Martial arts meets special effects in The Storm Riders, where Ekin Cheng battled an invisible Fire Dragon against a blue screen

Set in a mythical ancient China, the story plays out like a Western superhero film and stars Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng against some stunning backdrops

Effects-heavy scenes featuring the two manipulating water and other elements looked effective on film’s 1998 debut and brought something new to the wuxia genre

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Aaron Kwok in a still from The Storm Riders (1998), directed by Andrew Lau. The film is an adaptation from kung fu comics of Ma Wing-shing.

Published: 5:15am, 17 Jan 2021Updated: 5:22am, 17 Jan 2021

Hong Kong cinema is constantly evolving, and martial arts directors are continually bringing something new to the genre to keep it current. The novel approach of The Storm Riders, released in 1998, was to use digital effects and computer animation in a wuxia film.

The resulting martial arts fantasy, based on a popular Hong Kong comic by Ma Wing-shing, was a big hit with audiences in the city. It was helped by the presence of stars Aaron Kwok Fu-shing and Ekin Cheng Yee-kin in the leading roles, as well as one of the biggest publicity blitzes for a Hong Kong film ever seen.

Special effects were, at the time, not new to Hong Kong martial arts films. Early Cantonese swordfighting films, for example, hired artists to scratch magical flying swords and arrows directly celluloid. Tsui Hark pioneered make-up effects and models in films like A Chinese Ghost Story and Zu: Warriors from The Magic Mountain – the latter using special effects technicians brought in from the United States.

Digital effects and computer animation, however, were still relatively new technologies in 1998 and were rare in Hong Kong films.

Film company Golden Harvest, which co-produced The Storm Riders, did not conceive it as a martial arts film with special effects, but as a special effects film with martial arts. The comic was chosen as the source material because it had won praise for its fantasy-style artwork. Harvest decided to partner with Hong Kong special effects house Centro Digital Pictures, as the effects were so central to the movie, and it came aboard as co-producer.