T2: The Road Hog Edition

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‘Not three hours after last week's Road Hog hit the street, I got a phone call from a supervisor at Apple who apologized profusely and said that the fellow I spoke to was mistaken, that the fraying on the AC adapter is covered, both for the one that came with my computer, and the extra one I bought to keep plugged in at the office.’

OPINION • SEPTEMBER 13 , 2000
Road Hog: Shoot ’Em in the Knee
Road Hogs teach The Terminator a few lessons in brute force

by Tim Wilson
Man About Town™
twilson@digitalmedianet.com

We here at Road Hog are all about gratuitous, if elegant, displays of brute force. It's why we love our G3 laptops and why I always look forward to see what carnage director James Cameron will deliver in his next movie.

Sure he's got a big heart, but we forgive him for it in Titanic because he blew up so much stuff in Terminator 2. Yeah, yeah, T2 had a big heart, too, but that was displayed by shooting people in the leg instead of offing them. SO sweet. I get all weepy just thinking about it.

As big as his movies are, some of his best ones should have been bigger. The Abyss in particular was 10 times better in Cameron's director's cut laserdisc, which added a half hour so of footage deleted to please the soul-sucking studio weenies. Even they had to admit that he was right, which led to a theatrical re-release and an award-winning DVD packed with all sorts of amazing extras.

The team who created that remarkable release's add-ons have also just finished a deluxe edition of Terminator 2. The reason I mention it here? Much of it the additional material was created on Road Hogs.

A man on the move
Van Ling and Johnathan Banta are the two guys most responsible for what's special about the Ultimate Edition of Terminator 2, and they are Mac guys to the core. Much of the work they did was on PowerBooks. Producer Ling designed the menus, and Banta created all of the 3D elements, including entire environments, modeling, lighting and animation.

His G3 laptop has 320 MB RAM and an 8 gig hard drive, which are a mite small by Road Hog standards, but more than enough to do serious work. "Portability is the key," says Banta. "I love the power of the desktop machine, but my PowerBook allows me to work anytime, anywhere. I am constantly writing articles, programming shaders for ElectricImage, checking e-mail, creating 3D models and animating them or compositing 4K IMAX films (using proxies) wherever I am."

Spoken like a true Road Hog.

Ling and Banta's story is well worth reading, and it's posted at Apple's Web site. Mac partisans, which Road Hogs tend to be, of course, will also enjoy noting that the sound design for the original release, which won two Academy Awards, and the surround remix for this release, were both handled by Gary Rydstrom using a Mac-based ProTools system.

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