Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/371911
38 cgw j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 4 here once was a man who lived a life so strange, it had to be true. Only he could see what no one else can—the darkness inside…the real monster within…and he's the one who must stop them. This is his calling. This is his duty. This is the life of a Grimm." Each episode of the police drama Grimm, which began airing in 2011, starts with a quote that relates to the plot and usually to the wesen creature featured in that particular story. In the series, these characters exist in the modern world and walk among us masked as ordinary people – until they sud- denly transform into the fabled creature they are. In this series, the characters are typically grotesque and violent, and do not live happily ever a er once the Grimm, a police homicide detective, gets hold of them. The show is set in Portland and shot in and around the city, while a good deal of the visual eff ects work is done there, as well, with three vendors sharing the load, including Inhance Dig- ital (Los Angeles), which works on nearly every episode in some capacity, with about every third one being all theirs. In the beginning, Inhance did a variety of eff ects for the show – a lot of invisible things, such as set extensions, monitor burns, digital backdrops – but none that involved creatures, the main crux of the work. "We made it our business to learn creatures, and now we are doing a lot of them," says Eddie Robison, Inhance visual eff ects department supervisor. (See "In-hancing Grimm" in the July/ August 2013 issue of CGW.) The creatures in Grimm just don't suddenly appear in their full-monster splendor. Rather, they morph from human (actor) form into wesen, requiring digital assistance during those transi- tions. Sometimes the creatures K Chapter 4 "T Grimm GRIMM FEATURES A WIDE RANGE OF CREEPY CHARACTERS, SOME BUILT WITH PROSTHETICS, SOME ARE ALL-CG, AND SOME ARE A HYBRID OF THE TWO. THE ASWANG, SHOWN BELOW, WAS A COMPLETELY DIGITAL CHARACTER THAT WAS MODELED AND ANIMATED BY THE GROUP AT INHANCE. P R I M E - T I M E E F F E C T S Images ©2014 NBC/Grimm