Arts

     After graduating in 1992 with a degree in cinema from San Francisco State University, Wallin spent seven years with Industrial Light and Magic, the pioneering George Lucas-owned effects firm. There, he worked on the movies Twister and The Mummy, among others. After that came brief stints at two California-based SFX houses, ESC Entertainment and Tippett Studio, where he was a digital compositor for several flashy Hollywood films, including Constantine, Hellboy and the Matrix sequels. In 2005 he spent a few grueling months in Wellington, New Zealand, working as a digital artist on Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and then in 2007 did a stint at Sony Imageworks, helping to inject some digital dazzle into I Am Legend and Beowulf. Wallin spent the summer of 2008 in Vancouver as the compositing sequence supervisor for the much ballyhooed Warner Bros.’ Watchmen, another superhero spectacle, based on an Alan Moore graphic novel.

      Those were all fairly short but intense work projects. What has occupied more of Wallin’s time than anything over the last decade is the surrealistic, five-film, art-house Cremaster Cycle made by avant-garde artist Matthew Barney. Wallin spent several years in New York working as visual effects supervisor on three of the Cremaster films—an experience that turned the effects specialist into a filmmaker himself. He’s now close to wrapping up the final edit of his documentary on the Cremaster Cycle, titled I Die Daily. It’s been a 10-year project.

      Wallin, age 39, has put edgy urban living behind him. He lives on a farm in Keswick with his wife, Chrissy Baucom, a painter who grew up in Loudoun County, and their 5-year-old son, Thor—“like the god of thunder,” explains Wallin. He commutes twice a week to Richmond for his VCU gig and spent a few minutes of his school time recently speaking with Virginia Living. Excerpts:

How have special effects changed the movie business?

It depends on who you ask. In my opinion, they’ve changed it for the better in many ways. [For example,] digital effects enable filmmakers to make movies like The Dark Knight, which has been a huge, huge success. It relied heavily on special effects, but the story was still paramount to the project. I think digital effects and special effects are most effective when functioning in the service of the story. Cinema is a narrative art form. It’s about telling stories, and when special effects can help tell a story—make it grand or historical—that’s what’s important to me. That’s not to say that absurd blowouts with mind-boggling effects, like Speed Racer, a high concept that’s all digital, don’t have their place. They are eye candy.