The Alumni Magazine for Worcester Polytechnic Institute. (WPI)
Issue link: http://wpialumnimag.epubxp.com/i/114745
Some of Pete Travers's most challenging visual effects work went into Watchmen and What Dreams May Come. a long, terrorizing scene set in an elevator shaft digitally created by Travers—it got an Oscar nomination for best visual effects. HEY PETE, CAN YOU PAINT OUT THAT HIGHWAY? isual effects, says Travers, boils down to anything that can't be shot in camera. It's not always ƃesh-eating aliens or tsunamis. "We can paint out a pimple on an actor's skin, or the wires that make them ƃy," he says. Sometimes whole buildings need to vanish. In The Aviator, Travers put Leonardo DiCaprio in the cockpit of a vintage FX-11 spy plane, and dialed the Beverly Hills skyline back to 1946 to recreate Howard Hughes's devastating crash. "To use a nerdy Star Trek analogy—the visual effects supervisor is like the chief science ofƂcer on the Enterprise," Travers explains. On location in the pre-production phase of a movie, the director might turn to him and say, "Hey, Pete, can you paint out that highway and put something else in there?" The answer is usually yes— at a price. It's up to Travers, who might have hundreds of people working under him, to provide the budget breakdown. "That backand-forth never stops," he laughs. "Up to the very end of the shoot, they'll be asking those questions." Viewers don't always recognize what they're seeing as visual effects. In his most recently competed project, Here Comes the Boom, Travers's challenge was to pack the stands of a UFC championship with 20,000 spectators—without the cost of employing 20,000 extras. "We shot at a real event, and then shot Kevin James at the 6,500-seat Tsongas Center arena in Lowell, Mass. By merging the two environments, we got an absolutely photoreal event with Kevin surrounded by tens of thousands of fans. The logistics were challenging, but the result was rewarding. That's what keeps me interested—creating solutions to the problems of each script." V TIME MACHINE: WORCESTER n the early 1990s, WPI's classrooms didn't look like the launchpad to a Hollywood career. But Travers insists it was perfect career preparation. "There was no curriculum for the industry I'm in, back when I was in college," he says. "If I had a I 34 Winter 2013 FRESH FROM A YOGA RETREAT IN BIG SUR, TRAVERS IS FILLED WITH REALIZATIONS ABOUT HOW WPI CHANGED HIS LIFE. TWO PROFESSORS IN PARTICULAR LAID THE FOUNDATION FOR THE WORK HE DOES TODAY. BY TEACHING HIM HOW TO THINK AND HOW TO WORK. time machine, and I had to go back and do it over—given what was available at the time—getting a degree in mechanical engineering from WPI was probably the best option for my path." Fresh from a yoga retreat in Big Sur, Travers is Ƃlled with realizations about how WPI changed his life. Two professors in particular laid the foundation for the work he does today. In Thermodynamics, Jack Boyd taught him how to think; and Bob Norton's Kinematics class taught him how to work. "Professor Boyd would ask us to picture a tennis ball dropping off of a building, and have us consider all the forces involved. We would discuss things like control volume, and force manipulation, but he was really developing the problem-solving abilities of our minds.