Inside Zoic Studios

Also I am about to head to set for a big commercial spot that we are working on. Can’t say much, but I can say it’s up the street and is bound to be a lot of fun on set.

Finally the biggest news of the day is TOMORROW November 18th at 4:00pm Zoic Studios is having it’s first LIVE BROADCAST. Yours truly will be interviewing VFX Supervisor Andrew Orloff on Ustream about the latest and greatest in Visual Effects for such shows as V, Human Target, and CSI. So join me as I take you Inside Zoic Studios:
Inside Zoic Studios

Each year, the television networks commission pilot episodes for prospective television shows. Each pilot is a fully-realized episode, usually the first episode, of the show; and network executives use the pilots to determine which shows will be “picked up” and become actual television series. Of course, only a fraction of those pilots are picked up.

The majority of television pilots are produced during “pilot season,” which is generally January through April of each year. This is the busiest time of the year for many in the television industry – actors, producers, crew, production and post-production. It’s also the time of year when many in the industry make most of their income.

The global Financial Crisis has impacted entertainment as it has every other industry. In 2009, NBC tried a strategy of choosing new shows based on scripts rather than fully-produced pilots, a seemingly logical plan that saved millions in production costs. But every new show chosen by this strategy failed last season, and the Peacock has returned to ordering pilots.

Indeed, while orders for pilots are still down overall, the networks have ordered about as many for 2010 as they did in 2009, which is good news for those who depend on pilot season, like VFX houses.

At the Culver City, California and Vancouver, British Columbia offices of Zoic Studios, pilot season is always a challenge. I spoke to Andrew Orloff, Zoic’s executive creative director, about the winding-down 2010 pilot season, and how Zoic responds to the heavy influx of work.

The fun part of pilot season is the new shows, with new creators and new scripts; this is where we really get in a lot of our creative input.

“It’s been very busy this year,” Orloff says, “and we’re definitely doing more than we’ve done in the past, probably about double what we normally do.” In fact, the studio produced around 3,700 shots for 32 projects in the months of March and April alone; this included pilots as well as ongoing series, including effects-heavy shows like Fringe and V. At its busiest time, the Culver City studio had 163 people hard at work, as many as 70 of whom were freelancers. In addition, the studio performed a large server update, to 80 terabytes of high-speed storage and hundreds of render nodes.

“We’re cracking out hundreds of shots a week for review,” Orloff adds. “A lot of the pilots are being delivered electronically, a step away from tape delivery. It’s actually easier for the client, and a lot less time-intensive on the editorial end, because we’re delivering media directly to the Avid [Media Composer], fully integrated into their technical pipeline.

“We’re completely dependent on our Shotgun database. It allows the VFX supervisors to constantly review material from their desks, to be able to give notes directly to artists from their desktops. And then we have nine hours worth of dailies every day, uncompressed high-def material, all the shows and all the pilots. We’re reviewing an immense amount of material, and using our database and pipeline tools to make sure we don’t get swallowed up by the volume of the work we have to parse through, and maintain the creative focus.”

Orloff says it’s important to find the time to maintain creative focus, despite the volume of the work during pilot season. “We use these pipeline tools, these efficiencies, so we can still be having creative conversations even though we’re in this massive delivery mode — which is a kind of a cool thing. The fun part of pilot season is that there’s new shows, with new creators, new scripts; and this is where we really get in a lot of our creative input. Talking to directors and executive producers about what are the visual effects going to be for the show; what is the signature look for the show; how does it integrate with the story you’re trying to tell. We have the opportunity to set up a language for the visual effects, that is going to stand as long as the show lasts.”

Much of the work done for the pilot will be used throughout the life of the series. “When a pilot gets greenlit, the first thing we do is, if it’s a spaceship show we’ll build the spaceships. If there’s a digital double that needs to be made, we’ll scan and build the digital double. All of that happens for the pilot. So a lot of the heavy-duty lifting, with models and techniques that are going to be used for the life of the series, is done during pilot season. There is a lot of discussion with the creative heads of each show to make sure we design something that’s not only creatively right, but that’s also sustainable for the long run when the series gets picked up.”

Orloff explains that dealing with the extraordinary workload during pilot season can strengthen the studio’s technical pipeline. “You get a very clear idea about what the pressure points and the log jams in your pipeline are — what’s working and what’s causing a bottleneck. You have to react to those production issues very quickly. It’s definitely a benefit for the rest of the year when things are at a more regular pace. You have a limited number of development cycles to spend, and one of the opportunities of pilot season is to see where you want to spend those development cycles, and to pressure test everything you’ve been working on throughout the year.”

More  info: “Tables turned this pilot season” and “Pilot season getting mojo back” on Variety.com; “As TV networks tighten belts, look for fewer stars, fewer risks” on USAToday.com.

Based loosely on the DC comic series of the same name, Human Target is an action-drama starring Mark Valley (Boston Legal) as security expert Christopher Chance, with Chi McBride (Boston Public) and Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen). It airs Wednesdays at 8pm on FOX.

Zoic Studios provided a number of visual effects shots for the series, including for the pilot episode. Zoic creative director Andrew Orloff discusses the studio’s work on Human Target.

“The question is, how do you do a super-sized action movie every week?” Orloff asks. The answer? Invisible effects, stunt enhancement, special effects and pyro enhancement. “There are all kinds of things, from a bullet train, to a HALO jump, to a large passenger airplane flying upside down in a storm, to a fight on a gondola suspended above a ravine. There are a lot of explosions – exploding boats, exploding trains, exploding buildings, and large set pieces.”

The largest set piece Zoic did was for the pilot episode, which took place almost entirely on a bullet train. Since America doesn’t have bullet trains, the team created the train station and landing. Both the 3D train and the landing were designed and created at Zoic.

“When [the characters] get on the train, what they are really stepping into is a greenscreen with a hole in it,” Orloff explains. “Then when they are on the train, the outside we see through the windows is a plate, which we shot via helicopter.

“We flew out to central California from Van Nuys airport; and flew at low altitude over the train tracks, making multiple passes going forward and back, and side-to-side. We used those helicopter plates to make exteriors to be seen from the windows inside the train.

“We also shot a ton of aerial establishing shots, which was a fun thing to do. We planned out the helicopter day by going on Google Earth and identifying where all the train tracks are. It was supposed to be a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles, so we were looking at the tracks around San Luis Obispo, and the ones a little more inland towards Tehachapi. We plotted out the course, and got our passes. Those were tracked in 3D, and the 3D train was put in on top of them.”

Another episode features a scene in which a CG passenger jet, flying through a storm, flips all the way over and then back again. “We couldn’t use any existing model of a passenger jet for legal reasons,” Orloff says. “So we had to take an existing jet model, modify it, and change up the existing engine configuration so it was more generic.

“We did a dozen shots of the plane at night, in clouds, with rain and lightning strikes, flipping over and right side up again, with smoke trailing back from it.” The production built a full-sized cockpit mock-up on a greenscreen stage, which could be rotated 360-degrees and upside down. This greenscreen footage was integrated into the CG airplane shots.

One episode portrayed a HALO jump. “It was interesting and challenging – we shot the main character on greenscreen, and added a whole aerial background, where we see clouds behind him. We enhanced the wind blowing in his face, and created a CG parachute that opens up and floats to the ground.”

Other VFX for Human Target are less spectacular, but just as important to creating the world of the show. In his review of the pilot episode, USA Today reviewer Robert Bianco wrote that the “confined-spaces fight on the train is a miniature marvel of its kind.” Orloff says there have been several confined gunfights on the show, and that it’s not safe to shoot with blanks in such tight quarters. As a result, Zoic creates and enhances muzzle flashes for the gunfight scenes, even for an underwater gunfight.

There were also a lot of set extensions. “There’s a big show where they escape from a building by climbing around in the ventilation and elevator shafts,” Orloff says, “and those were all shot on small set pieces, with greenscreen work extending the ventilation shafts up and down in this 50-storey building. There was an elevator shaft, that was a set that with two floors of elevator; we extended it, and the characters were zip-lining down the elevator cables.”

