Computer Graphics World

work. "When I fi rst proposed this scene to Eden, I thought they were going to laugh at me," says Suskin. e Eden group ad- mits there were a few chuckles, but there was also fi erce determination to make this scene a reality, at least on screen. Hard Landing According to John Gross, Eden FX co- founder and in-house VFX supervisor, the group—comprising three CG artists and two compositors—created slightly less than two minutes of animation for the sequence, which involved both interior and exterior shots of the plane. " ey wanted something big, beautiful, and glorious for when the characters return to the island. ey wanted something really dramatic," he explains. "As we started working out the animatics, we got more and more the picture they want- ed—a very dangerous ride along the island. We tried to make it more perilous." e adventure starts with an outside shot of the plane. For this, the group was able to save time by reusing a model they had built for an earlier episode. e plane, which had been modeled in NewTek's LightWave and textured in Adobe's Photo- shop, was animated in LightWave for this new scene. Later, the digital 737 is shown fl ying over the island, which is a completely synthetic environment. Most of the point-of-view shots of the airplane's fl ight over the island and its landing and crashing through the jungle were from three camera locations: within the cockpit with the pilot and co- pilot, on the wing of the plane, and from the underbelly of the plane. e group used one additional POV placed on the island itself as the plane roars down the dirt and sand runway in what the Eden artists called "the glory shot." According to Ross, Eden avoided using any camera angles that would have been impossible to achieve in real life, so the sequence would not appear fake. "Mitch [Suskin] and Eric Hance, Eden's digital supervisor, sat down early on and tried to work out the animation to make the crash as perilous as possible," says Gross. " ey started out with the plane coming up against one section of moun- tains and then going around them. at evolved into this idea of basically having a canyon run where they careen past a set of mountains and as they are trying to dodge those, there is another. It was amazing to see how the animatic process allowed the excitement to grow." e group spent approximately three to four days creating and revising the ani- matic, done in LightWave. In the end, the animatic contained about 10,000 frames of animation. "One of the great things about the pipeline we set up for this proj- ect was that it allowed Stephan [Brede- reck, the lead artist] to use the animated cameras and objects while he was work- ing on diff erent parts of the island," says Hance. "For the most part, we didn't have to reproduce or re-create things from one package to the next." For the Lost episode "Namaste," Eden FX created this CG plane landing within a totally synthetic environment. May 2009 41

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