Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/491542
www.postmagazine.com 25 POST APRIL 2015 tered around lead character Sarah Man- ning, who had discovered an unsettling truth in Season 1 — that she was part of a cloning experiment. Lead actress Tatiana Maslany masterfully portrays all iterations of her clone, from soccer mom Alison Hendrix and science geek Cosima Niehaus, to the ruthless corporate Rachel Duncan and the unstable and sometimes dangerous Helena. Here, Post speaks with senior VFX su- pervisor Geoff Scott of Intelligent Crea- tures (www.intelligentcreatures.com), the Toronto-based VFX house and sole VFX vendor for the show, about its work on Orphan Black, includ- ing the show's signature "clone scenes" and Season 2's inspiring "clone dance party" finale, which featured all of the show's clones together in one scene. "This all obviously started with, 'How do we do clones,'" says Scott. "That was the trick. We needed to do clones that would be believable and feel real; not staged. So, we ran a series of tests prior to Season 1, trying differ- ent motion-control systems, but, as with everything, it grows. In Season 1, we did over 300 visual effects for the show — the majori- ty of them being clone work." Many of the clone scenes are shot with Maslany portraying one of her many characters, essen- tially acting with a microphone where a body double/stand-in actress (Kathryn Alexandre) reads the other clone's lines. That way, Maslany has something to respond to. Maslany then switches into the other character and does the scene over again, this time, por- traying her clone. "Quite often, in almost every clone scene, there's a piece of physical interaction between the clones," explains Scott. "And we always try to do it in a way that's very natural, doesn't feel forced and is only there to help the story. So, they almost always pass something, hand something to each other, talk to each other, touch each other. For exam- ple, at the end of Season 1, we had one of the clones pour wine to the other clone. For those scenes, we use Katherine. We took Katherine's arm at the sockets, and tracked that arm onto Tat's body. We could have done CG fluid dynamic from the bottle of wine to the glass, but we're still working with a TV budget and this is the most economical way to do it. With that being said, we still had to sort of break her arm in a few places, shorten it and reposition it." Scott is also proud of one of the other signature scenes from Season 2 — what he refers to as the "clone dance party." He says, "It was a bit of a showcase for us. I think the first time we put our reel out, we got about 250,000 hits on it. Nobody has ever had a demo reel with 250,000 hits on it before," he laughs. According to Scott, the clone dance party was "on the board for a very long VFX FOR TV Much of Orphan Black's VFX involve clone scenes, meticulously planned out by Toron- to's Intelligent Crea- tures. The show returns this month for Season 3.