• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

 

Green Meets Red

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

Inside the Red One workflow for the Sci Fi Channel's Sanctuary.

While Winn's position as data-acquisition supervisor is a new job category, the challenge for the digital-effects team is as daunting as ever, considering that RAW files from the Red camera arrive at Anthem on 10MB drives every day. Anthem, which is a Mac-based studio located in downtown Vancouver, makes regular use of Apple iChat software to communicate with the editorial staff back at the bicycle factory.

“We always have a cut from them so I can see how a shot plays at full res,” Wilson says. Anthem's visual-effects comps are then shown for approval to Sci Fi Channel execs via secure FTP sites. While the Sanctuary team is proud of being an all-Canadian production, they can't let physical distance slow them down. Especially when they have only about seven months to complete 13 episodes containing thousands of effects shots.

The virtual side of the story

Because digital effects are so central to Sanctuary, Wilson is actually a co-producer of the show as well as visual-effects supervisor. From his office at the bicycle factory, he can pull up any element from Anthem's archives. But what he calls his favorite shot from Sanctuary — at least so far — isn't an elaborate landscape of the Himalayas or Rome, or the virtual stone-and-glass cages where Dr. Magnus houses her exotic creatures. It's a shot of Magnus walking down a long corridor talking to a colleague. As the camera tracks with them, the spacious interior of a building Anthem created digitally recedes into the distance, just as it would if it really existed.

Unlike the virtual sets in the films 300 and Sin City, which conveyed the feeling of graphic novels, Sanctuary aims for a more photoreal style. The production has photographed a variety of locations, such as gritty alleyways in Vancouver, and Anthem has blended them with pure CG to create hybrid environments. It's not unusual for a scene to begin with a shot following a real police car down an actual street, only to have it turn a corner and enter a virtual environment. It's up to Wilson to determine which environments are worth doing later in CG and when shooting practically makes economic and creative sense. Wilson definitely photographs practical effects such as fire whenever possible. “I'm the one who has to ring the reality bell,” he says with a wry smile.

Wilson, who co-founded Anthem four years ago with Visual Effects Producer Lisa Sepp-Wilson and Digital Effects Supervisor Sébastien Bergeron, brings 30 years of experience to bear on Sanctuary. He has worked on both optical and digital visual effects for miniseries, television movies, and feature films — including director David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He has also earned Emmy nominations for the Sci Fi Channel shows Legend of Earthsea and Tin Man.

For his visual-effects team on Sanctuary, the use of the Red One camera has meant that it's faster and cleaner to pull keys. The greenscreen footage that Anthem gets every day is copiously dotted with tracking markers, and the studio uses both 2d3 boujou and Science.D.Visions 3D-Equalizer to integrate CG elements with Geddes' camera moves. But Wilson says that the integration process is far from automated. “A lot of hand-tracking is still required,” he says. “I want these effects to hold up on my big plasma-screen TV.”

Sanctuary features lots of digital extras, but Wilson says that cyber-scans of actors weren't required. “Where we needed digital avatars, we got the information from photographs,” he says. The bigger challenge for Anthem's CG Supervisor Les Quinn is modeling and animating the show's bizarre digital creatures — which includes a mermaid, a creepily hairless wolf, a human-sized lizard, and a man with faces on both the back and front of his head. One of the more difficult of the abnormals, as the monsters in Sanctuary are called, is a boy with a snake-like tentacle that sprouts from his torso. The production uses prominent makeup effects, but achieving what series creator Damian Kindler has called the “freak of the week” usually falls to the CG animators at Anthem. “And there are episodes that have more than one creature, too,” Wilson says with a sigh.

A final irony

The completed shots from Sanctuary are being delivered to the Sci Fi Channel on HD tape, and Winn notes the irony of that. “HD technology hovers around 2 megapixels, and the Red image [information] is HD times four,” he says. “So what will be broadcast is only going to do one-quarter justice to these images. But that's where TVs are right now.”

Sanctuary 1 also has to keep 1/2in. magnetic tapes in its archives to satisfy the concerns of its insurance company. Capturing camera data direct to disk is so new, Winn says, “that it worries some people. With digital, nothing feels tangible.”

At the last stop in the process, the 42-person crew at Anthem is working day and evening shifts to finish Sanctuary by mid-December. Wilson was able to hang onto several of the talents that Anthem had hired for Tin Man, but he says, “I could do this show more comfortably with twice as many people as I have now!”

Continue the discussion on �Crosstalk� the Millimeter Forum.
© 2012 NewBay Media, LLC.