Posts Tagged V (2009)

Recently ABC’s alien invasion drama V returned from hiatus, and Zoic Studios has been working night and day creating the VFX for the critically-acclaimed sci-fi series.

I managed to pry compositor Nate Overstrom away from his desk for a few minutes, to discuss some of the work the Zoic team has done for V since the show returned from its Winter Olympics break.

“We’ve been working on so many shots that everything kind of blurs together,” Overstrom says. “We’re delivering about 200 shots per episode, on a two-week turnaround. We’re moving lightning fast, and doing the best we can to keep everything running smoothly.”

The most memorable effects scene since the show returned might be the final shot of episode #105, “Welcome to the War,” when (spoiler alert) V leader Anna (Morena Baccarin, Firefly), having just finished mating joylessly with an anonymous V male, says “now my eggs need nourishment” – her head juts forward, a mouthful of fangs protrudes from her maw, and she lunges at the doomed male.

“Anna’s teeth were pretty interesting,” Overstrom says. “There were two shots we worked on for her face. The first one, where she first started opening her mouth, was primarily a 2D effect. First we used The Foundry’s Nuke to warp her mouth and jaw open, and moved her existing teeth out of the way. Then we rendered the upper and lower CG jaws and teeth separately, and tracked in the 3D elements to the new warped face.

“The second shot was a digital prosthetic. The matchmovers tracked Anna’s face, and modeler Jason Monroe built out a new lower face with the jaws extended, as well as the new CG jaws and teeth. Sal Massimini and Chris Strauss took it through texturing, lighting and rendering. They projected the textures of Anna’s original face back onto the CG model, so everything lined up pretty well. Then it was just a matter of color correcting it in.”

She seemed to do a thing where her whole head slid forward…

“That was just [Baccarin]. She leaned forward, and I did a little bit of a warp on her jaw before she opened her mouth, to kick her jaw forward a little bit, and give her a bit of a menacing motion.”

In another scene, Fifth Column member Ryan Nichols (Morris Chestnut, Boyz n the Hood) reveals his alien nature to terrorist Kyle Hobbes (Charles Mesure, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) by pulling down his lower eyelid and pushing up his false human eye, revealing a reptilian slit pupil. “Jason built the eye models and did the initial textures,” Overstrom says. “Sal and Chris did the rendering.

“Those were pretty straightforward. We layered in each eye separately to maintain as much control in comp as possible. The tricky part was getting just the right kind of ‘membrane’ effect on the human lid, which was accomplished through a few extra CG elements. We had to do a little bit of extra 2D warping on the pupil of the second shot to simulate the eye constricting and dilating.”

There’s nothing practical with the actor, right?

“He’s just doing this [pulls down eyelid].”

The brunt of the show is virtual sets – anything on the mothership, which is a lot of shots…

Episode #104, “It’s Only the Beginning,” reveals a surveillance room aboard the mothership, from which the Vs can monitor humans who have been tagged with fake flu shots. “These are 300 foot long digital sets,” Overstrom explains, “with dozens of digitally added extras, and accompanied by 3D holographs around each group. The only thing rendered in CG was the room; then Dayna Mauer populated the expanse of the room using Nuke’s 3D capabilities. She extended out a full set of extras and holograph screens, and added reflections and shadows of everybody.

“The groups of extras were shot on greenscreen – six or seven plates of five groups of people standing in different positions. She went though and did 30 extra greenscreen comps, lifted those people out, put them on cards and placed them out in 3D.”

Since the show came back, the mothership technology has centered a great deal on the V control screens, which are flat 3D interfaces that appear in midair. What’s involved in creating these floating holographic screens?

“The production has a group of motion graphics artists that provide us with the playback elements,” Overstrom explains. He says that the actor is given on-set direction about how to interact with the screen, which has no practical on-set element. “They provide us with the elements. We track them into the shots in Nuke, and time the animations accordingly.

“Sometimes we get fancy and add some chromatic depth by taking a display, duplicating the object twice, and shift the channels on each iteration so each is either a red, green, or blue channel. Then we shift each ‘channel’ in space so the three are slightly offset from each other and then recombine them. So if the camera rotates around, we see that there’s a little 3D depth to it that creates a chromatic separation.”

In another memorable scene, from episode #106 “Pound of Flesh,” Anna tests the loyalty of a group of Vs who failed an empathy test. They are told to consume pills that will immolate their bodies instantly. The Vs who take the pills die, but pass Anna’s test. “The V immolation shot was definitely challenging, especially on such a tight turnaround. We custom-built and animated a CG rig to provide a series of animated mattes, skeleton elements, a charcoal mannequin, and several sets of particle passes. We then cleaned several actors out of the greenscreen and re-layered the effects in, also taking care to add the reflections of everything in comp.”

Overstrom admits that working on V, while tremendously satisfying, is also a challenge, due to the scope of the work. “The brunt of the show is virtual sets – anything on the mothership, and a lot of matte paintings for New York City, which when you watch the show… is a lot of shots. But we also have to take account of all the other shots that go into the show as well: all the holoscreens, the healing effects, medical instruments and prosthetics that need cleanup, rig removal… you know all the ‘standard’ work that goes into just about every show. That’s all there as well.”

“The biggest hurdle for any of these shots that we’re doing is the time constraint — but our work on V has come off pretty successfully!”

More info: Official V site on ABC.com; Nate Overstrom, Jason Monroe, and Chris Strauss on IMDb.