Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1234746
e d i t i o n i , 2 0 2 0 c g w 2 9 person would appear to fall dozens of floors to a dark and scary death. The studio also adds football fields of length and detail off into the distance to really sell the idea of its massive scope. One of Technicolor's most complex visual effects contributions comes in Episode 10, where there is a fight sequence with some of the main characters. "It's a set extension [with] over 40 shots, which entails not just geometrically building up the environment in 3D, but adding a lot of atmospherics," Ghezzo explains. "There's some steam, smoke, sparks. We had to do a couple of character takeovers, where we're replacing the performance with a digital double. There's hologram-style graphics that pop up and one of the performers gets thrown through it. And it all just blends together seamlessly." – Marc Lous TITANS (DC UNIVERSE) DC Universe's Titans follows a group of young superheroes as they come of age. The show is a new, albeit darker, take on the Teen Titans franchise and features characters such as Batman's former side- kick Dick Grayson (Robin), the mysterious Starfire, the lovable Beast Boy, and Rachel Roth, who, as Raven, is possessed by a strange darkness. The series premiered in October 2018 and recently completed its second season. Encore VFX in Hollywood handled visual effects on the first two seasons of the show, helping to introduce the characters as well as their signature powers. Each episode involves about 100 VFX shots, according to Armen Kevorkian, creative director/senior VFX supervisor at the studio. One of the main challenges on the show was the transformation of Garfield "Gar" Logan into Beast Boy. "We decided early on that he's just going be a tiger for that year," explains Kevorkian of the character, which in cartoon versions regularly changes into a range of different animals. Raven's effects entail a black energy. "[It] has a little bit of a liquid/smoky feel to it," says Kevorkian, "kind of like an extension of her evil side. It had to have its own person- ality. The way it attacked people. The way it wrapped around people. The way it just came out sometimes to show that she's on the cusp of that bad side." Starfire, meanwhile, shoots flames from her hands. The team referenced "burning steel wool" as a starting point of what this should look like. All of her fire effects were created with CG and made to resemble that of a flamethrower. "They're all simulations. We matchmove her so we can do the subsurface elements, and then if it's going to hit something, we usually have some kind of collider object there," explains Kevorkian. "If it's another person, we will usually put another digital double in as a collision object, so it feels like the fire is hitting something. The same goes if there's any kind of architecture it's going to hit." Beyond the character work, Encore also created the entire exterior of Starfire's spaceship, along with parts of its interior to augment the practical interior used on set. Having completed Season 2 of Titans, Kevorkian is working on another DC Universe streaming series – Doom Patrol – which, he says is coming to HBO Max. – Marc Lous Technicolor was among the vendors sharing the work on the new Picard series. The Raven character's effects comprise a liquidy/smoky black energy. Titans features several unique characters craed or augmented digitally.