Thank you! That's awesome that you worked on Super Mario Brothers, I remember watching that as a kid. What did you do for the movie, if you don't mind me asking?
Heck, why would I mind? I wore several hats on that film. We 4 walled a facility to do the VFX for the film, in West L.A. not far from Marina Del Rey. I went to NC to supervise shooting of some live action plates for the matte paintings, designed matte paintings, and painted views of Dinohattan back in LA. I also storyboarded a couple of sequences, including the de-evolution of Koopa, while in NC, and designed some bits and pieces of Dinohattan for the film.
At that time, getting the footage digitized was difficult as there were only a couple of companies that had built film scanners, and they wanted to do the FX, not the scanning. These early home brew scanners presented real performance problems, and costs to do the scanning were extremely high.
Then Kodak announced that they had developed a film scanner, which they called the Cineon Scanner, and that changed everything. I was tasked with evaluating the quality of the scanner for our use. I reviewed the scans and if I didn't like the result, ordered a rescan.
So basically I did a bit of this and that, whatever was asked of me. I even taught myself enough UNIX to fix networking links when the Silicon Graphics Machines got pissy and wouldn't talk to each other.
