Sony Imageworks, the studio's sleek new special-effects facility where Anderson works, has been assigned 122 of the film's estimated 500 sequences involving special effects. It is Anderson's job to direct and manage every detail of these sequences, to make sure they match those being produced in other studios, and to present them to director Paul Verhoeven, whose previous movies include Robocop , Total Recall , and Basic Instinct . Anderson, whose house is in San Francisco, rents an apartment in Venice Beach when he works on projects like Starship Troopers , which can keep him in the studio twelve hours a day. Convincing filmgoers that the impossible is real involves a laborious process of analyzing and refashioning minute details. You develop an aesthetic for the show - it's not so much about right or wrong as about consistency.
Nothing is worse than inconsistency.
He cracked his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae while practicing with the Brown wrestling team during his second year and had to sit out the following season. It was then that he discovered film. He began taking more classes outside of his computer science concentration, mostly in semiotics, and studied such films as The Terminator, never imagining that he would help make its sequel a few years later. Anderson's injury also freed him to work as a teaching assistant with Professor Andy van Dam's computer graphics group. While learning how images tell stories in a semiotics seminar, he was also learning how to build images on the computer.