Chan was the ideal person for the job. By day, he is a senior technical director at Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. in Culver City, Calif., where he has helped create digital special effects for such blockbuster movies as Titanic (1997) and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001). "I spent about two months staring at Viggo Mortensen kissing Liv Tyler," he laughs, referring to his work on The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers (2002), for which he electronically painted in some suitably elvish scenery behind the smooching actors.
Chan is also well acquainted with the author of our elevator article, Bradley Carl Edwards, whose daring design for a cheap and reliable highway into space is the latest twist in a century-old engineering dream. Chan, who is also an independent filmmaker, got to know Edwards when he asked for some technical advice on a screenplay featuring a space elevator. At the time, Edwards had only relatively crude graphics of how he envisioned the elevator.
Chan offered to create "a magic bullet"--a polished animated short film that Edwards could use to impress and persuade people when he stumped for the space elevator. Recruiting some friends to help, Chan put together the animation in about four and a half months. The images used in Edwards's article are based on that animation, but the cover is a custom-tailored illustration Chan made for IEEE Spectrum.
Chan explains his motivation: "If I could give Brad this magic bullet, and he gets this thing done, I could stand at the bottom of the elevator and look up and think 'I had a small part in helping to bring this to life.' "