There are many wire and rig removals, and other stunt enhancements, “like when they’re coming down the zipline in the elevator shaft. They’re using a homemade rig in the story, but it’s a real rig and we erase that. There’s also a motorcycle jump off these big steps, and there were wires holding the motorcycle upright; and we’re erasing that. They’re fighting on a gondola, and they’re getting knocked over and flying off; there are all kinds of rigs and harnesses keeping the actors from falling off the gondola, that we erase.

“We did an episode where we blew up a building. We were using pyro and glass elements that were shot on our soundstage, along with special effects elements used to create CG fire. We do miniature shoots sometimes; do a small explosion and comp it into a larger piece. In the pilot, we blew up the wall of an office building. We shot that with no explosion, and then we went on a separate day, made a small quarter-scale version of that set and then blew it up.

“It’s a really interesting show; it’s a variety of challenges. It’s a different thing every week. It’s all based on real world phenomena, and it’s important to the show that this exists in the real world. We did a shot where there’s a DC Metro station. It was shot in Vancouver in a hotel lobby, and they greenscreened one side; we made a subway tunnel on that side, and brought a CG train into it. It’s a lot of stuff like that — expanding the scope of Chance’s world, bringing him to different environments and helping with these various moving action set pieces.

“You have these really cool shots you’d expect in a feature film. In the pilot there’s a shot from outside the train car, where they’re running from car to car to car and you’re seeing it through the windows. And there is actually no train – all that stuff is put in. When they go through a tunnel, there’s no tunnel. We’re doing all that.

“It’s a fun show. There’s a lot of work that might go unnoticed, but it really contributes to the believability and the scope of what they’re trying to accomplish.”

More info: Human Target official website; “Give ‘Human Target’ a shot, and it could just be a bull’s-eye” on USAToday.

ABC’s sci-fi drama V returns from hiatus this coming Tuesday, March 30th at 9 pm (10pm central). Culver City, California’s Zoic Studios produces visual effects for the series, which is a re-imagining of the beloved 1980s miniseries. It stars Morena Baccarin (Firefly, Serenity), Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), and Joel Gretsch (The 4400).

Zoic’s creative director, Andrew Orloff, discussed his excitement for the upcoming episodes.

It’s a big season, with a lot of surprises and a lot of new stuff. We’re spending a lot more time on the mothership. We’re getting a lot more into Anna, and the Vs and what they are really up to. We can’t give away too much, but there’s a lot happening, and a lot more to the visual effects — it’s going to be very cool. We’re continuing with the virtual set work we’ve been doing, and the virtual prosthetic work.

We’ll see a lot more of the V technology; we’re going to see a lot more of the V physiology; we’re going to see more of everything. We’re working a lot to create the reality of the whole environment. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

They’re really pushing the limits – it’s something that’s going to be really unprecedented as far as the scope of it. The scope is expanding astronomically for the first couple of episodes.

Be sure to watch the new episode of V, “Welcome to the War,” next Tuesday night at 9pm on ABC!

More info: “Zoic Brings Visitors to Earth for ABC’s ‘V’” on IDYE; the official V web site; “Welcome to the War” preview clips on VisitorSite.net.

It was the “night of Avatar and Zoic” on Sunday evening, as Zoic Studios was victorious in three categories at the VES Awards, held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. The annual event recognizes outstanding visual effects in more than twenty categories of film, animation, television, commercials and video games.

“Zoic Studios is extremely proud to have achieved this level recognition from the VES,” said Andrew Orloff, Zoic’s executive creative director. “It’s been a fantastic year for us, and it is great to be recognized for the creative work we’ve all put into the broadcast medium. All the artists from Zoic this year, winners and nominees alike should be proud of the work they have done in continuing to raise the bar in television visual effects.”

