After explaining the effect Bass wanted to achieve, Okun would sit with
the technicians while they worked, eventually learning the technology. "I
didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that. I was a very entertaining fellow,
telling them jokes and getting them coffee . . . " In time, when he brought
in footage and they told him the effect was impossible, he was able to offer
creative suggestions for accomplishing it. "Eventually, these optical houses
would get phone calls from movies that were in trouble and they would
tell them to talk to me--I became known as `the fix it guy.'"
The first feature Okun was called in to fix was The Last Starfighter,
directed by Nick Castle. "It was really the first movie that ever used 3-D
computer created graphics--not Tron, as everyone thinks. It turned out to
be a small success and my name got around. That's how I became `the
visual effects guy': I got drafted into it."
Working on films like Die Hard 2 and Shocker, Okun established
himself as the optical king. On Shocker, he replaced a supervisor who had
made promises to director Wes Craven that he could not fulfill. "I had to
unravel everything, down to finding out where the negative was . . . and
figure out how to accomplish a ridiculous number of shots in a ridicu-
lously short amount of time, for no money." With technology rapidly
changing in the early 1990s, he began mastering the digital effects world.
For Sleepwalkers, Okun employed the use of morphs in a new way.
"Nick Garris is the nicest director in the world. He actually understood
[visual effects] and gave us the proper amount of time to do them. We
did half of the film optically and half of the film digitally. It was another
transition stage. We did morphs like nobody had seen before . . . the
camera was moving all the time instead of locked off."
Working with director Renny Harlin on Cutthroat Island required yet
another set of skills. Okun had to create the illusion of two ships doing
battle with one another, having only one ship to work with. When the
director dangled people over an ocean that wasn't there, Okun had to
create it. A big yellow crane was left behind the actors in a sequence of
shots, which Okun had to remove in post. Having seen Okun perform
magic in the repair of Cutthroat Island, Harlin expected even bigger tricks
when he directed The Long Kiss Goodnight.
"Renny, being a quick learner, figured he didn't really have to shoot
anything on the right set or in the right places. He would say to me, `That
building that is behind the actors won't be there. Instead, there will be a
giant lake. All these trees on the left side will be office buildings about
20 or 30 stories tall. In front of the railroad tracks we'll have a four lane
freeway.' I'd say, `Renny, something in the shot needs to be real. Couldn't
we shoot in front of a lake?' He'd say, `You can do it.' Over his loud-
speaker system he would say, `If anybody has seen anything in the shot
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