Computer Graphics World

how much we could do," says Lebed. "With 80 effects, we tried to keep them as simple as possible so we could turn them around quickly." What's more, e Middle- man was shot in high definition. Mechnology has a core of eight artists but ramped up to as many as 20 to handle the show's quick turnaround. e studio's Mac-based pipeline consists of Autodesk's 3ds Max, Maya, Flame, and, occasionally, Smoke; Apple's Shake; and Adobe's After Ef- fects and Photoshop. e renderfarm, meanwhile, is PC- based, with dual AMD boxes, with Nvid- ia's Mental Ray software used for rendering and Autodesk's Back Burn as the render controller. "at allowed us to change the priority of the renders," says Derek Zavada, VFX producer, about Back Burner. "We had several jobs on the farm, but some- times something would happen to change the priority, and we would go in there and easily change it." Mechnology's main file server is an 8tb Dell running Linux; the VFX company also uses a proprietary asset management system (a Web-based setup that uses Maya's QL and Adobe's ColdFusion, formerly from Dreamweaver) for logging in/out and track- ing footage. "It has a color-coding system to let us know the status of each shot," says Zavada. "Every artist can see what shots they're assigned to." Another tool that helped the Mechnol- ogy group throughout production was Iridas' FrameCycler. "is was the easiest way to view the frames and check the final output," says Zavada. "Sometimes you get a bad render, and this was a good way to check for that." Adding Effects For Lebed and Potter, each episode began by perusing the script. "e fun part was breaking down the script and figuring out how to create the VFX," says Lebed. "ey knew how to challenge us. We had five days or less to turn around each episode. It was a wonderful experience." Grillo-Marx- uach, who is knowledgeable about the canon of sci-fi movies and TV, paid hom- age to the genre in each episode to a scene or theme—small inside jokes for TV-savvy geeks and sci-fi fans who watch the show. For example, "We got to create a 1950s- style flying saucer," says Potter. "ey shot it out at Vasquez Rocks (near Los Angeles), where Star Trek and e Twilight Zone has filmed. ere's a specific rock formation that you see in every sci-fi show, and, of course, that's where our CG saucer lands. e CG door opened, and the aliens walked out on a little plywood ramp that we later turned into a ramp that came out of the saucer." Another action-packed scene had Wendy ejected from a jet in midair. "ey shot Wendy greenscreen in an ejector seat, and we created the 3D jet that left the frame as she is being ejected," Potter continues. "at was homage to Bruce Willis' Die Hard." Any superhero has his or her supertoys, and e Middleman was no exception. "He has guns, his secret office, his Middle- man car, and other devices," points out Potter. "It's Men in Black meets Inspector Gadget meets Get Smart. ere were a lot of things going on." e Middle-mobile was based on a Smart car, which, of course, had special powers created by Mechnology. "When he pushed a button, a jet engine bursts out, and the vehicle goes down the road a billion miles an hour," says Potter. In another episode, an alien posing as a precocious girl rode a bicycle that also tran- sitioned to warp speed when she rang the bike's bell. Some of the effects helped out a typi- cally crunched TV production budget. For example, the Middleman's high-tech head- quarters featured a bank of 20 monitors that played back everything from surveillance video to newsreels. e production couldn't afford to use real monitors, so they created plastic ones instead, and relied on Mechnol- ogy to shoot the footage that played in the monitors and composite it into the moni- tors' blank screens. "Doing it that way also made the production much more flexible," says Lebed. "Ordinarily you'd have to shoot the footage that played in the monitors before you shot the actual scene. is way, we were able to shoot that footage when- ever we needed to and add it in later. For a seven-day schedule with so many locations and stunts, this helped a lot." Not too long ago, all-digital characters were too complex and expensive to create for anything but high-end feature films. Now, even with the tight turnaround, The scene depicted above was filmed at a power plant. Left shows the film plate, while right contains a 3D monorail composited at the top of the shot, added by Mechnology. June 2009 43 Broadcast n n n n

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