I thought this was a very cool article. Masi Oka has been doing digital effects and more for a long time, which makes me wonder if he is helping visually with the NBC show Heroes. Certainly he would be able to add some incredible knowledge to the special effects of the show.

Heroes: Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura

Millions of viewers of NBC’s Heroes know actor Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura, the bored young Japanese office worker who discovers he has the power to alter time and teleport. What they probably don’t know is that he’s been working behind the scenes for years as one of Industrial Light & Magic’s top programmers.

Some of the incredible accomplishments include:

After a year and a half of training, which included some work on Star Wars: Episode I and Rocky and Bullwinkle, Oka got his first big “show” with The Perfect Storm. He worked with John Anderson to create the computer-generated water effects for the film. All of the water effects in that film, as well as water effects in more recent films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, were the result of code written by Oka. “That allowed me to get my name out in the ILM community and people wanted me to do a lot of particle work, fluid stuff and modeling for different shows,” said Oka. “I became more of a firefighter, going around from show to show doing short-term work as a hired gun to solve problems on a very quick basis.” A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.

Wired News - Masi Oka: Coder, Actor, Hero

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