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Comedy king and actor-director Stephen Chow Sing-chi  knows the value of a good visual gag. Take his latest film, Kung Fu Hustle.  Chow's character, a two-bit con artist, tries to assassinate a loudmouthed landlady. For his efforts, he is bitten on the mouth by a pair of snakes. In the next scene, his throbbing lips are swollen to the size of pillows.
Simple, effective and funny - and impossible without the help of computer graphics, this gag is one of several in the film that relies in part on special effects to get  a laugh.
Computer-effects production house Centro Digital Pictures  devoted 50 of its 160 staff  over eight months to produce more than 550 shots in the movie. But, like Kevin Bacon  in any Hollywood film, it is content with a strong supporting role. 
'There is no doubt that Stephen Chow is the star and major attraction of the movie,' said John Chu Ka-yan,  Centro Digital chairman  and chief executive.  
Mr Chu, who  worked on Chow's earlier hit Shaolin Soccer,  said: 'What computer graphics have done in Kung Fu Hustle is enhance the overall presentation, so that what the director has in mind can be recreated on screen.'  
Too many movies cast special effects as their lead, frustrating filmgoers with flat narratives.
 Kung Fu Hustle, however, was a 'fusion of story and technology',  Mr Chu said. The visual effects were part of the punch line rather than the sole reason for seeing the film.
 Centro Digital is one of several production houses to crop up in recent years as Hong Kong cinema increasingly relies on computer effects to tell a story. There are about five leading production houses and many smaller shops in the city, employing  about 1,000 people.
Local production houses are also growing in number as Hollywood stretches its digital entertainment production chain to cities like Hong Kong to take advantage of lower costs. 
Centro Digital worked on the visual effects  in Quentin Tarantino's  Kill Bill films. DCDC,  another local production house, did the animation for the television series Butt Ugly Martians,  which will  be broadcast in the US and Europe.
Menfond,  which employs 70 people in Hong Kong and  50 in Guangzhou, recently won a bid to provide most of the visual effects for the sci-fi flick Ultraviolet,   produced by Sony Pictures and Screen Gems.  The company will do 800 of the film's 900 special effects shots over nine months.  
'Many production houses in Hong Kong can do one or a few shots very well, but what Hollywood producers look for is consistency among all the shots,' Menfond director  Victor Wong Wang-tat  said. 'Few houses can maintain the same quality over several hundred shots.'
There is little doubt, however, that the main reason Hong Kong houses are winning Hollywood contracts is lower costs. 
'Animators in the US earn on average [$80,000] a month. Here, they earn about $20,000,'  Mr Wong said.
DCDC director  and chief executive Wendy Choi  estimated the company's recently released animated film DragonBlade  would have cost five times its $10 million budget had it been made in the US.
But industry players point to Hong Kong cinema's kung fu heritage as another reason special effects work is migrating from west to east. 
Centro Digital producer Tommy Tom said: 'As a child growing up we watched kung fu movies and action films, so most of us know what a fighting scene should look like.'
To make the fight scenes in DragonBlade  more lifelike, Ms Choi filmed mainland martial arts masters in action and hired local stuntmen to give  animators a better reference when designing shots. 
But it is not all explosions and stunning action sequences. Computer-generated effects are used in less obvious ways to help keep production costs down.
Computer graphics can make a two-storey  building appear 100 storeys  high. People or objects can be added  to scenes.   With  visual effects, the laws of physics simply do not apply, giving directors unprecedented creative control.
Take the opening sequence of Jackie Chan's  New Police Story,  on which Menfond worked. In a single shot, the camera starts with the Hong Kong skyline, sweeps down the buildings and to a back alley where Chan's character lies drunk on the floor. 
'This is impossible to do with any conventional camera,' Mr Wong said. 'But with computer graphics, we can generate a sequence that merges actual shots of the Hong Kong skyline with shots of the back alley. So, in one shot, the director can tell the audience the place, the person and his situation, which is quite amazing.'
In the case of Kung Fu Hustle, computer colour corrections meant the director did not need to wait for the right weather to shoot because the lighting of each scene could be readjusted in post production.
Although Hong Kong would like to become a centre for computer-generated visual effects production - in his policy address last week Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa vowed support for creative industries as part of the city's development - Hollywood animators need not worry about losing their jobs to outsourcing. 
 Mr Wong said the technology used by Hong Kong production houses lagged behind Hollywood by about three years.  Ms Choi agreed, noting the animation techniques in DragonBlade were not as sophisticated as those used in  big-budget productions such as Shrek. 
'There are 500 [animation] points on Shrek's face. We have about 100 points on our main character's face,' she said.
Many companies simply do not have the scale to land big contracts. Large US-based houses such as Pixar and Sony have more than 500 people, whereas the leading Hong Kong companies typically have about 100.
And, like in the electronics manufacturing industry, the value lies in the brand, not in the ability to do low-cost work. Contract work today generates a profit margin of about 30 per cent, but Hong Kong production houses have no intellectual property rights for the products they help create, meaning they cannot share in lucrative merchandising and licensing opportunities.
DCDC hopes its DragonBlade creation will win a following among fans, leading to opportunities for other revenue streams. 'We can also publish books, make home videos, games and toys, and license to TV channels,'  Ms Choi said.



Snakes alive - it's special effects