Originally hailing from Limerick, Simon Brown is a technical director whose credits include The Matrix Revolutions (ESC Entertainment), Van Helsing and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (Industrial Light & Magic), and Robots (Blue Sky Studios). His most recent credit is as special effects senior technical director on Ice Age: The Meltdown. Simon talked to Paul Farren about the pros and cons of computer graphics in motion pictures.

Paul: So tell me, what is a technical director?

Simon: Well, the job description would be 'creative person with a strong technical background'. Sometimes they' be people from engineering backgrounds and pure science, but also people from fine art backgrounds. With computer graphics you're using very technical software to do very creative things. That's a high level description. Technical directors would usually do things ranging from looking at the lighting of a scene to doing the effects to figuring out how a character might respond to animation.

How did you fall into this line of work?

After my maths and physics degree I was wondering what to do – high art or science. Then I learned about computer graphics, animation and computer games, and thought 'that sounds fantastic'. So I went off and got a masters in computer graphics and went to work with Sony; from there I managed to get work with the Moving Picture Company in London. I started off writing some software tools for the artists, then I got my foot in the door doing some rain for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, just a few seconds worth of work up on the screen, but the first job that I could say I did.

Your most recent work was on Ice Age 2, is there a difference for you in terms of doing CGI for animation opposed to working on live action films?

Yes, there is a difference. With the live action you have a plate, some photography has been done, and you're looking to fill in some details. You have a pretty strong reference of where it's supposed to go and how it's supposed to look. When you're doing computer animation every tiny detail, from a puff of dust when a characters foot hits the ground to a tiny leaf in the background, requires a lot of thought beforehand. You can't just expect the details to be fleshed out, so that's the biggest difference.

Do you think the development of CGI is as much because of the gaming revolution as it is to do with film?

That's a good question, I'm not really sure. For me the games were a stepping stone into movies, they kind of a go along a parallel path; there's not too much crossover of technology, but on some of the bigger films you are starting to see some crossover. A lot of the crowd-based stuff, such as the battle scenes on Lord of the Rings, they'd use similar rendering techniques that games use. The computer graphics industry as a whole has taken off over the last ten years, it's very fresh and new.

Have we really come that far in terms of effects? Terminator 2 was, of course, the first CGI mindblower, then we had Jurassic Park; but CGI in live action certainly seems to have plateaued, even the likes of Spiderman have produced some ropey FX.

You've a very good point there. The way I see it, back then you would devote an entire studio's resources to doing a single Terminator effect, or the dinosaurs, and get the very best people involved. Nowadays I like to think that places like Blue Sky are still keeping that high bar. What's happening is, if last year you do one dinosaur, then this year you do a hundred; and now that we've done it once, instead of getting the best experts in the field, we'll try using this regular software. There are pros and cons to it. What you're talking about is where they do these movies and the budget isn't enough or it's overly ambitious.

But even, say, King Kong was a mixture of ropey CGI and fantastic CGI. Kong himself was an amazing creation, but alongside it were some unconvincing dinosaurs – notably the brontosaurus.

When I am listening to directors or other creative people at the beginning, it's not so much 'can we do it', it's 'how long is it going to take us to do it?' Because anything is possible; the problem with that is that someone like me doesn't have a huge amount of control over that. Your imagination is the limit, and that's not necessarily the best thing. But yeah, with Kong you're right, he was a benchmark, you really got lost in the character.

Which raises another issue, the ability to put such huge spectacle on the screen affecting storytelling: it's often the case that the spectacle outweighs the story.

Definitely people do tend to lean on it a bit. There is something about spectacle in movies that goes right back, but the problems come when it doesn't have any story to support itself and it falls flat. It needs to be in addition to a good story, I use Indiana Jones as an example: there's no computer graphics but there is a strong spectacle. My personal feeling is that it gets a bad name because of the few. When it doesn't work, even a twelve year-old can see it. But what a lot of people don't know about is that even non-spectacle movies, like one of the recent Jane Austen adaptations, you'd have a lot of computer graphics involved – not in a big way – but these days computer graphics touch everything. When used well it can be very effective.

I think that effects all have their sell-by date; what was state-of-the-art twenty years ago is going to look patchy today, even something like the original Star Wars.

The audience's eye changes. A good example is what happened to Blue Sky a few years ago. They did an ad for Braun, a computer animated shaver; they put it in for competition and got refused because the organizers thought it was real. The problem now is that when people see something fantastic they think it's CGI even if it isn't! People nowadays are not surprised by effects.

Do you think you're spoiling the audience too much?

Maybe there's a bit of that, but I'd like to see how it evolves over the next few years.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is release to buy and rent on DVD on the 23rd October 2006 by 20th Century Fox
See review here.