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VFX for TV Series his first incarnation,moves within mysterious smoke and has a solid smoke body at his core. Since Darkseid debuted in the season opener, and was previewed at Comic-Con, Entity FX was able to get a jump start on his R&D.“We used DC Comics as our starting point,” says Smith,“then built off that plat- form. But his appearing with smoke is a Smallville add on.” The company evolved the technique using fluid simulations in Autodesk Maya for the smoke effects.“We had to come up with a natural flow to the smoke so it would go where we wanted it yet we had to be able to create a solid form from smoke,” he ex- plains.“In Maya we could model the form using concrete textures as a solid mass then have the smoke sucking into the structure of the body and filling in his form.” But that wasn’t enough. The producers For Fox’s Bones, Look Effects turned this LA warehouse into a Washington, DC- based locale. somewhat new to be posting in HD resolu- tion when we came onboard in season two. Nine years later you don’t think twice about an HD workflow. Nowadays we often shoot and work in 4K resolution to enable us to have four times the amount of information in the frame and gain more flexibility in post.” The show was originally shot on Panavi- sion 35mm film cameras. Then, in season eight, it switched over to the Panavision Genesis digital platform; Genesis remains the primary camera although sometimes Red One, Phantom high-speed cameras and the Canon 7D are also deployed. “The use of the Phantom is a good ex- ample of how things have changed,” says Smith.“We do lots of frozen moments we call ‘Clark Times,’ where we enter super- speed travel with him, and objects freeze in the air. Now they use Phantom to shoot ex- tremely high speed so they don’t need to create as many CG objects: It can be a real pane of glass breaking that’s shot with the actors or as a separate element that gets composited in the shot.They can utilize in- camera effects, not just post effects.” There’s still plenty of room for VFX, though. “This season ups the ante,” says Smith.“The entire 10 seasons lead up to the last episode to make sure everyone will be happy when the finale airs.” The last season of Smallville introduced the the fully CG Darkseid character, who, in 24 Post • April 2011 wanted Darkseid’s smoky form to ultimately explode into hundreds of crows.That effect was “done with sleight of hand,” says Smith.“As he came into his final form, cracks appeared in his body with light shining out of them.The cracks grew so intense that the light exploded and that’s when we threw in the crows flying out of his body with residual smoke trails fol- lowing as they scattered; one hero crow keeps Darkseid’s eye color giving hints into the future evolution of his appearances.” From that point on “every form we see [Darkseid] in is a bit different,” says Smith, al- though he’s always identifiable from his eye color, which is sometimes seen close up as a fluid simulation across the eyes.“We knew the path Darkseid would take, so in R&D we made sure his evolution would be doable in the normal TV show pipeline where we have about a week-and-a-half to turnaround the effects.” For the crow effects, footage of real crows was shot on the Smallville set. Entity FX then modeled and animated CG crows in Au- todesk Maya, referencing the footage for tex- tures to help model individual feathers as well as beaks and feet in ZBrush;Maya hair simulation gave the feathers a natural flow. In the run up to the finale the series is “leaning heavily on fully CG-animated char- acters,” Smith reports. “The image-capture technologies are helping us out:We’re now shooting on 4K Red and framing for HD, which gives us extra information to track. We also use locked-off witness cameras that capture the same movement at a 90-degree angle, which helps us do the animation.” Through the season 10 opener Entity had done more than 4,300 VFX shots for the se- ries, with several hundred more slated www.postmagazine.com through the finale on May 13. BONES Episodic TV and feature films share the roster at Hollywood-based Look Effects (www.lookfx.com), where current shows in- clude No Ordinary Family, Harr y’s Law and Bones.The company also did VFX for the final season of Lost. Look Effects has been working on Bones since it debuted six years ago; Christian Car- dona assumed the role of VFX supervisor on the show about 18 months ago. One episode in the current season set a unique tone, with a film noir aspect that was “dark and introspective for a different over- all look,” he notes.The plot centered on a torrential rainstorm, which toppled a tree exposing a skeleton tangled in its roots. In an especially challenging shot Dr. Bren- nan returns to the scene of the crime at night: a run-down part of Washington, DC, with a large housing project in the back- ground. And it was still raining.“They shot in an industrial area of LA where there were no apartment buildings, but everything else fit:There was a bridge over the LA River and a couple of oak trees, which we supple- mented with a fake one rigged to fall over,” Cardona explains.“Big rain towers stretched for about two blocks.” Look Effects New York provided photos of housing projects in the city to give an au- thentic East Coast look to the building the Hollywood office needed to create to re- place the existing background. “We took one of their photos and built a matte paint- ing of the building,” says Cardona. “We painted out the cars on the street and tweaked the perspective to match what we needed.”Adobe’s CS5 version of Photoshop was the primary tool with Adobe After Ef- fects used for compositing. “The photo that worked best was shot during the day, out of direct sunlight so there were no hard shadows or overexposed areas,” says Cardona.“This made it easy to take the building from day to night by chang- ing the levels, desaturating the image and adding lights and the flicker of a TV in some windows for a lived-in-feel.The key to any successful matte painting is to give it some variables:You need to give it enough life so it doesn’t feel like a still photo.” Because the apartment building needed to be seen from several different angles, Photoshop’s Vanishing Point, which allows artists to clone an object in perspective, continued on page 50