Fantasy is his Reality

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/08/2005 (7599 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TO all appearances, Ken Zorniak is like one of those meek and mild alter-egos of the superheroes.

He looks innocuous, self-possessed. A Regular Guy.

You’d never suspect, in the secret lab where he works, that he has helped make monsters.

The organization he helped build has put a weapon in the hand of a kinky comic book creation. It has journeyed to the centre of the earth. It has helped another comic book character bring down U.S. air force jets using tornadoes.

The waitress at our St. Boniface restaurant doesn’t give any indication she knows about this aspect of Zorniak’s life.

But she does smile and tell him she has heard his Exchange District company Frantic Films is officially one of the fastest-growing companies in Canada, according to the business publication Profit Magazine.

(Frantic’s revenues in 2004 exceeded $9 million, compared to $1.2 million in 2001, which helped make the company the fourth fastest-growing business in the province, according to a Manitoba Business survey.)

But Zorniak, 34, who started the company in 1997 with partner Chris Bond, and who currently holds the position of chief operating officer, plays it secret-agent modest.

Yes, it’s doing very well, thank you.

Crystallize that moment for a minute. It yields some valuable perspective when it comes to the city and its burgeoning relationship to the movies.

At a time when Winnipeg gets breathless with anticipation with the news that, say, Brad Pitt will be coming to town to film a Jesse James movie, it’s worth remembering that Winnipeg already has its own constellation in the Hollywood star firmament.

That includes the unassuming Zorniak: a visual-effects specialist who gently but firmly has elbowed a place for himself and his company at the Hollywood studio table.

Since the 2000 arrival of powerhouse CEO and executive producer Jamie Brown to the Frantic fold, the company on the third floor of the pleasingly shabby Silpit Building on Arthur Street has successfully diversified into commercial, film and television production (including Sean Garrity’s upcoming drama Lucid and shows including the 2002 reality-adventure series Quest for the Bay to the in-production Food Network series Kitchen Crimes).

But when Bond and Zorniak started the business in 1997, Frantic was synonymous with visual effects, and that’s where Zorniak and Bond have maintained their focus.

Their mutual drive has earned Frantic credits on big hit studio films including The Italian Job, and the X-Men sequel X-2 (wherein Frantic helped “pre-visualize” a sequence in which Halle Berry’s character Storm brought down those aforementioned jet planes).

Other studio films included The Core (in which Frantic created a sequence inside an earth’s core geode, featuring a mile-high lava waterfall) and Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (which featured Frantic’s first fully-articulated feature film digital creature, the “Tar Monster”).

Who put the digital whip in Halle Berry’s gloved hands in last summer’s Catwoman? Frantic Films.

Coming this fall, we’ll see some subtle but pervasive digital work from Frantic in the supernatural Ewan McGregor thriller Stay, co-starring Naomi Watts.

On the horizon (and there always seems to be something impressive on the horizon at Frantic Films) is a mega-project about which Zorniak is forbidden to discuss.

It’s all extremely impressive when you remember Frantic was just a relatively rinky-dink effects house eight years ago, forged when Zorniak became reacquainted with his old high school buddy Bond.

They went to different high schools, in fact, but were introduced by a mutual friend.

“We were always trying different things,” Zorniak explains. “We made T-shirts one summer. We sang in a band… well, he convinced me to sing in a band. We acted in a play together.”

In an interview from Sydney, Australia, where he has established a new Frantic Films outpost office, Bond elaborates on this last bit:

“While in high school, he discovered that Balmoral Hall, the all-girls private school, required young men for male roles in their production of The Crucible,” Bond says. “He saw an opportunity immediately, and he called me up — purely for artistic intent, of course. We both tried out and made it into the project.

“It was tough being one of the few guys amidst the dozens of young woman cast in the play,” Bond says. “But we successfully learned our lines and pushed aside other responsibilities in order to ensure the theatre would be a success.

“As Jamie always says,” Bond adds, “This was definitely an early sign of genius.”

Zorniak attended the University of Manitoba, getting a degree in commerce, majoring in finance and minoring in marketing. And he was in a management training program at Safeway when he encountered Bond by chance at a bar.

“We started talking and rekindling our friendship,” Zorniak says. And his imagination was also rekindled when Bond expressed interest in the growth industry of 3-D animation.

“Movies like Toy Story were starting to come out in ’95, and Chris was very interested in growing this,” Zorniak says. “He decided 3-D animation was the next interesting thing to start happening…”

Zorniak saw the potential. It wasn’t Safeway.

“We got a few contracts right from the start for commercial work… we used that to slowly build the company from there.”

Ironically, Canadian film companies didn’t give Frantic much of a break.

But the company got a huge boost when its very first visual-effects project — on the 1999 Stephen King ABC network miniseries Storm of the Century — ended up earning an Emmy nomination.

“Being nominated for an Emmy in visual effects for our very first visual-effects project was pretty much it,” says Bond.

That success gave the company a foothold, in Los Angeles especially, which Frantic strengthened by creating a branch office in 2003, after opening a branch office in Vancouver in 2002 to facilitate the production boom in that city.

Basing the company in Winnipeg, Zorniak says, exploited “a much lower cost of living, tax breaks and the Canadian dollar.

“We had a lot of competitive advantages and we really started building up the business.”

Frantic currently employs 75 full-time staff and 10 contracted staff. In the course of building that base, there was an understanding that the partnership between Zorniak and Bond brought with it a division of duties.

“Chris always had the notion of mixing commerce and art together,” Zorniak says. “And I’m not really an artsy kind of guy.

“I think we know our roles. He’s more of a creative director and I’m more of a producer, so I’m the one saying: ‘We’ve got to get this out the door, we’re running out of money and it looks great. Go.'”

Bond suggests Zorniak is selling himself short on the artistic side, although he acknowledges Zorniak has a better head for business.

“He always tempers any hare-brained schemes I come up with a huge dose of reality,” Bond says. “Starting Frantic, for example. Without Ken, I’m certain we would not have lasted six months.

“Ken handles all of those bits which ensure the machine of Frantic can operate,” he adds. “I swear I’d be the one forgetting to pay the Internet bill.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca