Apex blast ready for its close-up

Chapel Hill animator depicts '06 event for safety board

CHAPEL HILL -- No one was inside when an Apex chemical-waste storage facility blew up 18 months ago, but a video animation of the fiery blast brings everyone virtually there.

Using piles of schematic drawings, technical reports and eyewitness interview transcripts, Chapel Hill computer animator Robert Newton created a "forensic visualization" of the explosion that sent thousands fleeing their homes that October night in 2006.

It will be used today to detail the U.S. Chemical Safety Board's findings on what went wrong at Environmental Quality Co. when a stack of chemical oxygen generators ignited and sent a fireball and a toxic cloak of chemicals far across the sky.

Newton, a former screenwriter with Hollywood experience, does not have a degree in chemical engineering or practical experience investigating industrial chemical accidents. Yet the Shelby native's transition into 3-D animation production has the U.S. Chemical Safety Board and private companies seeking him to recreate catastrophes for safety videos examining what went wrong.

"You would think that the best thing would be to have an engineer do these," said Newton, 50. "But in the end, you don't. You want someone who can tell a story, because I don't think those engineers want me second-guessing their engineering decisions, whereas an engineer might do that. They want someone who can visualize exactly what their conclusions are."

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board began producing video re-creations three years ago to accompany the lengthy technical reports summarizing the board's findings on major accidents. The videos have become an effective training tool for executives, managers and workers at refineries and other chemical industry companies worldwide, said Daniel Horowitz, the federal agency's director of public affairs.

"We really reach a different and probably larger audience with the videos, because people are able to use them directly in training large groups of workers," Horowitz said. "It's more informative to communicate about an accident and about these very detailed scenarios that cause them using video, using computer animation specifically. This is very difficult to explain to most people, even engineers, about just how one of these processes work, using schematics and so forth. The 3-D representation really lets us get the salient points out very quickly to people in a few minutes."

When CSB investigators told Newton that his spreading blaze looked more like a pool of lava, it took hours of overtime tweaking the video in the office he sublets from New Century Digital Media, a video post-production facility sandwiched between a dentist's and a doctor's offices.

Ads, then Hollywood

Newton has a UNC-Chapel Hill degree in TV and motion picture studies. His first job was filming car commercials and public affairs programming for WRAL, but his filmmaking aspirations led him in 1987 to write, direct and produce "Dear Phil," a movie version of Lee Smith's short story about a housewife who confides her anxieties in letters to Phil Donahue.

Newton moved to Los Angeles and secured several options on his screenplay adaptation of a short story written by Marianne Gingher, an associate professor of creative writing at UNC-CH. The script, telling of a teenage girl's tumultuous summer at a fictionalized Wrightsville Beach with her mother and family friend, is still kicking around Hollywood.

Asked by Disney to develop projects for Bette Midler after the bloom fell off her acting career, Newton said he and his wife, MaryKate Cunningham, knew it might be time for a change. With their first of two daughters set to be born, they moved back to North Carolina in 1997.

He had taken some interactive media classes through UCLA's extension program and learned he had a knack for 3-D animation, then a growing niche.

Newton got an early break producing animation for a Science Channel program called "Failure Analysis," which produced re-enactments of accidents such as the 2003 explosion at Kinston's West Pharmaceutical Services plant. Through animation, he showed how dust that had gathered above a false ceiling was drawn into an overhead vent, prompting the blast.

Working from the Chapel Hill office his daughters call his cave, Newton said the demand for his brand of computer animation is spiking upward. And you never know when Hollywood might come calling, he joked. That screenplay of Gingher's short story is still waiting to be filmed.

"It's been called one of the great all-time unpaid scripts," he said with a laugh.