Angelo Sahin has a job that many movie buffs, sci-fi enthusiasts and creative minds would dream about, as BRAD RYAN tells

AFTER uncovering the date of an impending apocalypse, teacher John Koestler played by Nicolas Cage in new sci-fi flick Knowing asks: ``How am I supposed to stop the end of the world?''

Behind the scenes, West Footscray's Angelo Sahin was finding answers to the opposite question: How am I supposed to create the end of the world?

Sahin, who has worked on film sets for almost 20 years, was in charge of the film's special effects. And it was no easy gig, given the movie's dependence on eye-popping visuals and depictions of large-scale disasters.

``Alex (Proyas), the director, was exceptionally meticulous and everything was discussed down to the micron because there was no room for error,'' Sahin said.

``One error can blow us apart.''

The film which shot to number one at the American box office and recouped its $50 million budget in a day-and-a-half was shot in Melbourne, although digitally-altered skylines and switched-around shop signs make some locations tough to pick.

The West was host to much of the filming, with Sahin's effects team conjuring some movie magic to make a plane crash into the Princes Freeway and a train smash at the Newport Rail Yards.

Then there was the tough ask of generating rain during an Australian drought something which required several pumps, more than 2km of fire hose and enough water to reduce a Target 155 campaigner to tears.

``My two favourite effects would have to be the one with the stairs and the train we had to simulate the train smashing into these stairs and squashing all these people and the plane crash with the explosion and all the fire,'' Sahin said.

Unsurprising choices, perhaps, by a man who says he was drawn to the job by a love of gore. ``Anything from buildings burning to horror movie stuff people being stabbed and shot and the whole `how did they do that?' '' Sahin said.

Since starting as an apprentice working on local productions like Romper Stomper in the 1980s, Sahin's work has taken him to great heights literally. He lived in the Himalayas for three months to shoot Indian war film Lakshya, and spent a day filming on the sky-bridge between Malaysia's Petronas Twin Towers for Bollywood comedy Don.

Movies Ghost Rider, Scooby Doo, Queen of the Damned and Mission Impossible: II also feature on Sahin's lengthy CV, and the job has brought him up-close-and-personal with some of Hollywood's biggest stars.

While declining to publicly name and shame any celebrities, Sahin has battled the on-set challenges inflated Hollywood egos can create such as the time an actress made a crew wait three hours while she and her heart-throb co-star played board games. Sahin himself had to bang on her trailer door and order her back to work.

``It's like any other job, you get good customers and you get bad customers,'' he said.

``Tom Cruise was fantastic when we did Mission Impossible: II, Anthony Hopkins was fantastic and Nicolas Cage was great too.''

Computer technology has changed the job immensely, but it still takes plenty of physical building, scientific problem-solving and hard grunt work.

``We come home, nine times out of 10, not looking the way we did when we left,'' Sahin said. ``We are covered in stuff from head to toe.''