Six months in the Alaskan wilderness and $5,000 allowed Timothy Albee to single handedly create the 23-minute demo for Kaze, Ghost Warrior. All images © 2003 Timothy Albee Animation. All rights reserved.

If you have the Kaze, Ghost Warrior.

You have heard it before. Stories of: “If they won’t let me do a movie, I’ll go do it myself!” are part of the Hollywood legend. It is well known that if you have talent, “they” will give you a chance — or will they? For some people, waiting for their lucky day is not enough: they need to make their own chances and force a breakthrough on their own. Sam Raimi’s homemade Evil Dead (1981), Peter Jackson and his four years-in-the-making Bad Taste (1987) or Robert Rodriguez’s can-you-believe-he-shot-it-for-$7,000 El Mariachi (1992) are here to remind every wannabe filmmaker that it is possible.

Ask Timothy Albee, a former animator who last year embarked on an amazing journey: creating a stylish CG-animated short film to raise funds for a feature film project. And the result, Kaze, Ghost Warrior, is, by any standard, impressive. Albee resisted producing a mere technical showcase à la Final Fantasy and created instead a unique world populated by intriguing characters. Kaze is much more than a “look-what-I-can-do” film. It is a real piece of art in which substance and style — for once — transcend technology. Most impressive of all, Albee created Kaze alone, on two PC workstations, working in a cabin in the wilderness of Alaska…VFXWorld recently spoke to Albee about his Alaskan journey to make Kaze, Ghost Warrior.

Albee (left) at SIGGRAPH 2004 with Steve Worley, creator of the fur simulation package Sasquatch used in Kaze.

Alain Bielik: How did this all start?

Timothy Albee: I’ve always been an artist. I’m a painter and a musician (I even trained in opera), but what I really wanted to do was cel animation. I quickly delved into CG animation and worked on video games, commercials, TV series (Babylon V) before joining Walt Disney Feature Animation, credited as an assistant animator on Dinosaur (2000). I then ran my own animation company called Exile Films for a while. It all changed the day I saw Fight Club (1999). There was a scene in which Brad Pitt’s character drives very dangerously and asks his passengers: “If you were to die now, what do you wish you had done in your life?” An answer popped up into my mind instantly: go live in a cabin in Alaska… And I did it.

AB: Really!

TA: I quit everything and on May 1, 2001, I settled down in a cabin lost in the wilderness. I was planning on a sabbatical leave of one or two years. To tell you the truth, I’ve always had a passion for mushing and settling down in Alaska allowed me to live this passion in a very intense way. This said, the conditions are pretty extreme out there. I almost died on four occasions…

AB: How did you sustain yourself during this sabbatical?

TA: I traded paintings against food and supplies. I also wrote books on CGI, filmmaking and animation, one of which now replaces the manual for LightWave 3D. LightWave is my favorite animation package, along with Softimage. I’ve had the opportunity to work with Maya and it is a very powerful tool. However, when I delved into producing CG animation, I looked for a package that was an extension of my own creativity. LightWave supports this. With Maya, you first need to write a bunch of scripts in order to be able get it to do what you see on its demo reel — basically re-programming the thing. It is billed as “Teamware,” and you end up with as many programmers as animators. It didn’t work for me. Plus, LightWave comes with the fastest renderer, that looks beautiful, right out of the box, while it’s assumed that with Maya, you need to acquire RenderMan or mental ray for a decent looking render, which requires even more programming as shaders must be written. To me, Maya is like buying a very powerful car in which you still have to build the transmission. With LightWave, one person can do it all. And that’s exactly what I had to do.