Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/983981
www.postmagazine.com 17 POST MAY 2018 WHAT'S STREAMING there's his form when he's more human, after he's bonded with Will. And it was really as we went down the design pro- cess, trying to find that balance of, we didn't want him to feel overly friendly, with the wrong tone for the season, because he is this thing that's both good and bad, and I think that's a big part of his journey, where is the robot going to land himself as a character as opposed to just being tied to the story through the boy. He really does have his own ad- venture and his own path that he's on." Raisani says that if you look at the shots in the pilot episode, there were lit- erally "hundreds of artists" that went into creating the robot. "There's a whole team of people — a performer and his whole crew — that operate the practical robot that's on-set. Then there's character and digital aug- mentation. Then there's full CG versions of him, when he's in his original form which I'll call, 'dissected.'" This is when Will is stuck in a burning tree in a forest at night, and the robot's upper half is on the tree limb while his legs are below. According to both Pratt and Raisani, the robot's face was also of high importance. "We did a ton of design, it's almost like a motion graphic design, of exactly what should be on his face and then technical- ly, how we're going to get that onto his face on-set practically as well as digitally," explains Raisani. "On-set, it's an actual laser projector that is sort of above and to the side of the performer's head and the front of the face is a screen, as in a movie theater screen that an image is projected onto. We did a lot of testing and found that he needed to be a combination of emotives, so you can sort of understand what feeling he is portraying without being distracting. We found that the more detail and the more information and the busier it was, almost the more distracting it got. The more it was almost like a lava lamp, the more it drew you in and was enigmat- ic in a way that you weren't exactly sure what emotion he is portraying. That, in combination with the performance, really brought together this character that really sets the tone for the whole season, which is, is he really friend or foe? As the season progresses, his face and emotions progress and get more complex." THE GREAT BEYOND After crash landing on an alien planet, the Robinsons, as well as West and Dr. Smith, make their way across the terrain, which ranges from glacier landscapes and icy lakes to forests and mountain- ous landscapes. "They crash in what we call the 'glacier landscape,' and they actually went to the top of a mountain outside Vancouver and shot up there," says Raisani, "so the exte- riors are shot — that's real snow around them — but looking out over the valley and the valley itself is extended and replaced with our alien planet and from there they descend into the forest, that forest and anything where they're looking out at the burning ship down below in the forest — anything beyond 20 feet — is all extended. "We tried to shoot as much as we could practically, only so much you can get of alien landscape in Vancouver, so we tried to find that balance of making sure that we augmented where neces- sary to help remind you that you're on an alien planet." CHALLENGES According to Pratt, some of the big- gest challenges were in the fact that there were multiple scenes with heavy VFX throughout a single episode. "Particularly, Episodes 1 and 2 had a very high shot count," he says. "The majority of those were incredibly difficult." To help with the heavy lifting, Raisani and Pratt called in some support from outside vendors, including Image Engine, ILP, Cinesite and Mackevision to take on different scenes while others shared assets to complete the same scenes. The internal team relied on Sohonet, a private global fibre network for studios, production, post and VFX, in order to move the data around the world. However, from vendor to vendor, each has their own pipeline setup, and software tools that include Maya, V-Ray, Houdini, Nuke, Arnold and Shotgun. "We had really high expectations for everyone, and I think we were able to achieve not only the level of quality we had hoped for but at a volume that was unanticipated by all of us," sums up Raisani. "I'm really happy with how everything turned out." Pratt agrees, "I think it did definitely develop into a larger show than anticipated, but I feel that even with that expansion, the show runners and studio still got onscreen, exactly what they wanted." Raisani Pratt Environments were digitally enhanced. The key Will/robot connection.