Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542296
Cote's home workstation. 53 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E T E C H episodes." "Usually, I'm the one driving the post- viz process directly with the vendors, but Regis is very hands-on. His temp mockups became the offline blueprint for our visual effects vendors. My job was to make sure he had all the elements he needed," added Cote. "And I handled traditional post-viz for full CG scenes, which there were quite a few of, especially in the first episode, like the crash sequence and some of the space shots." "Alien: Earth" was shot on location in Thailand — not on an LED volume stage. Cote said, "They didn't have the most high- tech shoot. The most high-tech gear was the crane used for the oners and the motion control camera for the transition sequence. Everything else was very traditionally shot. Noah Hawley and director/cinematogra- pher Dana Gonzales knew early on how they wanted to shoot it, mimicking the '70s aesthetic. That went all the way through to the finishing process; in the DI [digital intermediate), we added a film grain that's reminiscent of this 1970s feel, and it's evi- dent from the opening sequence inside the USCSS Maginot." What the set lacked in technological luster, it made up for in size. "They had very large-scale sets. The whole underground area where the ship crashed was built in an abandoned shopping center. They created the whole side of the Maginot in there, with fake concrete chunks for the destroyed building," said Cote. "We also used CG set extensions, for instance, every time the camera looks up or down the stairwell. The hardest part there was having water and sparks dripping through the frame. Some- times we had to paint them out and put them back in to make it work with the digital set extensions. That was more tedious than difficult. Once they dialed in how far down the stairwell they wanted it to go, Jonathan would spend a lot of time massaging the lighting to make sure there was no demar- cation between what's digital extension and what's practical set." For any scene with an animated crea- ture, the on-set visual effects team would have the unit shoot with the actor and an empty frame where the creature would be. Then, after the actor was done but before they wrapped the lighting on set, they would shoot the background and also "tile" (i.e., have the camera pan and tilt to capture a series of overlapping plates of the back- ground, which the visual effects team can use when compositing a creature into the scene) either with the motion picture cam- era or a still camera, and also do a LiDAR scan to capture highly accurate 3D data of the physical set. "Then we'd also do a pass with a maquette — a puppet on a pole — just