From making faces to making movies

Mark Sagar. Picture / Martin Sykes

So you were pretty proud of your ice-man act during that down-to-the-wire deal you just pulled off?

Actually, your face probably "leaked" all sorts of emotions, according to Mark Sagar, one of New Zealand's most valuable exports as arguably the world's No.1 digital face expert.

Sagar, a cross between a scientist, a mathematician and a creative artist, knows a lot about facial emotional leaks - he put actor Andy Serkis' emotions on King Kong's face in Peter Jackson's blockbuster.

Back home in Auckland from Los Angeles to work for Jackson's Weta Digital company, Sagar says certain facial muscles "leak" and we can't control them, no matter how grown-up we get.

"When you are a child you show all emotions in your face. When you're an adult it becomes much more layered as the cognitive part of the brain starts taking over and is able to control it more. [But] if people get angry, sometimes you will see tension around the mouth. You'll see micro expressions, a flash of an expression like eyelids raising up in a flash of anger."

And watch your corporate smile.

Sagar says a genuine emotion like a smile will appear symmetrically on the face for two or three seconds.

"If it is a fake smile it'll be an instant smile and often asymmetric."

If that's so, boyish-faced Sagar, 39, seems genuinely unspoiled after nearly 10 years in TinselTown.

Aside from Kong, Sagar's other movie credits include research and development director for Spiderman 2, Monster House (to be released this year), and the short films The Jester and Young at Heart. His title at Weta Digital is special projects supervisor.

So how did a North Shore boy who loves the water and snow playgrounds of New Zealand end up at the sharp end of movie-making in smoggy Los Angeles?

Kenya-born Sagar's career may have been sealed at the moment of conception.

His mother was an artist, his father a systems analyst. His mother took him as a toddler to draw animals in Kenya's game parks (mother and son have just published a book of the drawings); his father taught him about computers.

The family came to New Zealand when Sagar was three. He was dux of Takapuna Grammar School, going on to do a BSc in mathematics and science at the University of Auckland.

"I was always torn between art and science," Sagar recalls in the office of his Devonport home, as wife Justine pilots the household and the couple's two young daughters around the turbulence of a house move to Cheltenham beach.

Art won out for a few years after university, as Sagar toured the world, doing portraits of café and restaurant customers and English pubs. The travel bug out of his system, he came home and did commercial art, until a friend urged him to get back to science. Sagar returned to Auckland University to do a doctorate in the Bioengineering Institute of Dr Peter Hunter. There he met Dr Gordon Mallinson, who was developing computer graphics for bioengineering. Sagar was hooked. He had found a field which combined art and his technical bent.

"Mark has an almost unique combination of a physics and mathematics background - he was a top-notch student - and long-standing artistic flair," Hunter says.

Sagar got busy turning the institute's scientific modelling on eye and heart simulations into realistic visual information for clinicians and other medical practitioners.

PhD in hand at age 29, Sagar moved to Boston in 1996 for post-doctoral study under Peter Hunter's bioengineering brother Ian, at MIT.

Here Sagar indulged his fascination with faces. Working with his former computer engineer colleagues back at Auckland University, and using all he had learned about making eyeballs and hearts come alive on the screen, he made human faces. He took the digital image of a 20-year-old actor and aged her 60 years, the animation based on human physiology and created by a mathematical representation of her facial muscle reaction. Capturing those facial leaks, Sagar would say. The result was a level of realism far greater than achieved by special effects.

In the US Sagar also worked with his former colleagues to produce virtual people for the internet. Facemail, as it was branded, allowed users to have their emails read to them on screen by a stand-in digital person.

At MIT he became technology founder of a start-up company called LifeFX, which moved to Hollywood. Sagar made big advances on his digital faces, working with some of the big screen's most expressive faces, including Jim Carrey, on Warner Bros projects. By 2000 LifeFX's financial backers were focused less on movies and more on the potential dollars from Sagar's interactive internet inventions such as Facemail, and the company was listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

When the tech stock bubble burst, Sagar went to work for Sony Pictures Image Works, applying his animation capture ideas and techniques to Monster House.

In 2004 the Sagars had to return to New Zealand for family reasons.

"It was a really bad time to leave the States career-wise. I was thinking what chance is there of work [in New Zealand], and Weta Digital contacted me to work on Kong."

Sagar commuted between LA and New Zealand, moving back permanently in November last year.

"It worked out miraculously. I've been so lucky with my life and work."

Ask Sagar what his biggest career challenge has been and he jokes "children".

Despite financial success - "money isn't an issue, it hasn't been bad" - the family lives modestly and the new house will be smaller than this villa. In LA, surrounded by neighbours' BMWs, he drove, by choice, "a crappy old Jeep".

The achievements he's most proud of are also understated. He's fulfilled his ambition to make a "completely believable" digital human, a digital actor.

Applying lessons about how faces reflect light to make realistic doubles of the performers in Spiderman 2 was a big achievement.

Capturing Andy Serkis' emotions in "absolute, incredible detail" and putting them on a gorilla's face to produce "absolute soul" was another.

Turning the young woman into an old crone is also right up there.

"I knew it was working when I walked in and saw on the monitor this face, and I started thinking what was her life like? I knew we had crossed the threshold, rather than [having] an objective piece of geometry."

But Sagar, who almost vibrates with passion about his work and hardly stops for breath when talking about it, seems stumped when asked if he considers himself a success.

"Success is a by-product. I consider myself moderately successful. My mother says if you have the talent and low energy, you are a pauper. But if you have talent and energy, the drive is critical.

"I figure a lot of people go through life with a depth versus breadth problem. To do things well you have to devote a big chunk of energy to it, so you have to choose things which bring you the most rewards.

"Success is a complicated one. You have to sacrifice things. To me success is ultimately whether you are happy at the end of the day. If you've got enough out of life."

Sagar still wants a lot more out of his. Future projects could include children's books, sculpting, maybe an arts degree. Teaching and consulting are also on the post-Weta menu.

He admits to "zero" musical talent, but he's bought an electronic keyboard and he's going to develop software so he can "draw" music.

He'd like to bring musicians, artists, scientists and bioengineers like himself together for regular talkfests.

"To use technology developed from engineering and physics and mathematics and apply that to some of the social sciences ...

"It's like the low-hanging fruit - you take something from a different sphere and apply it to something else and you have a whole new idea."

Auckland University's Hunter knows this side of Sagar well.

"He has a wonderful creative side. He's interested in a very wide range of things. He really likes the interaction between science and art."

Sagar puts it another way.

"I don't want to miss out on anything. I want it all."