From the blue-skinned Na’Vi aliens to the mystical Tree of Souls, some of the most jaw-dropping effects in the blockbuster movie Avatar were made with the help of two Central Albertans.

Innisfail native Ron Miller is a facial technical director with Weta Digital, who worked on bringing the blue, three-metre-tall alien Na’Vi to life on screen — and a host of scarier creatures from the plant Pandora.

His colleague, Mark Pullyblank of the Red Deer area, is a senior layout technical director at Weta. He helped create the enormous tree in the movie that links all life forms on the alien planet.

Both Miller and Pullyblank work in New Zealand for Peter Jackson’s digital animation company that also helped create Lord of the Rings and King Kong movie effects.

But they started out half a world away as Central Alberta kids who liked to draw and watch movies.

“I can remember in the dead of winter, lying in my bed in our little farmhouse (outside Red Deer) and dreaming of working in the movies someday,” recalled Pullyblank, who went to River Glen School and graduated from Lindsay Thurber Comprehensive High School.

Today, he’s not only contributed to Avatar, the biggest grossing movie ever made, he has also helped create films like Night at the Museum, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Watchmen and Blades of Glory.

“I occasionally find myself sitting in dark theatre watching the end credits.

“If I’m patient enough, I can catch my name scrolling by on the screen. I know no one else is watching, but it still tickles,” said Pullyblank.

Miller’s early creativity was encouraged by his artistic mother.

“As a child, I was always drawing, watching movies and playing video games,” recalled Miller, who spent two years in the visual arts program at Red Deer College, specializing in painting and printmaking.

He eventually took 3D animation at a Calgary school, and began working at a series of different studios in Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton.

It was a lot of moving around, Miller admitted, but “I decided to try to find the best opportunities that would help me get to a place like Weta Digital . . . I have no regrets at all, because it’s truly been an amazing journey.”

Miller, whose film credits include The Day the Earth Stood Still, Disney’s The Wild, and various TV and video game projects, left Canada with his wife and young daughter to work at Weta three years ago. They have since had a son born in New Zealand.

The transplanted Albertan was surprised when he first met Pullyblank. “I couldn’t believe there was someone else here at Weta that was from the same area in Canada that I was from,” Miller said.

Pullyblank followed a different career path to get to the same place. He spent most of the ’90s bouncing around in a tour bus as a bass guitarist. His most notable gig with Manitoba singer Holly McNarland earned him a gold record (“Is that braggy?” he jokingly asks. “It wasn’t at all glamorous.”)

Since Pullyblank liked to draw, he enrolled at the Vancouver Institute of Media Arts and got a diploma in commercial animation. His first job for a Vancouver F/X company was drawing talking animals for the first Garfield movie.

“I’ve learned that the industry is actually quite small,” said Pullyblank, who heard about the Weta job through a friend with whom he made a school film eight years ago. He moved there with his wife and two children — and the family is now in the process of adopting two more kids from Uganda.

Working on Avatar “sounded like a fun adventure,” Pullyblank said — and it was.

His job was to take director James Cameron’s vision and painstakingly reconstruct each minute piece of it, digitally. Everything had to be fully realized, from the large trees, to the rock formations, to individual blades of grass, said Pullyblank.

Miller helped add rigging elements to real-life faces to help animators make digital facial expressions more believable. “It’s been done before on a single animated character, like Gollum in Lord of the Rings or King Kong, but not for a whole cast of (100) digital characters,” he said.

“The quality expected was really, really high,” added Miller, who believes Cameron is extremely passionate and wanted the very best of everyone working for him. “I think he deserves a lot of credit for taking animation closer to realism.”

Since both Weta workers had only seen bits and pieces of the movie that took three years to make, they were thrilled with the look of the final on-screen product.

“I was really blown away when I saw Avatar in 3D,” said Miller. “It was a really fun ride of a movie.”

Pullyblank said the storyline that involves a romance, an environmental message and an epic battle “has never been told quite like this. (Cameron) knows how to stage one helluva fight sequence.”

Both men love New Zealand — a “groovy little country” that reminds Pullyblank of what northern California would have been like in the 1950s — and accept new challenges.

Pullyblank is already working on the movie The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, expected out in 2011, and is shopping an original script. He expects to be back in Alberta this summer to visit friends and family.

Miller, who is also working on Tintin as well as The Hobbit, sees no reason other local young people can’t set their sights on working on the international stage.

“Just because someone grows up in the middle of the Alberta prairies doesn’t mean they can’t do it. A person just has to start the process going in the right direction and take opportunities where they come.”

lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com