Heart-throb Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi has a new assignment this summer. As one of the next generation of Zu warriors, she will wield virtual weapons against evil in director Tsui Hark's latest project, The Legend Of Zu. Almost 20 years after 1983's acclaimed cult classic, Zu: Warriors From The Magic Mountain, Tsui has brought the legendary warriors back to the big screen. Although the new Zu is still about martial-arts masters who dwell on Magic Mountain, this film features a whole new breed of warriors. Only Sammo Hung Kam-po returns from the original film as Longbrows, the 1,000-year-old founder of the Zu sect, Omei. Like its predecessor, The Legend Of Zu brings with it a feast of visual effects. The film cost $90 million to make, three times the average budget for a local film, and $40 million of that was spent on 1,600 computer-generated special effects. Two Hong Kong companies and four from Hollywood were hired to produce the computer effects for the film. One, Menfond Electronic Art and Computer Design, which also collaborated with Tsui on Master Q 2001, took control of more than two-thirds of the production. 'We started the project in March this year,' says Eddy Wong Wang-hin, director of Menfond. 'We spent one month just having meetings with the director before we actually started.' Wong and his team then translated Tsui's concepts and sketches into three-dimensional images. Within four months, Wong and 70 co-workers created more than 800 shots, including a stunning opening scene and the design of the warriors' weapons. Tsui was a hard taskmaster. 'For certain parts we had lots of amendments,' says Wong. 'The worst one was Cecilia Cheung's sword. It just took a lot of time to get it right.' Cheung plays the role of Enigma, one of Longbrows' disciples, and her weapon of choice is the Heaven Sword. 'We changed it 10 times and Tsui still did not think it was right,' Wong says. 'But finally the 11th version was accepted.' In one sequence, Enigma and Ying (Wu Jing), the owner of another of Omei's holy weapons, the Thunder Sword, have to fly towards each other. The studio footage contains just Cheung and Wu, carried by wires in front of a bright green background. The virtual mountains and clouds behind the characters in the film were created by computers. 'You can see that without computer-generated effects, this film could never have been made,' says Wong. 'We spent six weeks just constructing the opening shot. Obviously, you can't film this sequence in a real setting. Just these few seconds of screen time took us one-and-a-half months to shoot. 'For Master Q 2001, we only had to create [the cartoon character] Master Q and make him be able to act, so we only had to solve one problem. But for The Legend Of Zu, every single effect is different.' Wong says the effects in The Legend Of Zu have come a long way from those seen in 1998's The Storm Riders, another martial-arts adventure that leaned heavily on computer animation. 'The Storm Riders was made more than two years ago and this is a long period of time in the world of computer development,' says Wong. 'We have made some big steps forward.' Wong says the stunning computer-generated images are created using the Maya software package, which also helped create Disney's first computer-animated feature, Toy Story (1995). 'I know that many audiences still complain about Hong Kong's standard of computer-generated effects,' Wong says. 'But this is because of lack of investment and time. If we are given the same amount of money as Hollywood, I am sure Hong Kong could produce really high quality work. We are slowly getting there.' The Legend Of Zu opens on August 9
