WHEN he was 27-years-old, artist Christian Lorenz Scheurer was struck by lightning. He packed his portfolio and headed to Hollywood, saying life was too short to waste. Here the master of digital fantastic realism talks to Liu Xiaolin.

At the age of 45, Swiss visual artist Christian Lorenz Scheurer has realized what many young artists only fantasize about - he plays a major creative role in Hollywood films and in designing popular role-playing video games.

For more than a decade he has created exotic worlds in a style he calls "digital fantastic realism" with chimeric images in exquisite detail.

His works range from whimsical and mysterious fantasy worlds, as in Hironobu Sakaguchi's role-playing video game "Final Fantasy IX," to the gloomy, menacing dystopia in the 1998 film "Dark City" and the ice-crested perspective in the disaster film "The Day After Tomorrow" (2004).

He doesn't like violent content, but it's unavoidable, as in "Animatrix" for which he was praised for creating a visually awesome war-torn setting with an midnight-blue-tinged palette. He also designed monsters in the video game "Pirates of the Caribbean."

In Shanghai to address visual design students, Scheurer said he was not very familiar with Chinese conceptual art or video games, but said the culture is so rich that it should provide endless inspiration. He has no China projects planned.

Scheurer's art career, and perhaps much of his art, was forged by a lightning bolt.

When he was a young artist working on movies and commercials in Brussels, he was hit by a lightning bolt as he slept in his penthouse apartment. It was 1994. He was 27 years old.

It was transformative.

"When I woke up I found a brick missing in the wall, my alarm clock had exploded and there were piles of rocks in my bed," he recalled in an interview last Friday with Shanghai Daily. "I felt terribly sick and had no idea what happened."

The lightning knocked out power and phones in the entire five-story building. In the morning, a roommate found him rocking back and forth in the corner, thought he had been struck by lightning and drove him to hospital.

At first doctors didn't believe them, until they found two burn wounds - entry and exit. The lightning hit his right shoulder, entered the body and exited in the lower left torso, barely missing his heart.

For the next 10 days he had neurology treatment, and once he was recovered, he packed up his portfolios and flew to Hollywood to try his luck.

"I figured life is too short and one can die at any moment. I needed to pursue my dreams sooner than later," he said.

When he arrived in the Hollywood, he started making cold calls to film companies, asking for big names such as Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. People thought he was crazy. He didn't care.

"I survived the lightning. How much worse could it be?" he said. "I just wanted to try. If it works, that'll be cool. If it fails, then I can come back and do other things. At least I'll know."

At last he called Lightstorm Entertainment in Los Angeles, a film studio owned by James Cameron, asking not for a job but for opinions of the work "of a young passionate artist." The company agreed to meet. When he took his portfolios to the company, the security guard thought he was a delivery man. "I was a delivery man, I delivered myself," Scheurer grinned.

The company was struck by his originality and craftsmanship and sent him to Digital Domain, another Cameron company. He was so excited that he walked for two hours along the Coast Highway from Santa Monica to reach the company in Venice, landing his first job in Hollywood.

Today, Scheurer is one of the most successful visual artists and concept designers in Hollywood, working in both film and video games. He has his own studio and constantly works with production teams on various projects.

Last Friday he addressed students at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. His works and those of 10 other Swiss conceptual artists, graphic designers and animators, are on exhibition at the university through April 5.

Later that evening he sat down with Shanghai Daily and talked about the storyboard of his life and career.

African inspiration

Born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1967, he was influenced by his zoologist father and artist mother. His father traveled extensively for work, and so did his family. When he was three, the family spent a year in Florida, then several months in the Seychelles Islands.

When he was six or seven, he spent a year in South African jungles and bush, encountering exotic cultures, Zulu warriors, shaman healers and learning about daily life. "It's a child's best dream and it had a terrific impact on me. That's why I was so eager to keep on traveling. It's deeply rooted in my DNA," Scheurer said.

On his own he backpacked through Mexico and Central America, again encountering exotic terrain, cultures and archeology. "Traveling is always a great inspiration," he said.

He started drawing in Africa and continued when he returned to Switzerland. He focused on the training in science and math, went on to art school and studied comics design in Saint-Luc, an architectural school in Brussels.

"My parents were surprised because they wanted me to be a scientist," Scheurer laughed. "But conceptual art design is a perfect mix of their educations and what I was exposed to."

'Titanic' to 'Matrix'

In his first two years in Hollywood, Scheurer worked on blockbusters. He designed the mega buildings for Luc Besson's "The Fifth Element" (1997), illustrated how the Titanic broke up and sank in James Cameron's "Titanic" and created the dojo fight in "The Matrix."

