Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491542
www.postmagazine.com 22 POST APRIL 2015 New York night sky in the background, that's a set extension. We shot that at San Pedro. The establishing shots were matte paintings or photographs we made into actual live action shots." The sheer amount of VFX work creat- ed for the show goes deep, ranging from key explosions and implosions to fight scenes atop moving vehicles and trucks diving into rivers. "When she's disarm- ing the bomb and throws the bomb on the floor, we see all that effects anima- tion," says Duggal. "There's some quite complicated effects simulation going on there, probably one of the hardest things we did on the show because effects animation is just really hard to do with no time. For the CG explosions and CG implosions, FX animation was the dust, smoke and debris that you're seeing in the shots." Noting a scene with a truck going over a cliff, "that was entirely, fully CG — a CG truck, a CG environment," she says. "We were collecting camera data, HDRI, texture reference and lights and so forth. We lit our truck and lit our sets, so we could do a lot of set extensions and had the 2D geometry and then we shot all the textures. So, while the truck was completely CG, the water we leveraged off an interesting element of a car falling into water and we painted the car that was in the shot out and we used the impact, put our CG truck in and we did more effects, simulations and bubbles coming off the truck. That was beautiful- ly done. I mean, it was really hairy and we were right up against our deadline, but it was very successful." The series was shot on Arri Alexa XTs with VFX supported by Houdini and composited in Nuke. Of note, it's report- ed that this was the first TV show to use ArriRaw for main unit photography (DP was Gabriel Beristain) and an ArriRaw workflow in series television. "Gabby decided that we should shoot ArriRaw to capture the best quality im- ages, something that had not been done for network TV before, to my knowl- edge," says Duggal. For camera shooting formats, the team shot open gate for the VFX plates and 16:9 for the non-VFX shots. Duggal adds, "I think we did an amazing job. We were all in this idea of creating a female character that we felt passionate about because we feel the younger generation of women needs a strong female role model in the mass media to teach women that they have their own power." CSI: CYBER CSI Cyber recently premiered on CBS, bringing with it storylines set deep in the bowels of the Web, where hackers and criminals prey anonymously and crimes are often untraceable. Patricia Arquette stars as Special Agent Avery Ryan, who heads up the Cyber Crime Division of the FBI. In just the first few episodes of what is scheduled to be a 13-program series, her team has dealt with baby abductions using common nanny-cam technology, and the murder of those who use popu- lar ride-sharing applications. Brad Powell is the show's visual effects supervisor. Powell operates LA's BLP Visual Effects, which contributes VFX services to a number of television programs, including CBS's Elementary and Fox's The Mindy Project. For CSI: Cyber, his team is considered part of the crew, and works directly with the show's writers and producers. "I bring them the creative ideas," he explains. "We deal with writers and pro- ducers directly. In order to get the job, we gave them a 'look book' of what we thought the direction of the show should go in and the way we saw the effects going: how to visualize encryption, how to visualize hacking, and how it flows through the Internet." On average, each episode involves 120 visual effects, and of those 120, ten are typically "cyber" shots. "The approach I took was, we see it as deep space or the ocean," says Powell of the Internet, "where it's an infinite sea of openness, and not the traditional '90s version of the Internet, which was a tube of 1s and 0s." BLP Visual Effects' main tools are Maxon's Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects, running on a mixture of MacPros and PCs. The show is shot on Arri's Alexa — though an iPhone or GoPro may be used on occasion — and is edited with Avid systems. VFX FOR TV BLP Visual Effects is responsible for the high- tech VFX featured in CSI: Cyber.