Zoic earned the following VES awards:

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Ep. 1001 “Family Affair” — Rik Shorten, Sabrina Arnold, Steve Meyer, Derek Smith

Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
V – “Pilot” Atrium and Ship Interiors — Chris Zapara, Chris Irving, David Morton, Trevor Adams

Outstanding Compositing in a Broadcast Program or Commercial
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Ep. 1001 “Family Affair” — Derek Smith, Christina Spring, Steve Meyer, Zach Zaubi

In addition to Zoic’s honors, Avatar was the evening’s big winner, taking home six awards including Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects Driven Motion Picture. The animated feature film Up was honored with three awards, including Outstanding Animation in an Animated Feature Motion Picture.

For those unable to attend the live event, the 2010 VES Awards can be viewed on Friday, March 5 at 10pm ET/PT on REELZCHANNEL.

Congratulations to everyone at Zoic on this momentous achievement!

For more info: The official VES site; read about CSI and V.

This Thursday, three Zoic pros will discuss the VFX of ABC’s V at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood.

Zoic Studios’ creative director Andrew Orloff will head up the presentation, which also includes pipeline supervisor Mike Romey discussion the ZEUS Shotgun pipeline, and senior compositor Johnathan R. Banta on compositing.

The event, “The Making of: Heroes and V,” will also feature talks by Stargate Studios’ Mark Spatny and Eric Grenaudier. It takes place this Thursday, February 25th, at Gnomon’s Cahuenga Blvd. campus, from 6 to 9pm.

More info: Gnomon School web site; “Zoic Brings Visitors to Earth for ABC’s ‘V’” and “Zoic Studios’ ZEUS: A VFX Pipeline for the 21st Century” on IDYE

Zoic Studios has been nominated for eight VES Awards this year! Here are the nominees:

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Miniseries, Movie or a Special

Ben 10: Alien Swarm - “Montage
Evan Jacobs, Visual Effects Supervisor
Sean McPherson, Visual Effects Supervisor
Andrew Orloff, Visual Effects Supervisor

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Broadcast Series

Fringe – episode 206 “Earthling”
Robert Habros, VFX Supervisor
Eric Hance, Visual Effects Artis
Andrew Orloff, VFX Supervisor
Jay Worth, VFX Supervisor/Producer

V - “Pilot”
Johnathan R. Banta, Lead Compositor
Karen Czukerberg, VFX Producer
Andrew Orloff, VFX Supervisor
Chris Zapara, VFX Supervisor

Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – episode 1001 “Opening Sequence”
Sabrina Arnold, VFX Producer
Steve Meyer, Compositor
Rik Shorten, VFX Supervisor
Derek Smith, Compositor

FlashForward - “No More Good Days”
Kevin Blank, Visual Effects Supervisor
Andrew Orloff, VFX Producer
Steve Meyer, 2D Supervisor
Jonathan Spencer Levy, Facility VFX Supervisor

Outstanding Created Environment in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

FlashForward - “Pilot” “Freeway Overpass”
Colin Feist, Compositor
Paul Ghezzo, CG Supervisor
Roger Kupelian, Matte Painter
Steve Meyer, Compositor

V – “Pilot” “Atrium and Ship Interiors”
Trevor Adams, CG Artist
Chris Irving, Lead Compositor
David Morton, Matte Painter
Chris Zapara, VFX Supervisor

Outstanding Compositing in a Broadcast Program or Commercial

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – episode 1001 “Opening Sequence”
Steve Meyer, VFX Supervisor
Derek Smith, Compositor
Christina Spring, Compositor
Zach Zaubi, Compositor

Congratulations to all the Zoicians who received nominations:

The Visual Effects Society is a professional honorary society, dedicated to advancing the arts, sciences, and applications of visual effects, and to improving the welfare of its members by providing professional enrichment and education, fostering community, and promoting industry recognition. It claims 1,500 members in 17 countries.

The 8th Annual VES Awards will take place on February 28, 2010, at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Good luck in February, everyone!

More info: “VES Announces Nominees for 8th Annual VES Awards” on VES web site.

Last Saturday the 12th, Zoic Studios celebrated its 2009 Holiday Party at the visual effects company’s Culver City, California studio.

