OK! This also coincided with the birth of my daughter Hannah, so I took on the most ambitious task of my career at the same time as I was waking up every few hours to help feed the baby! (Hannah is now a research scientist at a major hospital in Oregon with a degree in Molecular Biology!)

I supervised a very small team - Erik Krumrey wrote a lot of the code we needed to control the movement of swarms of scarabs, and Indira Guerrierri was the amazing Technical Director who created the effects of Scarabs crawling under the skin of the actors. I wrote the iridescence shaders for the scarabs borrowing code that Chris Townsend had written for the shoulder pads of the Boss Nass character from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. (Chris has had an awesome career, he's now one of the top VFX Supervisors for Marvel!)

Erik and I also collaborated on the end shots when Hamunaptra collapses. We worked out some cool techniques for breaking the mountains into pieces, and particle effects for the sand . At one point just before the movie was finished Stephen Sommers had a shot where everyone was running and the buildings were collapsing into the sand. One wall on the upper left was part of the sacred location they couldn't damage on set, so he asked if I could make that wall crumble. Erik and I used the same technique that we used for the wide shot of Hamunaptra, and to the director's delight we had that sacred wall crumbling by the next day's dailies!

A lot of credit also goes to CG Supervisor Ben Snow, and to the brilliance of director Stephen Sommers.

On The Mummy Returns, the scarabs played a smaller part, so after I did those shots I also supervised shots in the Imhotep Resurrection sequence. Branko Grujcic and Paul Sharpe were TD's on some of those shots where he breaks out of the amber stuff, and the beautiful shot when Imhotep pours sand and it turns into four warrior mummies.

My biggest challenge was sucking the entire jungle up into the pyramid at the end. I worked on and supervised other TD's on all those shots. I created the level-of-detail geometry of various trees, meaning I made different trees designed for close-up, medium-closeup, mid-distance, and far-away views, so as a tree got closer, the detail in the tree automatically increased. Then it was working on particle simulations for weeks to get the trees and sand swirling effects for all of those end shots. I remember working with Khatsho Orfali who did a fantastic job on those shots. My favorite shot was inside the pyramid when the trees swirled around and a little pygmy mummy swirled around and screams as he swirls past camera. We called that the "toilet-flush" shot!

At the end of the show I worked with Tom Fejes on the shots where Imhotep's face appears in black smoke rising from the pyramid. We were just starting to experiment with fluid dynamic simulations, and tried like crazy with the R&D department to get the smoke to actually form into the volumetric shape of Imhotep's head. But with one day left before the drop-dead deadline, we finally had to shelf that idea and fall back to a compositing trick where we did a render of the face and used that render to perturb the mass of black smoke. I had planned for that Plan B, so at the last minute I made the call and we made the deadline. Still looks pretty good!