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VFX FOR TV www.postmagazine.com 25 POST APRIL 2016 An in-house team, working under Munroe's direct supervision, included compositing supervisor Mark Thomas- Stubbs and lead compositor Paul DeOliveira. John Mariella was the "fur and feathers guy" who created a bird flying in one-third G, a robotic hamster and the missing woman's lush zero-G hair. To facilitate asset sharing, the VFX houses working on The Expanse used many of the same tools: Autodesk's Maya, The Foundry's Nuke, Pixologic's ZBrush and Chaos Group's V-Ray. Keyframe also used Andersson Technologies' SynthEyes for tracking and Autodesk 3DS Max; Rocket Science employed The Foundry's Mari, and Spin used Pixar's RenderMan and The Foundry's Katana. Munroe says, "We'll continue the mul- tiple vendor process in Season 2 while making some workflow improvements, such as evaluating the use of Shotgun on the production side — the vendors already have it — and adding centralized servers for all the footage so vendors can pull shots at their discretion." DC'S LEGENDS OF TOMORROW DC's Legends of Tomorrow is the time-traveling spin-off of the hit series Arrow and The Flash. It debuted on The CW in January and has been renewed for Season 2. Hollywood-based Encore VFX (www.encorepost.com), a division of Deluxe Entertainment, is the lead VFX house for all three series. "The same team of enthusiastic artists is now on Legends, so they're familiar with the franchise and are working on something they're good at, which keeps the quality high," says Armen Kevorkian, the show's VFX supervisor and senior VFX supervisor and creative director at Encore VFX. "We established the looks for Captain Cold, Firestorm and Atom in The Flash, so the R&D process was already done for their appearance in Legends. A lot of assets carry over; we're not reinventing everything from scratch. But every episode has some- thing new to take on; we put a lot of effort into concepting effects specific to each script." Visual effects for the new series range from the time ship Waverider and the time tunnel gag to the superhero pow- ers of the ship's crew, which is trying to prevent Vandal Savage from destroying the world and time itself. The space ship-like Waverider, equipped with a time sphere, is a fully- CG element whose exterior was con- cepted at Encore in collaboration with the executive producers. The ship's AI is represented by a talking head hologram that appears on the bridge. The holo- gram is all CG animated by Encore after the actor has completed ADR. The Waverider zooms into the sky where it disappears into a CG time tun- nel whose portals or doorways lead to different eras in time. "The time tunnel gives a new twist to past interpretations of a time tunnel," says Kevorkian. "It's al- most a surreal tunnel with a greenish-or- ange tint and a wispy feel to it." Set extensions are sometimes required for the time travelers' destinations. An opera house in Vancouver, where the series is shot, was given the look of Moscow with Red Square and St. Basil's Cathedral in the background, courtesy of 3D and 2 1/2D matte paintings. Kevorkian is especially proud of the shots where Atom dons his power-suit and shrinks to traverse miniaturized CG environments. One sequence features a tiny CG Atom flying through a blood- stream; another has the fully-digital character inside a computer mainframe. "It came out gorgeous," he reports. "Another scene in an upcoming episode will blow viewers' minds!" Several shots of the CG Atom feature the face of actor Brandon Routh tracked onto the mini character. Encore VFX also creates the fiery head and hands of Firestorm, and the cryonic and pyro weapon effects for Captain Cold's cold gun and Heat Wave's heat gun. Both are generated with particle systems; despite deliv- ering freezing hits, the cold gun has a "flame-like look" in its weapon's fire, Kevorkian notes. Also in Encore's repertoire are the wings of Hawkgirl and Hawkman. "Our first point of reference for the wings was the comic book, but they are photoreal hawk wings that 'hawk out' from the characters' backs and retract at certain times," Kevorkian explains. "Each feather in the wings has a distinctive look — it's not a co- py-and-paste process. We don't want them to look perfect; symmetry and repetition would look fake. We need the wings to be grounded in reality." The toolset at Encore VFX includes Maya, 3DS Max, ZBrush, SynthEyes, Nuke and V-Ray. Encore is the lead VFX house on DC's Legends of Tomorrow. While some assets carry over, each episode features something new. The CG Waverider is one of the show's reoccuring VFX. Here, the Atom travels through a blood stream, all thanks to CG.