Express

January 1, 1998

Page 15

As a boy, Olun Riley drew cartoon characters, including his own creation, King CORBEAU, on his sketch pad and school textbooks. At 28 he's still creating cartoons but this time he's working on the real stuff - animated movies. He was one of ten computer animators to work on 20^th Century Fox's Anastasia.

"I worked on the movie for about three years," said Riley, who is in Trinidad for the holidays and will be here until January 8^th. "I was the only Caribbean person among the computer animators."

The movie is loosely based on the enduring myth of the possible survivor of the Romanovs, the Russian Royal family. Anastasia tells the tale of a young orphan girl named Anya and her quest to uncover her past.

Anastasia Nicholaievna was the youngest daughter of the last tsar and tsarina of Russia. In 1918, during the Russian Revolution, her parents and the family were executed under a veil of secrecy. For several years afterwards, rumours persisted that some or all of the family had survived, and various impostors emerged, claiming to be one or another of the tsar's children, including Anastasia.

Riley, originally from St Ann's, now lives in Phoenix, Arizona. He said the animators were involved in every frame of the film. They worked together with about 300 artists who created the characters, backgrounds, shadow levels, fire, smoke, train wreck, etc.

"We enhance what they do or do what is difficult for them, like drawing a train with all its detail," Riley said. "To draw a train would take about a month, but it won't be as good as what a computer can do."

Olun Riley has a degree in fine arts from University of Toronto (UfT) where he studied between 1988 and 1991. He also minored in economics.

For three consecutive summers while he was a full-time student at UfT, he studied classical animation at Sheridan College in Oakville. He graduated with a diploma in animation. The computer animator said he was learning to draw characters while studying and that he had learned computer animation on his own.

"All it takes is to understand computers to do animation. I learned it from doing the ads in Trinidad," Riley said.

As a schoolboy, no thick textbook - from the Student's Companion to the West Indian Reader - escaped his cartoon drawings. He drew most of the cartoons he saw on television and created his own super hero King CORBEAU, defender of "his block at the La Basse".

The story behind Riley landing the animation-computing job on Anastasia is a bit circuitous. It all started when Sheridan established Ballyfermont College, a school equivalent to the one in Canada, in Ireland where American director Don Bluth also had his studio. Bluth, who directed Anastasia with Gary Goldman, asked Sheridan graduates to work at his studio. The graduates were also asked to "teach" at Ballyfermont. Bluth also has to his credit An American Tail, Land Before Time and All Dogs go to Heaven.

Riley was in Trinidad at the time working with Advance Dynamics Ltd. and was responsible for working on the Solo Tall Boy, Eco Freco and Mighty Killer animated ads. But he maintained contact with his classmates who informed him of 20^th Century Fox's approach to Bluth to set up a studio in the US, Bluth accepted, but set up shop in Arizona instead of Los Angeles, because he didn't like LA's racy lifestyle and to avoid the trade unions. Riley applied for the position of computer animator and was accepted.

The animators used Microsoft's Softimage main three-dimensional programme to create the movie, which Goldman described in the hardcover book, The Art of Anastasia, as a digitally produced project, from the hand-drawn visuals and voice recordings to every musical note and each individual sound effect.

"Digitally speaking, more than three million individual computer files make up this film. Computer technology has helped us enhance the artists' work and produce animation art never before possible," he wrote.

One of the most challenging parts of the film for Riley was making a Pegasus come to life and interact with the main characters, Anya and Dimitri.

"The work was the level of Jurassic Park style in terms of making dinosaurs come to life," Riley said. "It took six months for the most part. I had to develop a skeletal structure within the objects so that upon animation, it would look like a real horse."

Riley will be working on Planet Ice, the working title of Century Fox's next animation project, a science fiction movie, when he returns to Phoenix. It's scheduled to be released in 1999.

"As long as I'm doing films, I'm pretty happy," he says.

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