Special effects for TV: theories abound on how to achieve greater efficiency and higher quality - SFX for Television - Industry Overview

Post, April, 2003 by Ann Fisher

If it's the tools that are the key to success when creating special effects for television series, we hope you are attending this months NAB show. Several post houses interviewed for this story were planning to attend and they are very candid about their wishes (see sidebar on page 66). If it is the talent and their techniques that will unlock the magic formula, better look closely at what you a ready have, whether your personnel are motivated. inspired, talented.

One post house believes in pushing the envelope, unleashing editors to try different combinations of tools. Another is convinced that one great artist working on high-end equipment is the answer. Many are wrestling with the implications brought on by the high definition format

SHOWTIME'S DEAD LIKE ME

MGM hired freelance visual effects supervisor Bob Habros for Showtime's Dead Like Me series, which will premiere in July. Much of the post production of the visual effects for the 13-part one-hour series s being done at Rainmaker (www.ainmaker.com), who did the pilot, and Image Engine (www.image-engine.com), who worked on the graveling characters (entities that put things in motion which actually cause death). Both studios are in Los Angeles The irreverent show, full of black humor, focuses on people literally caught between life and death. There will be about 40 to 50 effects shots per episode.

Signature special effects shots are the "pass throughs," when the living go to undead and then take a spirit form. The interactions between these grim reapers and the living often produces sparks of energy or trails of smoke. Discreet's Inferno is used for the signature effects with 3D shots and elements, created and animated in LightWave. Smoke elements are used for more organic effects. Other effects include a CG train wreck, 3D frogs and an amusement park heaven The show is delivered in HD, though the artists work in NTSC proxy for speed and to nail down the details.

"It's hard to find freelance hired by production nowadays," says Habros. "MOM likes the idea of putting the supervisor on staff with production Then you have someone representing the interests of the company as they try to get the shots done. When you hire a facility that's all you have. What I can do is go around to the usual or newer places in town, check things out. find out where the artists are. It's a very personal approach that I take -- I can take a particular shot to a particular artist wherever they are."

ALIAS HD SHOTS

Digital Dimension (www.digitaldimension.com) in Burbank has worked on three episodes of ABC's Alias, including the special episode that aired after this year's Super Bowl in January. They did about 20 HD shots. The studio's specialty is photoreal CG elements integration into live action film plates.

"The fact that the show is all done in HD makes the entire visual effects production a lot more challenging than regular D-1 I productions," says visual effects supervisor Ben Girard. "The additional resolution required for HD slows the development required to get the shots done in a very short period of time, sometimes as low as three days. ft's basically the same technical requirements that film needs but with a broadcast schedule. The visual effects studio needs to have a very efficient pipeline and highly knowledgeable staff to pull it off. Alias's visual effects supervisor, Kevin Blank, constantly comes back to us to break the limit of what is possible. One interesting fact is that every single visual effects shot done for the Super Bowl episode was conceived, shot and post produced all within three weeks."

Digital Dimension uses Eyeon's Digital Fusion, Discreet's 3DS Max and Chaos Group's Vray, all running on Dell dual 2.8 GHz Xeons with 2GB RAM.

ZOIC ATTRACTS A CROWD

Zoic in Los Angeles (www.zoic.com) opened its doors in July 2002. Already it has a large number of visual effects contracts in television, doing work that includes UPN's Twilight. Zone, ABC's Miracles, Steven Bochco's NYPD2069 pilot for Fox and WB's Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Interestingly, the post house initially planned to concentrate on effects for advertising, but series work just kept coming in and now accounts for 50 percent of its business. Of that work, 20 percent is HD, but as pilot season approaches that will rise to 70 percent

For this season's Firefly pilot, which aired in December, Zoic won the very first VES (Visual Effects Society) award for Best Effects in a Television Series." Creative director Loni Peristere thinks that was due in part to Zoic's technique of rendering all hard surface models in New Tek LightWave, producing photoreal objects in space. The facility plans to do something similar for this season's series finale of Buffy, which will air during May sweeps. Using The Beaver Project, a software that takes a scene created in Alias\Wavefront Maya and renders it in LightWave, Zoic artists have created a cave environment filled with thousands of vampires, the hellmouth under Sunnydale.

"We're very excited about this. I think this is going to get us closer to a Lord of the Rings-style for TV," says Peristere. "When you're working with senior level talent that understand Maya where you can script in the package, it allows you to do things like write your own crowd simulators. We decided we were going to need this for the season finale and Andrew Orloff, our CG supervisor, has written a pretty powerful crowd duplication tool that incorporates motion capture data working with flocking locators on alterable terrain for any number of CG extras you might require. Maya's new toolset lets you can pick a square, decide how big that square is, decide how many digital people you want in that square, decide how randomly you want their movements and tell them where to go. It brings together a bound model, motion capture data and Maya's powerful character setups. You can also exchange whether those are sprites or full rez people. In that shot we started with a close-up and ended up with over 50,000 folks ."