The festive fête featured hors d’œuvre, an epicurean sit-down buffet dinner, plenty of wine & spirits, and a DJ spinning tunes until the wee hours of 11pm. Zoic co-founders Loni Peristere, Steve Schofield & Andrew Orloff, and CFO Tim McBride gave out exciting prizes to the throng, including an American Express gift card, a trip to Santa Ynez wine country, and a paid day off.

The party was planned by Katie Johnson, whose efforts produced a fantastic evening enjoyed by one and all.

This week, Cartoon Network premiered Ben 10: Alien Swarm, its second live-action movie based on the popular animated children’s series Ben 10: Alien Force. Alien Swarm is the sequel to the first live action film, Ben 10: Race Against Time; both were directed by Alex Winter (Freaked, Fever).

Alien Swarm continues the story of ten-year-old Ben Tennyson, an ordinary boy who becomes part of a secret organization called “the Plumbers,” which fights alien threats. He possesses a wristwatch-like device called the Omnitrix, which allows its wearer to take the physical form of various alien species. Ben, now a teenager and played by 23-year-old Ryan Kelley (Smallville), defies the Plumbers to help a mysterious childhood friend find her missing father.

Winter, an experienced director more familiar to fans as an actor from the Bill & Ted films and The Lost Boys, chose effects supervisor Evan Jacobs (Resident Evil: Extinction, Ed Wood) to oversee the movie’s many effects sequences. Jacobs worked with Culver City, California’s Zoic Studios to produce character animation and particle work for a number of key scenes.

Ben as Big Chill, using his freeze breath.

Zoic worked on three main characters – Kevin “Kevin 11” Levin (Nathan Keyes, Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith), an alien-human hybrid who can absorb properties of matter; Ben’s cousin Gwen Tennyson (Galadriel Stineman, Junkyard Dog), another hybrid who manipulates energy; and Big Chill, one of Ben’s alien forms, a creature that breathes ice.

Zoic’s Executive Creative Director, Andrew Orloff (V, Fringe), says that for the production, the filmmakers chose to stay away from motion capture as “too limiting.” With all the jumping, flying and other stunt work that would be required, performers hanging from wires would not produce as realistic a result as traditional keyframing, in which every frame of a computer animation is directly modified or manipulated by the creator. “All the characters were traditionally keyframed and match moved by hand,” Orloff says.

Orloff collaborated with Winter and Jacobs to turn the Big Chill from the cartoon, an Necrofriggian from the planet Kylmyys, into a 3D, realistic breathing character. Working with a model created by Hollywood, California’s Super 78 Studios, Orloff developed character and motion & flying studies for Big Chill before the filmmakers ever hit the soundstage.

“It was very important to Alex [Winter] that we stay true to the original series, and give it a little something extra for the live action series that’s a real surprise for the viewers, to see their beloved cartoon characters finally brought to life,” Orloff says.

Gwen blasts the alien swarm, as Big Chill hovers nearby.

“Based on the visual choreography of the scenes, we didn’t really do previsualization as pre-development of the character. We talked about the way that [Big Chill] can fly, the maneuvers it could do; and that allowed Alex to have in his mind at the storyboard phase a good idea of what the kind of movement of the character was going to be.

“He’s a seven foot tall flying alien, so to create that realism was definitely a challenge. To take a two-dimensional character and turn it into a three-dimensional character, you have to maintain the integrity of the two-dimensional design, but make it look as if it’s realistically sitting in the environment. So we added a lot of skin detail, we added a lot of muscle detail and sinews; it was tricky to get the lighting of the skin exactly right. We just had to make sure that the skin had that ‘alien’ quality, so it didn’t look like a manikin or an action figure. We wanted to give a realistic feel to the skin using Maya/mental ray to render that subsurface scattering.”

Much of the footage with Big Chill involved the character flying and fighting inside a warehouse. It wasn’t possible to shoot plates that would track exactly with the as-yet unrendered character, and the filmmakers could only guess how the character would move, and how quickly. So Jacobs provided Zoic with a variety of plates of a number of different moves, plus some very high resolution 360° panoramas of the warehouse interior. Zoic then used these materials to produce its own plates, rebuilding the warehouse from the set photos and creating the shots needed to flesh out the sequence. This process was time-consuming and difficult, as much of the blocking and choreography was highly detailed.

