Legendary Bay Area cinematographer dies at 72

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags Pete Kozachik and Katy Moore-Kozachik at a bookstore. July 14, 2021.Courtesy of Katy Moore-KozachikPete Kozachik, the pioneering visual effects artist and cinematographer who brought his unique style to stop-motion animation classics including “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Corpse Bride,” “James and the Giant Peach,” “Coraline” and more, died Tuesday, Sept. 12, at his Bay Area home due to complications related to primary progressive aphasia. He was 72 years old. His wife, scenic artist Katy Moore-Kozachik, confirmed his death to SFGATE, describing her late husband as an unmatched “tech expert” who was one of the first to use digital cameras in an animated film (“Corpse Bride”) and constructed his own motion-control rigs to use in “The Matrix” series, among other films. She remembered him as a lover of cats and dogs and “a daredevil” who loved scuba diving and taught himself to build and fly his own airplane.“He was diagnosed in 2013, which was hard,” she said of Kozachik’s aphasia, a rare nervous system disorder that slowly impacts a person’s ability to speak, write and communicate over time. “So this is Pete, in a nutshell: I said to him, ‘You have this diagnosis. You’re going to lose language. Why don’t you write your memoir?’ He worked all day into the night for years, and in 2020, I published it for him.” AdvertisementArticle continues below this adPete Kozachik holding his book, “Tales From the Pumpkin King’s Cameraman.”Courtesy of Katy Moore-KozachikThe resulting book, “Tales From the Pumpkin King’s Cameraman,” details Kozachik’s early interest in filmmaking and peels back the curtain of the challenging industry he was deeply involved in for decades. His warm and conversational tone emanates from the page as he recounts working with the likes of Phil Tippett and Dennis Muren at Industrial Light and Magic. He also excitedly discusses the technical intricacies of his painstaking craft — how to make realistic dinosaur puppets by injecting liquid latex foam into the mold; place a fog-effect filter on a camera lens to achieve a ghostly look for characters like Zero (from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”); or use robotic rigs to maneuver the camera just so, preventing animators from bumping into it and forcing them to start the scene over from scratch.“Watching him work was like seeing a giant hovering over a quiet village or a mad scientist in his laboratory, bringing inanimate objects to life,” filmmaker Tim Burton, a frequent collaborator with Kozachik, wrote in the foreword of the book. “It takes an unusual person to work in stop-motion; imagination, patience, technical ability, and a strong artistic vision. Pete has all of these qualities.”Born in Michigan on March 28, 1951, Kozachik became entranced by movies like “King Kong” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” at a young age and spent hours after school at a newsstand, where he pored over science-fiction and horror magazines, namely “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” which offered a behind-the-scenes peek at the actors, writers, directors and makeup artists who made these low-budget masterpieces happen. He idolized one man in particular: visual effects producer and animator Ray Harryhausen, who was responsible for the fearsome creatures in “Clash of the Titans,” “Mighty Joe Young” and “It Came From Beneath the Sea.” AdvertisementArticle continues below this adPete Kozachik on the set of “Auntie Claus” at Athena Studios in Emeryville. Courtesy of Athena Studios in EmeryvilleKozachik decided he wanted to try his hand at making his own Harryhausen-esque movies. A family friend taught him how to shoot, develop and print photos, and after reading an article titled “Build a Movie” in one of their Popular Photography magazines, he got to work on his very first project. Earnings from his job as a paperboy with the Detroit Free Press allowed him to buy a black-and-white 8 mm camera, foam pieces snipped with scissors became crude dinosaurs and cave people, and a dark rabbit-fur purse he found in a trash can was transformed into his star: a King Kong puppet he would pit against the dinosaurs. When his family moved to Tucson, Arizona, he continued to pursue his new hobby, offering to make commercials for the local TV and radio stations he was eventually hired at. Once in a while, he would air some of his personal short films just to see how viewers would react. On a “Saturday afternoon, with the bosses gone, A Jurassic Pictorial went on air unannounced,” wrote Kozachik. “No schedule, no permission, no complaints, but a few people called in. It felt good!”AdvertisementArticle continues below this adAfter he graduated from the University of Arizona, he advanced to higher-profile clients, animating a flying model car for McDonald’s, a Kodak logo and a Bank of America checkbook. (“There was a lot of flying going on,” he joked in the memoir.) Once he had enough projects under his belt to develop a demo reel, he went to Hollywood in the 1970s and got a job working under Phil Kellison, a renowned expert in animation who led Coast Special Effects, where several of the key effects artists on “Star Wars” launched their careers. There, he honed his craft, working as an animator and model maker for a number of projects, including the 1980s UFO movie “Hangar 18,” in which he crafted a flying saucer that could “withstand a real pyro explosion and sit there with blinking lights in the midst of gasoline flames.” Kozachik would meet another collaborator in 1991: director Henry Selick, who approached him to do motion control and lighting work for the pilot episode of his shoestring-budget MTV series, “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions.” Never deterred by a challenge, Kozachik set up with Selick at Tippett’s studio. They formed a “brotherly” bond as they got to know one another and developed a process for blocking animation in tandem with motion control systems.AdvertisementArticle continues below this adAfter the project wrapped, Selick invited Kozachik out to lunch with him and Tim Burton to discuss their next move: a Disney stop-motion feature. At first, Kozachik was hesitant. He had just been offered a job with Tippett working on a big-budget dinosaur movie with Steven Spielberg and thought of the main character of the animated film Selick was pitching as “a dorky skeleton dressed up in a formal tailcoat, waxing poetic in a florid voice.” Nonetheless, Burton had seen Kozachik’s work on “Slow Bob” and agreed with Selick’s recommendation — that he should be hired as the director of photography for the film that would become “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It was a tough call for Kozachik, who grew up loving dinosaur movies, but he ultimately ended up turning down work on “Jurassic Park” to chart new territory as the DP behind his first feature-length stop-motion animation film. On the set of “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” a stop motion musical fantasy film written and produced by Tim Burton and directed by Henry Selick.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images“‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ was our first film together, and he came over from ILM, and I remember being in awe of him,” producer and special effects artist Kat Alioshin told SFGATE. “I thought he was a little untouchable — he had so much experience in visual effects. But I found out that he was really approachable and wanted to share all these great ideas. That was important, because we had so many parts of production where no one knew what they were doing because it hadn’t been done before.” AdvertisementArticle continues below this adAlioshin said it was a constant trial-and-error process for the crew, which had to figure out how to schedule, light and add movement to 800 effects shots in a way that would appear lifelike on camera. Yet Kozachik never broke down under pressure or rushed his crew, even as he had to manage over 20 soundstages, each one with its own equipment, model movers and gear. Some scenes took over three weeks to make, or a frame would get exposed to the light, ruining the scene, and they’d be back at square one. “There were so many opportunities for problems, and he would always come to the rescue and say, ‘We’ve got this,” Alioshin said. “He mentored hundreds of camera people, and they all seemed to be saying that he always pushed them to do better, try harder and look at the problems in a different light.” The hard work paid off — the film was nominated for an Academy Award for best visual effects in 1994. Though it lost out to “Jurassic…

FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS

Read original article here