Jan 31, 2005 - Claremont, Calif. -

Harvey Mudd College alumnus Scott Stokdyk '91/92 has been nominated for an Academy Award (Oscar) for his work in creating the visual effects for the movie Spider-Man 2.

It is Stokdyk's third nomination for special effects. He was also nominated for the first Spider-Man movie in 2002 and for Hollow Man in 2000. The Oscars, given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, will be presented on Sunday, Feb. 27. For information about the Academy Awards and Stokdyk's nomination, go to:

http://www.oscar.com/nominees/nom_34165.html

Stokdyk's path from Harvey Mudd College student to special effects creator was featured in the college's magazine HMC Bulletin in 2003:

HMC BULLETIN, Spring 2003, pp. 15-17
The Invisible Career
by Stephanie L. Graham

Whether you're Peter Parker or Scott Stokdyk '91/92, it's difficult to predict what the future holds. Peter surely never knew he'd be a web-swinging superhero. And Stokdyk never imagined he'd become an Academy Award-nominated visual effects supervisor lending realism to Spider-Man's exploits.

Understandably so, since, at one time, Stokdyk's chosen profession did not exist. But while the movie industry was evolving, Stokdyk was diligently developing skills necessary for the work he does today.

Stokdyk spent a good part of his youth in front of an Apple II+, making crude representations of pencil drawings on screen. His eyes light up at the recollection.

"I scoured magazines for any bits of code I could pull into my own code," he recalls. "I remember in particular there was one pretty simple but cool shape-filling algorithm that I copied out of a magazine and plugged in, and I was so thrilled that it worked. I really loved the amount of control and flexibility graphically that you could get on a computer compared to what you could do by hand. I also liked being able to procedurally program things and get visual results out of it. That was like the big thrill I had as a kid that carried over into adulthood."

At HMC, Stokdyk continued to seek technical and artistic outlets, finally settling on engineering.

"I think out of all the engineering things that I did at HMC, it was really Clinic that gave me the most sense of happiness," said Stokdyk. Of the two-and-a-half Clinic projects he worked on, an anti-aliasing project he did for Hewlett Packard was his most memorable, he says.

"It was more technical than artistic, but it reminded me of when I was little and had done those graphical kinds of tests. It fundamentally taught me some of the concepts that, even today, I still use. Aliasing and anti- aliasing is a key part of all the work we do."

Stokdyk worked for two years as an applications engineer at Teradyne, Inc., before heeding follow-your-dream advice from HMC economics Professor Gary Evans. With a "very crude demo reel and my programming background from HMC," Stokdyk left Teradyne for a programming job at former visual effects house Motion Works.

"At night, I started learning their really expensive software packages," says Stokdyk. "At the time, that was one of the great barriers to the [entertainment] industry, just being able to learn the software and use the machines. I had free access to them at night, and I was just ecstatic."

When two animators left Motion Works, Stokdyk was poised to step in. "That was probably my big break, being able to get my first job at a place that gave me the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time."

He capitalized on his experience there and went on to create commercial animations and straight-to-video animation productions. When he moved on to Digital Domain in 1995, his visual effects career went into full swing with high-profile projects "Titanic," "Terminator 2:3D" (Universal Studios' special effects show) and "Fifth Element." He joined current employer Sony Pictures Imageworks in 1998 and worked as a digital artist on "Starship Troopers" (1998 Academy Award nominee, best visual effects) and "Contact." He was computer graphics supervisor on "Godzilla" and supervised over 100 shots on "Stuart Little" (1999 Academy Award nominee, best visual effects). As digital effects supervisor on "Hollow Man," Stokdyk received his first Academy Award nomination for what he describes as the "hardest project I've ever worked on."

"Everything we worked on, day by day, was a constant struggle," Stokdyk recalls. "There was so much data we were passing around, it was hard to get to every step. Every mistake you made was so costly and set you back so much. Plus, everybody was stressed out because our deadline was really tight. Just to get comments turned around for the next day was hard enough in itself. And to do it creatively and artistically correct," he laughs, shaking his head, "that was the icing on the cake that you didn't always get to. That was one of the only movies I've worked on where I really wasn't sure if we could get it done."

"Hollow Man"--the story of a deranged scientist who tests an invisibility drug on himself and then morphs layer by layer in and out of nothingness--was quite a departure from Stokdyk's other projects.

"It was totally different from the way we normally do characters," says Stokdyk. "We'd just come off of 'Stuart Little,' where we have a little furry mouse whose fur hides all sorts of skin issues. But for 'Hollow Man' we actually saw all the internals. Everything had to be anatomically correct. So, instead of just driving the skin layer from the animator's controls, we had to build a set of real calcium bones, then build layer upon layer of ligaments and muscles on top of that. Then everything had to not intersect itself, and that was one of the hardest issues. Basically a lot of very good artists went in and, by hand, set up controls to slide muscles over bones to make sure veins were riding on the right surfaces and didn't intersect. That was a tough process in and of itself just to get a static character with all the pieces coming into place. Then getting the invisibility transformation timing became a huge choreography issue."

The grueling experience resulted in an Oscar nomination, which surprised Stokdyk.

"It was something I hadn't expected to happen this early in my career," he says. "Now that I've been nominated, that's fantastic and is something that I can take with me. But it's so much more important to me to have fun on a show and have a crew that I really like."

Tapping the creative visions of veteran director Sam Raimi (his movie, "Evil Dead 2," is one of Stokdyk's favorites) and pioneer visual effects designer John Dykstra was a thrill for Stokdyk. The rest of the "Spider-Man" team--200 strong--combined to make the movie a truly enjoyable experience.

"We had a lot of fun, and I think it shows up in the movie." A majority of the team is back for "Spider-Man 2." Stokdyk says to expect the energy and action from the last shot of "Spider-Man" to carry over into the start of the next movie. "We expect to do a lot of things better and some new things," he says enigmatically, refusing to reveal more.

With his enviable combination of artistic and technical skills, Stokdyk is positioned to take advantage of all that he's learned and remain among the industry's trendsetters. He recently worked on a preliminary test for the upcoming Robert Zemeckis movie "Polar Express," based on the popular children's book.

"It's going to be one of the first all-computer-generated movies directed by a renowned, live-action director. It takes the 'Toy Story' or 'Shrek' kind of look and takes it to a different place because it's coming from the mind of a live-action director. So it's going to be slightly more realistic looking but fantastical where it needs to be fantastical," he says. "I think there's a whole world that is going to come from all these creative minds who are thinking in incredible, new ways."

That Stokdyk is one of these creative minds is apparent. "I think I've got a good combination of artistic and technical skills, so I can understand creative, technical ways to solve visual problems," he says, "That's what I want to keep on doing."

Thanks in part to two Oscar nominations, Stokdyk has reached a comfortable plateau in his career. At work and at home-he and wife Danielle Stein (Pitzer College '93) became parents to son Mason last year-he is very content. Now that he doesn't have anything to prove, Stokdyk says he's concentrating on enjoying what he loves to do.

"When I was going to Mudd, I was more worried about getting a good engineering job than really pursuing things I was passionate about," recalls Stokdyk. "You think you're planning out a road map in college about what you're going to do, but the reality is you have no idea where you'll be in five years. There may be opportunities in five years that never existed."