If you ever wondered how they did some of the visual effects for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, ask Jim Rygiel. The Kenosha native and UWM grad created them.

Rygiel returned to his home state recently to speak to a luncheon audience at the Wisconsin Entepreneurs' Conference at the Hyatt Regency Milwaukee.

"When I first started, the industry I am now involved in had not even been invented," says Rygiel, a 1973 graduate of Kenosha St. Joseph and a fine arts grad of UWM. "A professor at UWM, Adolph Rosenblatt, was sort of an out-there artist at the time I was there, and I think he had something to do with me starting to think out of the box.

"That's necessary when you are involved in something new like I was. Another cornerstone of entrepreneurship is risk. You have to be willing to take them."

After his graduation from UWM, Rygiel didn't see much opportunity in the Wisconsin of the 1970s.

"When I was growing up in Kenosha, I had choices -- working on a farm, working in a factory, working in a shopping mall or leaving," he says.

"I chose the latter. I packed up my 1971 Gremlin, made by my dad (at AMC in Kenosha), and headed to the West Coast. I didn't know what I was headed for, but I knew I was headed out of the box."

Rygiel earned a master's in fine arts at Otis Parsons School of Design and then "found myself working in that shopping mall, but it was in Los Angeles."

While earning money at the mall, he also kept working on design and gravitated into computer graphics and visual effects. Along the way, he worked for several startup businesses that eventually failed.

"There was no software back then, no Photoshop, no color monitors," he says. "One of the first computers I worked on was a Cray, made in Beaver Dam, and it cost something like $15 million. So, doing what we were doing was very costly.

"It was a new industry. The film industry was not really interested. There were a couple films with computer-driven effects like Star Fighters and Tron that got some attention, but it was a tough business at the time.

"I finally decided to do freelance. I figured if I was going to do under I wanted to be the one under."

Rygiel finally broke through a bit in commercials, with the first computer-generated commercial for Pentel Pen.

"Ray Bradbury even did the voice. That was how far out we were at the time," he says. Rygiel also was part of creating the first Bud Bowl commercial break for the Super Bowl telecast.

Gradually, in the 1990s, Rygiel worked as a freelance designer for the film industry, which finally was warming up to digital graphics and other computer-assisted effects.

"I went to every studio out there and did a lot of networking and knocking on the door," Rygiel says. "I got to know people."

All the work paid off. His credits today include "The Last Starfighter," "Species," "Outbreak," "Air Force One," "Ghost," "The Last Action Hero," "Batman Returns," "Alien III" and others. But, it was his work on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy that earned him three Oscars and other critical acclaim.

"I got a call and was asked if I wanted to go to New Zealand to make a trilogy," he says. "New Zealand didn't match up with high tech for me. I knew it was beautiful and had sheep.

"But, I learned that Peter Jackson (renowned filmmaker) was there, and there were tax breaks for the film industry. The latter was what they were most interested in. I could bring my family, so said 'let's go.'"

Working with Jackson was a fascinating experience. "One day I would say 'the man is insane,' and an hour later I would say, 'the main is a genius,'" Rygiel says.

Many of the visual effects were created by using old and new technologies. For example, the differing sizes of the Hobbits and other characters often were created by putting one actor in a hole and another on a pedestal.

In one scene with flowing lava, charcoal briquettes were used to create the effect. In another, an actor fell from "one soft mattress to another soft mattress" and the movement was digitized to make it look like he was falling off a cliff. "The actor made about $10,000 for doing that," Rygiel jokes.

Of course, Rygiel and his crew would use these old tech techniques, and the actors' movements, to digitize and create more sophisticated effects.

At one time, 23,000 people worked on the trilogy, and 6,000 computers were used. Rygiel knew he had come a long way from those original, primitive computers and their minimal software.

Rygiel might be headed toward becoming a director himself. He also returned to UWM while in town for the conference and met with the dean of fine arts, who now is involved in an interdisciplinary Digital Arts and Culture program.

That, and the high tech tone of the entrepreneurs' conference, made Rygiel realize things have changed in his home state.

"When they first asked me to speak, I thought Wisconsin and technology was a contradiction in terms," he says. "Of course, I'm thinking how it was 20 years or more ago. Things have changed."