In addition to designing the character’s movements and rendering his actions, Zoic created the freeze breath effects for Big Chill. The character’s power required two kinds of effects. First, Zoic used heavy-duty particle and fluid simulations in Maya and mental ray to create the chunks of ice, smoke and liquid nitrogen that blast from Big Chill’s mouth. Then Zoic produced quite a bit of matte painting work to encase objects in ice, icicles and frost. These include the chip swarm tornado; the interior of the warehouse; and the villain, Victor Validus (Herbert Siguenza, Mission Hill).

Kevin, having taken on the properties of the metal girder, attacks the alien swarm.

The main antagonist in Alien Swarm is the alien swarm itself, a cloud of thousands of intelligent, flying alien chips that work together to harm the good guys.

The alien swarm was also created in Maya and mental ray. According to Orloff, “there needed to be thousands of chips that swarmed with a random yet directed attack. The idea that the chips were learning, so they would group together – first they try to go at Gwen and the kids, and Gwen blasts them away — then they reconfigure into a buzz saw and try to attack the kids that way — then they configure into a large tornado – you have to give a personality, but an evolving personality, to a swarm of objects.” In predevelopment, Zoic looked at fish schooling and insect swarming behaviors in nature, to give the swarm movement that felt organic without seeming contrived.

Zoic also produced the effects for Kevin, who absorbs the properties of matter from objects. “Kevin was a big challenge,” Orloff says, “because what we ended up doing was scanning the actor; as he touched something we would put a CG version of the model over the top of him; rotoscope those few frames where the transition occurs; take that model and map it with whatever the material was – a rusty metal beam, a wood desk, a concrete floor. We rotoscoped the CG version over the top until the transformation was done, and then we transitioned from the rotoscoped animation, based on the actor’s performance, to a fully CG character animation.”

The energy manipulation effects for Gwen were “a ‘two-and-a-half-D’ effect, using 3D particle generators and 3D scene-tracked cameras in Adobe After Effects to create the energy bolts and energy fields that Gwen uses. We wanted to give it a ‘Jack Kirby’ kind of energy feel to it. So it has a lot of character to it, it looks very organic, and it affects the background objects and produces heat ripple effects.”

Frost effects in the warehouse. All of the frost and ice are VFX.

While Zoic was providing visual effects for the movie, Zoic’s Design Group worked directly with Vincent Aricco and Heather Reilly from Cartoon Network’s On-Air department, developing both the show and promo packaging for Ben 10: Alien Swarm. The package was used to promote the film both on-air and online – as well as in the Comic-Con preview this past summer.

Design Group Creative Director Derich Wittliff worked with Zoic’s internal production team, lead by Producer Scott Tinter and Designer Darrin Isono, creating 3D environments and models based on the movie’s 2D logo and other references from the film. Elements were created in Maxon Cinema 4D, Autodesk Maya and Adobe After Effects. The final product was a show open and modular promo toolkit which allowed Cartoon Network’s in-house team to create custom endpages, IDs, bumpers, and other elements.

Because the Zoic Design Group worked under the same roof as the team that produced effects for Alien Swarm, they had access to the best elements available from the show, like the “swarm” effect itself, as soon as they were created, allowing for an efficient process which produced finished elements for special uses – like Comic-Con – far in advance of customary production schedules.

Zoic Design Group Executive Producer Miles Dinsmoor says Zoic was excited to have the opportunity to work directly with Cartoon Network, acting as both a visual effects and digital production studio for the main production, and as a creative design shop for the promotional package, exploiting Zoic’s fully integrated media and design department. His goal is to offer Zoic’s in-house design and creative expertise industry-wide, and not just to Zoic’s existing VFX clients.

Orloff says he is proud of the work Zoic did on Ben 10: Alien Swarm, and looks forward to future collaboration with everyone involved – and hopefully, another Ben 10 movie.

More info: Ben 10: Alien Swarm at Cartoon Network; on Amazon.