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VFX for TV Series AMC’s The Walking Dead and Syfy’s Haven; its current roster of shows includes The Event, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Human Target and episodes of Parenthood and Parks and Recreation. VP of creative services Al Lopez says that NBC’s aliens-that-look-like-us thriller The Event is “a really fun show” to work on, with effects ranging from the creation of the Mt. Inostranka detention center in Alaska to the now-solved mystery of the mid-air disap- pearance of a commercial jet on a collision course with the presidential compound.“It’s up there with Heroes and The Walking Dead in its intensity,” he notes. (Although Stargate Studios has offices in Vancouver and Toronto, the work on The Event is done primarily in the South Pasadena studio.) “We get the scripts and occasional story- The Event: Stargate Studios blew up this building virtually for a recent episode. Maya’s Fracture plug-in helped. able five years ago.This kind of effect is huge in features like Percy Jackson and Clash of the Titans, but you haven’t seen it a lot for TV.The combination of character animation with the technical aspects of creating realistically-ren- dered simulations based on volumetric fluid dynamics was a big challenge for a three- week timeframe.” In addition to rigging the character model, FuseFX augmented the Mist Man with extra geometry and particles that were manipulated over the course of the shots to change the character’s shape from anthro- pomorphic to abstract via keyframe and procedural animation. FuseFX has been growing steadily since it opened its doors in 2006; the company re- cently moved to a new and larger location. “The work on No Ordinary Family has been a challenge and real feather in our cap,” says Altenau.“We appreciate the confidence that Mark Kolpack, Ra’uf Glasgow and the rest of the production team at No Ordinary Family have placed in us to create their visual ef- fects.The work has been challenging but ex- tremely rewarding.” THE EVENT For more than 15 years, the bread and butter of South Pasadena-based Stargate Studios (www.stargatestudios.net) has been VFX for television.The company did the VFX for the run of Heroes and the first seasons of 22 Post • April 2011 boards for the show, and have a lot of cre- ative latitude. For big VFX shots we do pre- viz for exploratory purposes and for ap- provals. That gives everyone a chance to change the look before we get too deep into the actual construction of models.” A crucial plot point inThe Event earlier this season had alien leader Sophia escaping from government custody and hiding briefly in an abandoned downtown Washington, DC, building, which was rigged by her fellow aliens to implode when federal agents arrived on the scene.The producers “had a shot of the agents walking up to the exterior of the building, so we had an idea what it looked like, but the way the structure imploded was 100 percent on us,” Lopez recalls. The scene simultaneously captured the action of the agents in pursuit of Sophia and showed President Martinez watching the chase and implosion in realtime in the White House via a “predator drone-like” video. Stargate Studios found an aerial plate in its stock library of LA’s Disney Concert Hall, which could stand in for the hero building that was rebuilt in Autodesk Maya; the rest of the visible city block was replaced with CG buildings created in NewTek LightWave. A live-action interior shoot in a downtown LA building simulated the collapse from the inside with frenetic camera movement and practical falling debris the actors could react to. “Our job was to take it home with columns shattering and collapsing, pieces of the ceiling raining down on them, lots of dust and debris everywhere,” says Lopez.“The big challenge was that all the elements had to be trackable in Boujou and Andersson Technolo- gies’ SynthEyes.There was no greenscreen photography, so we had to layer things in and do roto work — there’s so much happening behind the actors, in front of them, above www.postmagazine.com them, under their feet.” Compositing was done in Adobe After Effects. The first hint of the collapse from the outside was a dust layer visible on the first floor in the aerial shots.The hero building imploded with help from Maya’s Fracture plug-in, which “almost scored” the building into pieces prior to the collapse when dy- namic simulation took over. The FumeFX plug-in provided smoke and dust that en- veloped the structure and interacted with the adjacent CG buildings. “The building comes down in layers:You see the interior ceiling collapsing first, crack- ing, falling, with dust coming out of the blown-out windows,” Lopez explains. “Then, floor by floor, the rest of the building comes down, and the foundation is taken out by the aliens’ wormhole. By then, 80 percent of the building is covered by smoke and dust. Realistic smoke is something that kind of eluded us in the past, but after a lot of R&D we felt that FumeFX was really solid and gave us results we liked.” In the aftermath shot, one of the actors was composited in front of a matte painting, crafted in Adobe Photoshop and enhanced with 3D elements, depicting the destruction. SMALLVILLE LA’s Entity FX (www.entityfx.com) enjoys a mix of clients with recent feature films in- cluding Yogi Bear and I Am Number Four and TV series Vampire Diaries, Hellcats, Breaking Bad, Burn Notice and — since season two — Smallville, which concludes its 10-year run this spring. Having risen through the job chain working almost exclusively on Smallville, En- tity FX senior producer/supervisor Trent Smith is a repository of information about the show, which tells the story of a young Clark Kent just discovering the Superman he is to become. The company’s Vancouver office does the majority of the VFX work since the show is shot there; Smith collaborates with his northern colleagues via teleconference and video chats, all with networked monitors so everyone can access the same material. “With fast machines and processors today we’re able to work from Vancouver, transfer data back and forth and render here in LA,” he reports.“We keep the flow very fast.You need many iterations on a TV show, espe- cially on a show like this, which is based on visuals from comic books and events that you would not see in everyday life.” Smallville had an HD post workflow from the beginning, although many other shows at the time were not, Smith recalls. “It was still