LEE
They never dreamed of a career in the movie industry. They never aspired to be members of Hollywood's elite.
But somehow Ukraine natives and now Lee residents Eugene Mamut and Irina Borisova found their way to that level of success.
It was quite by accident, if you ask them. Mamut is an electrical engineer; Borisova, an artist who studied architecture. Their separate talents landed each of them a place in the creation of special effects and animation for Hollywood films like "Predator (1987)," "Ghost Dad (1990)," and "Dirty Dancing (1987)," as well as small-screen commercials for Burger King, Hallmark and the Michigan lottery.
Still, Mamut's first love remains science, and for Borisova it is art. They've combined their talents to create Animagic, a museum of science and art at 77 Main St. that showcases the work of Berkshire people who have been involved in the making of Hollywood animation and special effects.
Mamut displays his own 1996 Academy Award for his work on creating a camouflage visual effect in "Predator" and an elastic effect in "Ghost Dad" and "9 to 5."
Borisova displays her drawings, sculptures and the clay models used in various television commercials.
The museum is three rooms, the front one facing Main Street has its window and walls filled with toys. Mamut chuckled on a recent tour as he used a "magic wand" to make a ring of paper float through the room.
A globe, suspended in air, rotates as if on an axle. In fact, it is held in place by a magnet above and a computer below, Mamut said, adding: "This is all about science."
The front room also showcases Borisova's artwork, including drawings, sculptures and an illustrated children's book called "Cats Who Quilt."
In the second room, movie posters line the upper walls, and a "Berk-shire Special Effects and Animation Family Tree," like a family tree, shows people in the industry, where they began, how they came together in the Berkshires and where they are now.
Life-like clay models of penguins, a Mr. Potato Head, and a crab, all once used in animated commercials, fill a glass case. Borisova created the characters, beginning with sketches and storyboards. She, sometimes working with a team of sculptors, then created the models.
The third room of the museum is the workshop, where visitors, for a fee, can create their own clay models and have them "perform" in a short animated film, which they then get to take home.
These days, Mamut devotes most of his energy to running Animagic and hopes to expand the museum to show off more of Berkshire talent.
Monday night, he will be among a number of presenters talking at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield about the history of movie production in the Berk-shires.
The event, intended as a business networking opportunity, as well as a showcase of local talent, will feature some of Animagic's exhibits in the lobby from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Multi-media presentations will follow at 7 p.m.
Borisova, who said she was "born with a pencil," attended art school in Ukraine beginning at age 10 and later went on to achieve a degree in architecture. But she has never worked as an architect.
Mamut is a scientist at heart and earned a master's degree in electrical engineering.
"I was never interested in movies," he said. "I don't see movies. I don't know actors. For me, it's optics. It's machines. It's computers."
As an electrical engineer, he began designing equipment for movie production while working at the same movie studio in Kharkov where Borisova was volunteering her talents.
In 1978, Mamut emigrated to the United States and settled in Queens, New York. There he began sending out resumes to electrical engineering companies and movie studios. He got two responses from engineering companies, neither of which interested him, and one from a movie production company, Digi-tal Effects in Manhattan.
The owner, Judson Rosebush, said he didn't have a job to offer, but was interested in learning what Mamut could do, since he had been working on computer-generated movies in Ukraine.
Mamut said his English was so limited at the time that he had to draw pictures of what he was trying to say.
‘Don't call us.'
Rosebush referred Mamut to Joel Hynek and Jeff Kleiser, who at the time, were working on visual effects at a EFX Unlimited, another Manhattan production company.
"They said ‘Don't call us. We'll call you,'" Mamut remembered, and he left certain there would be no job offer.
The following morning, however, he got a call asking if he would be willing to take a job cleaning film -- about the lowest in the movie industry. Not proud, he took it. The first film he worked on was "Blue Lagoon (1980)."
It took about three months before a position opened up in contact printing --transferring the original negatives to film. It was a job Mamut found scary because, in those days, if an error was made, either by the operator or the machines, the entire film was a loss. And though the job was more important than what he had been doing, it was only one step up from the lowly cleaning position, he said.
It wasn't until Mamut made suggestions that eventually led to the creation of the so-called "elastic effect" in movie imagery that he began to move up in the film industry.
Slit-scan effect
On lunch break one day, he said Kleiser -- who would later establish his Kleiser-Walczak special-effects company at Mass MoCA in North Adams -- was telling him about a slit-scan effect used in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)."
The effect of squeezing the image was created, Mamut said, by moving it slowly on an optical scanner instead of leaving it immobile.
"I was amazed," Mamut said.
He proposed to Hynek and Kleiser that the image be moved step-by-step in order to create a different, "elastic" effect.
"They gave me the keys to the studio and said ‘Do what you want and we'll see what you can do,'" Mamut said, adding that they granted him full access to all the film and resources he needed to do his experiments.
It was then that he created the elastic effect that made objects look stretched or bent. It was first used in advertisements for the movie "Flash Gordon (1980)."
Now computers can create the same effect, but in the early 1980s, the technology was new and unexplored, Mamut said.
When Hynek moved that year from EFX Unlimited to R. Greenbush Associates, also in Manhattan, Mamut reluctantly followed.
At the time, Mamut said he was planning to return to electrical engineering, thinking that computers would soon replace all of the work he was doing mechanically in animation. Hynek said he could guarantee him another 10 years.
Meanwhile, Borisova remained in Ukraine, developing her art at the Kharkov movie studio and acting as art director of the Kharkov State Puppet Theatre.
During a visit to friends in the United States in 1993, Borisova and Mamut reunited and they married two years later.
Came to Lee in 1996
The couple moved to Lee in 1996 when both went to work in the animation division at Mass Illusion, a special effects company established by film director and special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, who "made movies in Hollywood, but dreamed about the Berkshires," Mamut said.
Trumbull had worked on the slit-scan technology used in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and also directed "Silent Running" in 1972, which featured a Spaceship Berk-shire. He still owns a studio in Southfield, where he works on research and is currently concentrating on astronomy, Mamut said.
Mamut, Borisova, Hynek and Tom Gasek, the key animator for the movie "Chicken Run (2000)," and one of the creators of "Wallace and Gromit (2005)," all worked in the animation division of Mass Illusion. Mamut worked specifically on early stages of research for the visual effects later used in such movies as "Starship Troopers (1997)" and "The Matrix (1999)."
When Mass Illusion moved from Lenox to San Francisco in 1997, Gasek opened his own company, Out of Hand Animation in Great Barrington, which he still owns and operates.
Worked on commercials
Borisova worked with Gasek on several animated commercials, which employed stop-motion filming of the clay models she created.
Stop-motion animation requires 30 pictures per second of movement with producers literally moving and bending the flexible clay models between each picture. A typical 30-second commercial would take roughly five months to create, Borisova explained.
The models they used included talking penguins for the Michigan Lottery, a conducting Mr. Potato Head for Burger King and a crab for Louis Kemp Crab Delights.
Borisova continues to work for the state puppet theater. She will be returning to Ukraine later this month for the opening of a children's Russian fairytale "Snow Maiden" at the Kharkov Puppet Theatre. She had been working on the project for the past year, creating 10 characters as well as sets for the production.
Mamut and Borisova opened Animagic in 2002 to showcase all of the Berkshire talent in special effects and animation. While the movies were made in Hollywood, the special effects for many were created locally or by local people, Mamut explained.
Many still remain in the Berk-shires dreaming and hoping for the future, he said.
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