THE GOLDEN COMPASS

When Mike Fink signed on as visual effects supervisor for "The Golden Compass," he assumed he would spend much of the film's two-year schedule on effects associated with the Alethiometer, the golden instrument of the title, which divines the truth and helps the story's preteen heroine navigate a pseudo-Victorian world rife with dirigibles, Tartar warriors and armored polar bears.













The filmmakers, though, decided that the actors could convey the magic wielded by the clockwork device -- which plays a key role in this first installment of a proposed trilogy adapting Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" novels -- leaving Fink to attend to the rest of the film's 1,100 visual effects shots. Until two months, ago, that is, when Fink was asked to illustrate the compass' unique effect using his own CG wizardry.












With time running out, the complex compass he had first imagined was jettisoned in favor of a simpler, more achievable effect: artisans at Digital Domain added digital particles to previously shot footage, making the images emitting from the clockwork mechanism look as if they were composed of magical dust motes.














"I said, 'The particles should embody the color, the luminance and the chroma of the objects they emit from,' " Fink says. "Even though the images were all 2-D, we'd position the edges or bright parts in space, then emit particles from them with a certain life, velocity and turbulence, which made the images feel much more dimensional."
The abrupt change in direction was only one of several major course corrections Fink and his visual effects crew navigated on a production that sometimes seemed to mirror the characters' tumultuous journey.