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VFX FOR TELEVISION The shots include two deceptively simple scenes where the show’s actors examine the spacecraft in its hangar.The craft itself is an amalgam of a Gulfstream G4 corporate jet with details composited by Robison to suggest something Richard Branson might fly into space.The backing plates for this se- quence were shot on Genesis cameras — as is the whole series this season. Robison calls the hangar sequence, in- cluding tracking the moving camera, the most challenging:“a very long dolly shot fol- lowing the actors across the hangar and right up to a real G4 Gulfstream jet.” The back plate shows a corporate jet parked under the lights as David Caruso and company approach, discussing a mur- quired compositing in hangar staff people ambulating in the background. Robison says LightWave “is a great tool for television” with its time and budget re- strictions, especially for solid-body vehicles. He also appreciates how LightWave can work with unlimited render nodes. This sequence’s four Earth-orbit shots were satisfying for Robison because he could call upon his experience on series like Star Trek. The orbital shots show Florida (of course), and the production benefitted from an extremely detailed, 26,000-pixel map of the Earth newly provided by NASA. Besides the CG sphere for your ter- rain map, you need spheres for clouds and shadows; for the atmosphere’s glow; and to make CG stars “fade” when close to Earth’s atmosphere. Other VFX shots included bloodshed in weightless space and a push-in showing a flock of micro-meteorites piercing the ship’s hull.The micro-meteorites, Robison says,were motion control 1000fps Photosonic plates shot by Detwiler and “sandwiched to- gether into a CG shot to create the effect of micro-meteors rup- turing their oxygen tank.” Inhance VFX artists Bruce Coy and Mike Underwood were key in the subsequent rig-removal work showing performers in weightless Vampire Diaries: Entity FX provides photoreal vein work for this CW drama. der as the camera follows. Robison re- moved the rear of the plane and replaced it with his own design — a double set of portholes and big rocket engines. It’s com- mon for Robison to go on set with CSI: Miami VFX supervisor Larry Detwiler for effects shoots. Here Robison shot stills from numerous angles using a Nikon D90 to create environment maps capturing the reflection of the hangar’s overhead lights off the jet’s fuselage, which he then used on the CG portion of the craft. “A ‘clean’ hangar wall was painted and merged over the plate using the tracking data,” Robison says, creating a new plate with the rear half of the real jet removed. “This new background was then 3D tracked by artist John Karner and the data was brought into LightWave to render out the new, mod- ified section of the spacecraft.” Inhance VFX used Boujou software on tracking shots. Robison seamlessly blended the CG with the real fuselage. “Depth blur, color correction and film grain tied everything back together,” he says, “and then the ac- tors were rotoscoped back on top of the completed shot.”The hangar shots also re- 24 Post • April 2010 space. “Fusion is a fantastic wire-removal tool,” Robison adds. VAMPING IT UP Entity FX, with facilities in Santa Monica and Vancouver, has been busy with this sea- son’s effects work on The CW’s Smallville and AMC’s Breaking Bad. But one new- comer to TV has created a stir — perhaps fueled by the public’s rabid interest in vam- pirism — The CW’s Vampire Diaries. One audience-satisfying vampire se- quence has long been the transformation from the pale and thirsty to the fully outed rampant vampire. Besides the fairly straight- forward speed-ramp and harness effects that help depict superhuman powers, such as jumping off a building, another key factor in exposing the undead characters in Vam- pire Diaries is their eyes.When, er, agitated, a vampire’s eyes grow dark and the surround- ing skin, including the cheekbones, will sprout a mild case of bulging veins. With their realistic pulsation and sickly color, these CG veins actually help convey a vampire’s mood. Usually a bad mood. “Perhaps the most challenging thing is www.postmagazine.com that a lot of the effects that we do are kind of performance-related,” says Mat Beck, LA- based senior VFX supervisor at Entity FX (www.entityfx.com), which has done all the effects for Diaries.These dramatic effects “tie in with the actors and feed off the actors and contribute to the moment.Their eyes change in a lot of different ways that reflect their emotional state.” Various vampire emotions include lustful, hungry for blood and emotionally conflicted, but they also must be readable to the audi- ence — vampires mostly appear in dark en- vironments. Each character is assigned unique vein “geography” and their veins ac- tually behave differently depending on what they’re experiencing.“One of our precepts is that everything has to look photoreal and in-the-scene,” Beck says.“The veins may be an odd thing to see on somebody’s face, but not an incredible thing.” In another example of surreal realism, one episode has a female witch revealing her powers to a friend by playfully levitating a roomful of feathers courtesy of Entity’s CG and effects. Besides wire removal and super-speed ac- tivities, Entity FX has also provided Vampire Diaries with CG fog effects and CG animals such as a crow “to add to the creepiness and mystery of the environment.” Entity has the capability to create digital doubles for stunts, but traditional rig-removal is still more efficient.The shop has an array of tools for hiding rigs, including After Effects, Nuke and Flame.This can be simple work, but sometimes a wire can get in the way of an actor’s face.“More often,” Beck says, “it’s not the wire that’s the problem, it’s the rig that’s deforming the clothing.You can get a cloth bulge rising out of the small of the back — often you spend much more time on the clothing than the wire. After Effects is a great package for a lot of this stuff and for certain special cases we’ll use Flame.” Entity also uses Nuke, but less so on Vampire Diaries. The show is shot on Sony F-35s along with some smaller cameras, but Entity can work with any mix of formats from 35mm to Red to Canon 7D to HDV. The lighting for many Vampire Diaries scenes reminds Beck a little of the early days of The X Files. To make such shots mysteri- ous yet readable to the audience, “you have to have really good control of all the para- meters of lighting. In terms of the veins we have a mixture of techniques — some of them full-on 3D tracking of the actor’s face as it moves — and 2D and 2 1/2-D tech- niques.They all benefit from knowledge of the real lighting in the room.A raised vein may show itself by picking up a little bit of