Maybe You've Seen It

Some movie scenes Ed Kramer has helped bring to life:

Jumanji (1995)
"The first shot I ever did at ILM was the shot in Jumanji where there were nine monkeys wreaking havoc in the kitchen. You should see it."

Twister (1995)
"One of the bad guys gets killed by a TV antenna.... I killed that guy. His name was Eddie. I felt like I was killing myself."

101 Dalmatians (1996)
"I was using particle systems to do all the snow simulations, like puffy snow and wet, slushy snow, all that kind of stuff that happens when dogs play around in snow.

Another shot featured sixty computer-graphics Dalmatians interacting with twenty real Dalmatians, all in the same frame. There are actually real puppies poking CG puppies, and you just don't know."

Deep Impact (1998)
"On Deep Impact, I saved the Earth. There's this huge piece of a comet that is heading right for the Earth, and, just at the last second, six brave astronauts dive down into the heart of it and blow it up with nuclear devices. What kind of thanks did I get? Did you know I saved the Earth? I spent six months doing those two shots."

Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999)
"I worked on some of the shots with Jar Jar and on some of the light-saber battle scenes."

The Mummy (1999)
"There was a group of shots, all of them involving scarabs, so that was the sequence I was supervising. There were other techniques that had to be worked out to simulate bugs crawling under skin. The actor is just looking at his arm going, 'Aieee!' But I had to make it look like there was something going on under the skin."

Galaxy Quest (1999)
"All around, my favorite movie that I worked on. I developed a lot of the technology for sand and dust and debris that gets kicked up whenever the rock monster moves, and the way his feet crunch through the ground whenever he walks. I never do all of the work.... There were some very talented animators who really brought the rock monster to life."

The Perfect Storm (2000)
"A very, very challenging film. There's a tremendous amount of different elements that have to go into creating a realistic-looking storm. Somewhere I have a list of over a hundred different terms, like bow splash, stern wake, crest spray, ten different kinds of foam, ten different kinds of mist."

The Mummy Returns (2001)
"At the end of the movie, the climax, an entire desert oasis jungle gets sucked into the middle of a pyramid. I supervised the pyramid destruction sequence."

Planet of the Apes (2001)
"I only did one shot, the one where we watch the hero fly through the anomaly in space, when we're right in the anomaly in space with him."

Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002)
"I worked on sequences involving the attack of the clones, the large-scale final scenes of the movie."

Van Helsing (2004)
"I created the shot of Dracula opening his monstrous jaw incredibly wide, revealing razor-sharp fangs before he bites Frankenstein.... I am the lightning guy. It's a new technique for three-dimensional lightning that allows the light to fill up space or react to any three-dimensional object."