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VFX FOR TELEVISION www.postmagazine.com 17 POST APRIL 2017 isual effects studios today con- tinue to step up, as they face ever-increasing demands to deliver high-end visual effects for television, on shrinking budgets and tighter deadlines. As this trend continues, these studios are seeing their efforts rewarded with in- dustry accolades, such as Emmy Awards for Outstanding Visual Effects for such innovative shows as Game of Thrones, Black Sails and more, creating a tight and competitive race for bigger, better visual effects for television. In some cases, studios are creating menacing parallel universes with monsters; seeing the mass destruction of fantasy realms with rivers of racing green wildfire; enabling superheroes and their crew to fight crime with surprising weaponry and helping real-world bands of misfit/science geeks solve problems on the global stage. Here, Post speaks with several leading visual effects houses about some of their biggest visual effects demands for tele- vision and how they persevere through some incredible challenges. STRANGER THINGS Set in Hawkins, IN in the 1980s, Stranger Things focuses on the disappearance of a young boy as supernatural events occur across the town. Season 1 was released on Netflix last summer, and the critically-acclaimed show will be back for Season 2 this fall. Los Angeles-based Gradient Effects (www.gradientfx.com) was the lead VFX house for the first season of the show, creating more than 250 VFX shots, including the full concept and design of the rift, the portal to the alternate Upside Down dimension. Gradient Effects needed to match the original set design showing holes in a wall that lead to the "Upside Down" world, while creating a rift that behaved "like a living being," says Gradient founder and VFX supervisor Olcun Tan. Filled with vine-like, slimy viscera, the rift "pulsates and wraps around the actors. It's like a membrane and a bit like a beating heart. It surrounds people once they go through the portal." One of the references for the organic structure of the rift was the Xenomorph egg from Alien, he notes. Netflix requires 4K delivery of content, which "drastically changes demands on networking and the pipeline," says Tan. "You need four times more resources. And, it's important to have a system to QC your work in 4K." Gradient's "closed loop environment" features SAM's Quantel Rio for color, editorial and DI. The system enables the studio to check its 4K work without going out to another vendor. "When you enter the 4K realm, you can't do this work at home," says Tan. "You need a real brick and mortar facility." What's unique about Rio, he says, is the ability "to script and program it — and it's tightly integrated with Shotgun. There are a lot of shot deliveries each day with TV, and editorial can often become a bottleneck. So you have to be automated and optimize the workflow for a high amount of throughput." To create the organic rift on a TV budget and schedule, Gradient estab- lished a pipeline with Pixologic ZBrush, Autodesk Maya, SideFX Houdini and Gradient's own lighting setup driven by Solid Angle's Arnold renderer. Gradient completed a lot of R&D with Houdini, writing program tools and developing a procedural way to recreate the rift's CG elements as the on-set geometry chang- es with each live-action shot. Additionally, Gradient created a dynamic system to fabricate the alien spores floating in the atmosphere of the Upside Down, a dark and threaten- ing parallel universe. "We had created snow for The Revenant and were lucky to be able to adapt the snow tools from our sister company, Secret Lab, for the spores," Tan explains. "The tools can handle an insane amount of particulates, figuring out where and when they are visible and how to distribute them." Gradient also added volumetric fog and digitally set dressed many loca- tions, adding rift-like CG structures and covering buildings and cars with the vine-like viscera. The company's custom tracking motion capture tool, Shape Shifter, came in handy for a scene where hundreds of organic structures hold onto a girl cov- ered with slime and for an alien feeding sequence with no facial tracking mark- BY CHRISTINE BUNISH Aaron Sims Creative devel- oped the Stranger Things' much feared Demogorgon. V