Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/680196
PRIMETIME www.postmagazine.com 15 POST MAY 2016 sions have to be made at that point." The skies of occupied LA are filled with drones. "You see them everywhere, especially after curfew; they spy on the population," says Syberg. "Design-wise the drones could be from today; they're not supposed to look super-futuristic, but we've given them some personality using an eye instead of a camera for their spying." Adds supervisor Martin Gardeler, one of the founders of Ghost, "We've given each drone some Artificial Intelligence, as if it was thinking for itself instead of being controlled by someone." A large portion of LA was destroyed during the alien takeover. Ghost used digital matte paintings to show the destruction and added full 3D elements — some of them landmark LA buildings — to shots with camera movement and multiple angles. The brief for creating the massive, just-erected wall was that it should be metallic and look "quite shiny and new," says Gardeler. "It's supposed to be 100-meters high and only exists in CG — it was not built on-set." Ghost devel- oped the look for the wall based on early drafts from production design. The wall is often shown in wide shots to capture its size and scale. "There are helicopter aerials and ground shots showing it winding between the buildings," says Gardeler. Reflections on the metallic surface were mostly crafted in CG. "One of the reasons the design of the wall changed was the reflections," notes Syberg. "The wall was flat in the pilot, but it was hard to make it look interest- ing with flat reflections — it didn't really look like metal. So we introduced some curvature to it." With seams joining the metal sections of the curved wall, "it can follow the path of a road perfectly when seen from above." "Creating something that big and that reflective was quite difficult," Gardeler adds. "There's no big metal object to compare it to. So it was a challenge to sell it to the audience, but I think we got away with it!" Ghost also helped modify the con- cept art for the CG spaceship, portions of which were seen in the pilot and last episode of Season 1. Ghost deployed Maya, Nuke, SynthEyes, Adobe Photoshop and The Pixel Farm's PFTrack for Colony. The studio also used OTOY's OctaneRender, a GPU-based rendering program. "I use it a lot for my projects," says Gardeler. "It's so fast — I can test things, see results and iterate faster. That really helped for the design of the wall. Metal is quite slow to render, but Octane sped it up." Drones and a giant, metal wall are regularly-appearing VFX. The studio relies on Octane for rendering.