Gardner-Edgerton grad helps bring ‘Big Hero 6’ to life

The groundbreaking 1982 movie “Tron” came out when Hank Driskill was a sophomore at Gardner-Edgerton High School. Upon first viewing, Driskill knew what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“When I saw ‘Tron,’ it clicked: They’re using math to do art,” he says.

Decades later, Driskill has carved a career doing exactly that. The University of Kansas grad’s latest success is “Big Hero 6,” for which he serves as technical supervisor, mixing computer programming and art skills into animation.

“This was a dream come true for me to make the best of Disney and Marvel come together in one movie,” says the self-professed geek, who owns a collection of 30,000 comic books.

Calling from his Disney office in Burbank, Calif., Driskill describes the superhero adventure as “a movie about smart people who solve problems by being smart people.”

The film’s co-director Don Hall gave him a core viewpoint: He was tired of movies where technology is considered evil.

“Here, technology isn’t good or bad, it’s in the hands of the people using it,” says the 48-year-old Driskill. “Don wanted the heroes to be as reliant on technology as the villain. San Fransokyo (the movie’s hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo) is a city where technology is making the place better.”

He spent 29 months on the $165 million blockbuster, working with the visual effects supervisor to plot the technical approaches.

“It was on the border between ambitious and crazy,” says Driskill, who previously worked on “Bolt,” “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Tangled.”

“We knew the film was asking for a level of complexity that was beyond what we were capable of doing in the past. ‘Big Hero 6’ has as much geometry in San Fransokyo as our three previous features combined. We wanted it to feel like this very dense, expansive environment.”

Specifically, that included creating 83,000 buildings, 200,000 trees and even 200,000 streetlights. The result is a combination of East-meets-West architecture and culture that makes the film immediately pop out as a visual innovation.

But did all those San Francisco elements irk the KC-area native while watching the World Series?

“Not at all. I didn’t really make that connection,” he says. “I’ve fully realized San Fransokyo as its own place. We started out with the San Francisco geography. But once we started populating it, we reached for this amalgam of San Francisco and Tokyo. We’re really happy where we landed. The city doesn’t fully feel like either one of them, but it feels like both of them.”

Driskill attended KU from 1984 to 1988, earning degrees in computer science and astronomy. Then he headed west to get a doctorate from the University of Utah, the campus where computer graphics were invented.

Driskill’s intro to the industry came courtesy of James Cameron. He got hired at the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s Digital Domain, one of the top visual effects and production companies. Driskill arrived on the tail end of 1994’s “Interview With the Vampire.” His first full project was the historical drama “Apollo 13,” a great fit considering his astronomy background.

He next worked on the then-biggest film of all time, getting credited for Digital Ocean Software on 1997’s “Titanic.” He says the emotional drama masks how much of the movie was crafted by techs like himself. He points to one sweeping overhead shot in particular.

“All you think about is these people and this story,” he says. “You don’t think about the fact the ocean is done in computer graphics. The ship is a scale model shot on a soundstage. The smoke coming out of the smokestacks is all digital. The other people on the deck are all digital. It’s completely an effect.”

Currently, Driskill is in pre-production on “Moana,” an animated tale of a teenage girl in the ancient South Pacific who teams with a demi-god in search of a fabled island. (More about that on D6.)

“I’m already in my dream job,” Driskill says of Disney. “You feel the weight and the legacy of this place when you walk in the door. I used to say when my kids were little, ‘I’m making movies for my grandkids to watch.’ Now my oldest is in college, so I’m closer to that reality.”

This story was originally published November 6, 2014 at 3:00 AM with the headline "Gardner-Edgerton grad helps bring ‘Big Hero 6’ to life."