Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1100392
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST MAR/APR 2019 Las Vegas or Vancouver, the weather is pretty dif- ferent at that point in time. In October, it usually pours 24 hours a day." Savela calls Episode 5 "an experience." "All the fans of the graphic novel were like, 'I hope they do Vegas!' The response from the fans were like, 'Wow, it came to life from the page.'" FuseFX averaged between 70 and 100 visual effects shots per episode for the duration of the season. In addition to blood shots, the studio also added an arrow here and there, and extended knife blades. "It's primarily not meant to be seen at all," says FuseFX's Cowley of their work. The work went almost entirely through FuseFX's Vancouver office, with some help from their LA studio. Cowley estimates that as many as 90 artists were contributing to Deadly Class at its peak. "One of the intrinsic challenges of episodic TV is the pattern per episode doesn't necessarily play out that way," Cowley explains. "So, trying to plan for an entire season can vary. We have shows where we are the only vendor on it. And you have big episodes and small episodes, so you don't crew and staff for a full run of everybody dedicated to that. It is sort of week- by-week, day-by-day triage of what's coming down the line. What the deadlines are. What the scope is. You sort of shuffle around your resources for the priority of the day and the week." FuseFX, says Cowley, likes to go after the more challenging work, as it engages their artists more so than the simpler stuff. The studio's core tools are Autodesk Maya, Foundry's Nuke and SideFX Houdini. "Those are our three primary packages that we have," he notes. "We have a proprietary da- tabase system called Nucleus, which we use for all of our production management. It's behind the scenes, but one of our really important tools for how we manage large volumes of shows at multiple facilities." In the case of a challenging sequence, like the Las Vegas VFX featured in Episode 5, Cowley says the team will spend a lot of time up front, design- ing the look for the effect. "Once we got turnover, we spent a lot of time working on single frames, really trying to get buy- off for what the look was going to be so we had a really clear target," he explains. "We came very close to 1-to-1 on that. There weren't any curveballs." Cowley's film background spans 18 years, while he's been working in television for just three in comparison. "In film, you have the expectation that there is a lot of time for play and explore. I really think the creative pipeline in TV — you have to be very linear. You have to be very targeted in where you are going. And when the end goal is very abstract, like it is with this sequence, that's where things can really go off the rails if you are not very, very smart with what you are doing." "We talked with you guys a month or even two months before we actually shot the episode," Savela recalls. "It's not really storyboards, it's the concept of what the tone is going to look like. We did a lot of 'melting Vegas' kind of examples. We designed the clown for the sequence and that all has to be signed off on before it actually goes into the production pipeline." Deadly Class also features reoccurring rooftop scenes, where the students hang out in what's called The Graveyard. The pilot episode was shot on a real rooftop, but subsequent scenes were shot on a cyc with a translight illuminated film background. VFX were added to enhance the outdoor look, include blinking lights and airplanes to add realism. In another sequence, taking place in a hotel room, the VFX team created matte paintings of 1980s San Francisco, which were then composited into the hotel's windows. At press time, the VFX team was working on Episodes 8, 9 and 10. "It's an amazing show to work on," says Savela. "The crew is amazing. It looks like a miniature fea- ture film when you look at an hour of television." — By Marc Loftus ABC'S STATION 19 In March 2018, the team behind television's longest-running medical drama, ABC's Grey's Anatomy, introduced viewers to a new spinoff series centered around the Seattle firefighters of Station 19. Created by Grey's Anatomy executive producer Stacy McKee, the production team also includes Grey's creator Shonda Rhimes, Grey's star Ellen Pompeo and Grey's executive producer Betsy Beers. A true "Shondaland" product, Station 19 finds its lead characters in some precarious situations — including fires, explosions and severe storms. And while the characters face life-threat- ening circustances each week, the network cer- tainly wants to keep its actors out of harm's way. "Our job is to create absolute reality," says VFX supervisor Mark Scott Spatny. "And if we're doing our job right, then viewers don't know that we have special effects. We're just trying to create the world and the actual environment and danger that firemen and women encounter every day, while keeping our actors safe." According to Spatny, two great examples of what he and his team at CoSA are accomplishing for the show can be seen in Episodes 4 and 7 of the 2019 winter season. In Episode 4, for instance, there was a large fire in an abandoned building. "They actually did that scene the old-fashioned way," he says, "by build- There are 70 to 100 VFX shots in each episode of Deadly Class. The studio's core tools are Autodesk Maya, Nuke and Houdini.