Computer Graphics World

hose who are familiar with the tele- vision series Lost know that nothing is at all what it seems on the mys- terious tropical island that has be- come a home of sorts for the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. e fi fth season, which began this past January, fi nds the remaining survivors as they time-travel on the island, shifting be- tween the present and the past after one of them "moves" the island in an attempt to save it and its inhabitants. e other survi- vors who escaped the island last season now are attempting to return to save those they had left behind. is reunion begins to unfold in the highly charged episode "Na- maste," as the rescued survivors fi nd them- selves on another doomed aircraft—some by happenstance, others with the intent of fi nding their former friends. And indeed, the plane crash-lands on the "other island," bringing them home, only during a diff er- ent time period. Despite the realism of the crash scenes, nearly everything in them, aside from a cockpit set, is computer-generated—from the entire exterior of the plane, to the es- tablishing shots of the island below, to the jungle as the 737 lands and skids out of control. And while the character's feat of moving the island proved monumental in terms of story line, just as momentous was the creation of the island for "Namaste," not only in terms of plot, but also com- puter graphics. "For this episode, we have a sequence showing the landing of a 737 airplane on one of our islands, an event that had been foreshadowed in several earlier epi- sodes. is was a scene we knew would be a challenge but turned out to be a much bigger challenge than we had originally imagined," says Mitch Suskin, Lost's visual eff ects supervisor. "Here we had a plane landing on a small island—the viewers needed to know the island was small but would still be able to accommodate the landing of a 737." Even though the series is fi lmed in Ha- waii, there was no way to shoot a small is- land, such as the one depicted in Lost, with aerial photography since it was unlikely the production crew could have found an actual locale that would have met the re- quirements of the story line in the episode, Suskin notes. So, the VFX supervisor ap- proached Eden FX—which produces the show's digital eff ects, including Dharma stations, the island's Smoke Monster, matte paintings, water, and so forth—asking the studio to build the island in 3D, not only for an establishing shot, but also in fi ne de- tail for the rough landing. "We wanted to 'fl y' the 737 over [the is- land] at low altitude and have it appear as real as possible," Suskin says. " e plane lands on a dirt runway on the island, but the runway is too short for a 737, so the plane ultimately crashes through the jungle." Adding to the diffi culty of this sequence was the time crunch: Eden only had a lit- tle more than two weeks to complete the May 2009 40 ■ ■ ■ ■ Modeling

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