But he quickly got tired and went to work for the Japanese digital design company, Square, which created the popular role-playing game series "Final Fantasy" in Hawaii.

"They bought me like a football player, offering me a green card and a job in a paradise-like environment," Scheurer joked. But most of all, he liked working with the Japanese team in another cultural environment.

He calls himself "a huge fan" of the comic book "Akira" (by Katsuhiro Otomo in 1982-90) and Mamoru Oshii's "Ghost in the Shell" (1989-97), and also of animation director and cartoonist Miyazaki Hayao's works.

His first work was concept design and matte art for the movie "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" (2001). After two years, the script was still being revised and much of the previous work was discarded. The whole production took five years and it wasn't a hit, mostly because the story was poor. Square went out of business and Sakaguchi, father of the "Final Fantasy" series departed.

Because of this loss of time and effort Scheurer always advises young designers not to work on projects without a solid script. "It could be risky and a waste of time and energy," he said.

Nonetheless, the movie was revolutionary in filmmaking because it was the first computer-animated film with hyper-realistic human beings. "If the ambitious mix of East-West, movie-game and anime-action doesn't pay off, we may still remember this as the moment true CG (computer graphic) actors were born," Time magazine commented at the time.

Everyone working on the film later contributed to blockbusters, such as "Avatar," "Lord of The Rings" (LOTR) and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." The technologies of "Final Fantasy" make those possible, Scheurer said. "Without them, there would be no Gollum in LOTR, Avatar and Benjamin Button."

Scheurer moved on, still using traditional pencil sketches but combining them with Photoshop 3D animation design. While some designers are resistant to new technology, Scheurer says he enjoys using 3D software such as Zbrush and SketchUp and finds it "invigorating" from time to time.

"You just have to accept that you'll be worse (in your art) before you get better," Scheurer said candidly about starting to use new technology. "To deal with the drop, you do the new technology on the side, while you do the other one parallel. At least that's the way I operated."While working on the "Final Fantasy" movie, Scheurer spent a year on the video game "Final Fantasy IX." He jokes that the switch "saved me from being fired" as were others when the "Final Fantasy" project dissolved.

Richness of video games

"I used to be against video games ... But once I got my hands on them, I realized how rich games can be," he said. Compared with a movie of 90 minutes, a game can last much longer. For example, "Final Fantasy IX" has four discs, up to 500 hours.

Besides, fantasy games require imagining the anthropology of invented cultures, figures, architecture, vehicles, flora and fauna. Thus, games are more "design-heavy and detailed" and offer more space and possibilities.

One of the major contributions Scheurer made to "Final Fantasy IX" is the design of the Theatership. He changed Japanese-style wooden airships into theatrical aircraft, adding a French Versailles-style castle on top of the barge-like ship.

This is a typical Scheurer combinatory play, an experimental approach he often uses to combine completely different and unrelated things for surprisingly effective results.

He has also visualized games with a well-established story, such as the "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," and also created a complete fantasy world out of nothing, such as the single-player game "Spore," in which players can develop a species from a microbe, to a creature and then an interstellar planet or even a culture.

"If the concept exists, you have to respect the mythology, and at the same time bring something new to the table. While for an original thing, you have to come up with new materials with new visions," said Scheurer. "There's no better or worse."

In Scheurer's view, art design is like "meditation," and concept artists are a bit like "high performance athletes" who require constant training to stay in their best form.

When he was young, he would identify certain areas of weakness in his art and them focus on them for weeks to master them. In art school, he had problems drawing feet and portraying how characters stand. So he started to draw feet and shoes and people standing whenever he could, at the bus stop, in the coffee shop and during school, for weeks.

He still does it today. "I actually seem to return more and more to basics, like light, color, perspective, and anatomy," Scheurer said. "Today when I approach a new project, I document much more than I used to. I read books, watch DVDs and endlessly surf the Internet for images. Even when I'm not working, I am always recording new images for my visual and mental library."

"Instead of showing clients the portfolios you think they want to see, bring the ones with your own personality," he advised students at Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. "The more you express yourself, the more likely it is that you will be chosen for what you're good at."

"That's what I always do. My personal art is what I want to be hired for. Every year, I create a couple of pieces for myself, what I desire and want."

His upcoming works include Zack Snyder's "Superman" (2013) reboot, "Thor 2" (2013) and "300: The Battle of Artemisia" (2013).