Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/9707
VFX FOR TELEVISION around.” Zoic artists are encour- aged to devise their own methods for visualizing such shockers. The Zoic method is expedient — have “generalists” leapfrog over the tradi- tional department-by-department workflow — in television, there simply isn’t enough time.“We have like three days to do all that stuff!” Orloff says.“Model, texture, rig, light, maybe hand off to one specialist who’s really good at animation. Then a compositor will put it all to- gether and maybe generate some of their own lighting passes.” After a given round of effects Heroesis just one of the many shows Stargate is providing VFX for this season. Mike Romey is Zoic’s pipeline TD.The ro- bustness of Zoic’s pipeline allows artists to excel at what they do because it relieves them of all the heavy lifting of data wrangling and data management and allows them to “express themselves more efficiently.” For Fringe, Orloff says Zoic creates many digital prosthetics.“We’re taking prosthetic makeup and tracking digital elements onto it, enhancing the performance, chopping peo- ple’s jaws off, having parasites crawl out of people’s mouths and stretch their face production, Orloff and Romey and staff will review which artists’ most innovative effects could work best for Zoic as a whole and then codify the workflow for that effect into a script.“Then everybody can have access to it at a click of a button.We let the artists’ discoveries and innovations drive what we do in the pipeline side.” Zoic is often consulted at the very early outline stages of a series’ season, Orloff says. “We’ll go in and say, ‘Here’s 10 cool effects that we think will be great for your show.’ And it’s really cool to see them written into the scripts as they come along.” As each episode progresses,VFX artists get to im- prove an effect over and over — “It’s like getting paid to do R&D!” OUTSOURCED & MORE In addition to services like compositing, editing, 3D CG and previsualization, Star- gate’s staff offers film and HD production as well as something special to them called the Virtual Backlot. It’s designed to provide pro- ductions — particularly those without a lot of time and budget — with an immersive, 360-degree world, which may be “pho- tographed from any angle.” Such virtual loca- tions may be true to life or a fantasy world (with help from CG) or a mixture of both. Just last month Stargate founder Sam Nicholson was in Mumbai shooting 360-de- gree locations for a new sitcom called Out- sourced. It’s not for Indian consumption though, it’s a pilot for NBC featuring an American whose employer has sent him to India to work at a call center that serves customers in the US. continued on page 50 30 Post • April 2010 www.postmagazine.com