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MillimeterMeego Mi Amigo
Aug 1, 1997 12:00 PM, Jennifer Vacchio
An extra-terrestrial lands on the set of Meego, a half-hour sitcom scheduled to air Friday nights this fall on CBS. The three-camera taped show centers around an alien named Meego (Bronson Pinchot), whose spaceship crashes in a forest on Earth. Meego is discovered by a child whose single father just happens to be looking for a nanny-who better than an alien with magical powers?
The special effects featured in the show were produced by several companies (including Laser Pacific in Burbank, Beyt Labs and Warner Bros. in Hollywood, and Creative Tools in Studio City) due to the need for a one-week turnaround from the offline cut, which was done on an Avid multicamera system.
"Laser Pacific had a full CGI department equipped with Silicon Graphics O2s, Onyxs, and Indigos," says Kelly Sandefur, supervising producer, Warner Bros. "Beyt Labs is a Mac-based operation, but what we learned is that it is not the equipment a facility has, it is the people who operate the machines that matter." In the opening sequence, a spaceship crashes in a forest. The spaceship was modeled in NewTek's Lightwave 3D. "We imported the model of the space ship in Alias's PowerAnimator, so that we could fly and crash it," says Sandefur. The flames and exhaust of the spaceship were also done in PowerAnimator. The set of the upper portion of the spaceship was built on Warner Bros.' backlot.
In another effects sequence, Pinchot is cleaning the living room with several pairs of hands that belong to invisible bodies. "To do this sequence, we shot actors wearing head-to-toe green suits, which were also used in Space Jam," says Sandefur. "Backgrounds were replaced using Ultimatte software and Discreet Logic's Flame," he says. "It seems like more and more audiences are becoming more sophisticated and have come to expect effects in television as opposed to just seeing them in feature films."
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