Effects-heavy films that Oscar nominee Rich McBride contributed to include Avatar, Gravity and The Matrix Reloaded.
For six long minutes in the gritty historical epic The Revenant, star Leonard DiCaprio wages a desperate fight for his life against a very large, very uncuddly bear. Much to everyone’s surprise, DiCaprio’s fanged and furry co-star — actually a computer-generated creation of alumnus Rich McBride (B.A., ’90) and the film’s visual effects team — went on to gain a full 15 minutes of fame, popping up in goofy internet memes and gags tied to the 2016 Golden Globes and Academy Awards ceremonies.
For McBride, however, the bear was serious business from the get-go. In fact, it came up the first time he spoke with The Revenant’s notoriously intense and mercurial director, Alejandro Iñárritu.
“The light he put it in was, ‘If this scene fails, the whole movie fails,’” McBride recalls with a laugh. “So no pressure at all.”
McBride on the set of The Revenant.
Neither the scene nor the film failed: The Revenant received 12 Oscar nominations. Though it lost out to Ex Machina for the Best Visual Effects award, McBride made the most of the experience, hanging out with his special effects heroes at nominee soirées and parading in front of the paparazzi in his brand-new tux.
“Our parents were going to see us on television, so … we really milked it,” he says of his team’s slow, hammy walk up the famous Oscar red carpet.
McBride’s arrival at SF State was less glamorous. Though the Indiana native started college at American University in Washington, D.C., he wasn’t happy there. So when a high school buddy attending SF State raved about the school, McBride and another friend road-tripped across the country to give San Francisco a try.
The impulsive move paid off. McBride fell in love with the city and the University (where he soon enrolled, taking his first class in fall 1987). Particularly inspiring to him were the Macintoshes he encountered in the computer lab and an animation course taught by filmmaker Patricia Amlin.
“It was such a free, open, positive, creative environment,” McBride says of the class. “The students were interesting people to be around, and there was a lot of support from the professor. That got me interested in doing more animation.”
After graduating, McBride put his new skills to use working on computer games. That led to jobs with a number of visual effects firms, eventually bringing McBride to Industrial Light & Magic, the legendary FX house founded by George Lucas. Along the way, McBride racked up credits on such effects-heavy hits as The Matrix Reloaded, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Pacific Rim, all while (mostly) staying in the Bay Area. (He temporarily relocated to New Zealand to work on Avatar and to London for Gravity.)
“At San Francisco State, I discovered frame-by-frame type [animation] work, which led to an understanding of visual effects, and it’s also where I learned how to use a computer in a creative way,” McBride says. “Those were the seeds for everything that came next.”