While Star Wars fans still scoff about The Phantom Menace, one striking scene inspired a change of career for Jason Billington that has taken him to the Academy Awards.
As a budding young photographer dabbling in animation, the Sydney visual effects supervisor was dazzled by the famous pod race.
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"I thought I want to do that," Billington says. "Not only is that photography but it combines the computer graphics side of things, which I really like.
"I thought: 'That's my dream job. How do I get there'?"
Around the same time Billington saw Keanu Reeves ducking and weaving in the bullet time scene in The Matrix. "The way they put that together, it was like 'Oh my gosh'," he says.
Eighteen years later, Billington is one of a record 14 Australian nominations at the Oscars for his visual effects work on the Hollywood oil rig disaster movie Deepwater Horizon.Â
"It's awesome," he says of the nomination. "A couple of years ago when I was working in San Francisco, my wife asked me: 'Are you ever going to be up there one day'? I said: 'One day, maybe when l'm 45 or 50'. But, no, it's happening now."
Billington, 37, has also worked on such blockbusters as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, all four Transformers movies, Avatar, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End and Jurassic World. Just before leaving Sydney for the Oscars, his team at visual effects house Iloura​ was finishing work on the Scarlett Johansson​ sci-fi movie Ghost in the Shell.
!["All five are awesome movies": Jason Billington who is nominated for best visual effects at the Oscars with a scene from ...](/web/20170226081647im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/k/3/7/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guj8n6.png/1488074925065.jpg)
While creating effects on computer is highly technical work, Billington says he has to be interested in the story rather than just how a movie looks.Â
"When you're leading the crew, you've got to understand the emotion behind what the director is trying to achieve with a certain sequence and also what the tone of the movie might be," he says. "You have to help communicate that to the artist who's working on specific types of work."
![Spectacular explosions and fires: Mark Wahlberg in Deepwater Horizon.](/web/20170226081647im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/j/y/v/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guj8n6.png/1488074925065.jpg)
There are movies the team has no interest in watching after working on them, especially when they involve repeated changes to the visual effects, but Deepwater Horizon was not one of them.Â
"I thought I can't wait for this movie to come out," Billington says. "Everyone on Deepwater Horizon had a big smile on their face working on such a good movie."
![More action in Deepwater Horizon.](/web/20170226081647im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/j/y/u/7/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guj8n6.png/1488074925065.jpg)
Iloura created 400 of the 800 visual effects shots in the movie, with Industrial Light and Magic in San Francisco creating the rest.Â
Growing up in Castle Hill in Sydney's north-west, Billington studied design and visual communications at Western Sydney University then moved into visual effects on the 2002 movies Ghost Ship and Scooby-Do on the Gold Coast. He went to work for ILM in California and stayed for more than nine years before returning to Sydney with his young family.Â
![Fire boat response crews battle the blazing remnants of the real oil rig Deepwater Horizon, off Louisiana, in 2010.](/web/20170226081647im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/s/c/n/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.guj8n6.png/1488074925065.jpg)
As this year's contenders show, visual effects take many different forms in movies. Deepwater Horizon features spectacular explosions and fires; Jungle Book is full of digitally-created and amazingly life-like animals; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story brought back the late Peter Cushing; Kubo and the Two Strings is a strikingly beautiful animation; and Doctor Strange has surreal Inception-style landscapes and cityscapes.Â
But Billington says visual effects can be a much more subtle tool for filmmakers. Â
"There are films out there where the visual effect is just making someone's face look younger or removing some pimples an actor might have had on the day," he says. "And whatever you can't do on set because it's dangerous, you've got to do it on computer.Â
"One of the simplest things is also one of the most common – adding muzzle flashes to guns when someone gets shot. You can't do that on set because it's too dangerous.
"Then there's adding blood. While you can have packets [of fake blood under actors' clothes] which explode, often the timing doesn't work or they don't go off in the shot so we add a certain amount of blood. And as long as it doesn't look fake, we've succeeded."
The Australian nominations at the Oscars include Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge, which is up for six awards including best picture and director; Garth Davis' Lion, also up for six awards including best picture; and Bentley Dean and Martin Butler's Tanna, which is up for best foreign-language film.Â
Billington is not sure about his prospects.
"Every morning I wake up and I say our chances are good," he says. "But then [IÂ remember]Â Jungle Book.
"All five are awesome movies and all five could potentially win but if I was to put them in order, I'd probably put Jungle Book first as the favourite.Â
"And right behind that, just from a totally different angle – the storyline and visual effects – is Deepwater Horizon. It's a whole film set on an oil rig that was supposed to be 80, 100 miles offshore and it was filmed on a carpark in Louisiana."
But Billington is allowing himself a moment to dream. "Favourites never win," he says.Â
Follow the Herald's live-blog of the awards from noon at smh.com.au.Â