These pages contain examples of the work that I did for Supernova. There were quite a few articles printed in various magazines about the effects for Supernova and every single one of them was wrong about some of the most basic facts. For a start, every single digital shot of a spaceship in the film was rendered in Lightwave. The next thing is that the overwhelming majority of the shots are digital. That nice 25 foot model of the Nightingale? Hmm. As I recall it's in shots a total of twelve times. Twelve times. Everything else is digital. And... there are shots of a digital Shuttle emerging from a practical Nightingale head, shots of the Nightingale back to back that are digital then practical, practical then digital. Sure, some shots suffered under the schedule and could have been better but then there are others... There are others that were shown back to back, real versus digital, on film, to an audience of effects people and when they were asked to point out which was which they said "You're joking, right? It's all models, isn't it?"

And that was our brief; Match the model shots. One particularly heinous piece of disinformation is that the practical Nightingale had to be built so the shots close in on the cockpit would work because the digital version simply couldn't do that. Ho ho ho. There were a couple of those shots. They're digital because the practical didn't hold up that close.

Of the four spacecraft in Supernova, I built three: The Shuttle, the Tug and the RRU. The Nightingale was built by a team of about six people, although even then I did do some work on it.

All images on these pages from the motion picture "Supernova" are copyright 2000 MGM/Digital Domain.