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By Eric Taub
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| Spartacus effect shot |
When Dr. Robert Romano, ER’s surgeon-you-loved-to-hate, had his arm severed by a helicopter blade last season, practically every element of the scene was computer-created. The helicopter was produced digitally. So were the blood, the wind and the Chicago skyline.
Paul McCrane, who played Romano until the character’s death earlier this season, was filmed in a parking lot at Warner Bros.’ Burbank studios, reacting to a nonexistent aircraft. The shot was then transferred to high-definition video, and computer-generated effects were added. The live-action shoot took twenty minutes, instead of the four hours that would have been required had a real helicopter been used.
Complicated crashes, flyovers and crowd scenes can all be created in camera. And while feature producers may wonder, "Are elaborate effects worth the price?" television producers question whether a show can be made efficiently without them. Today’s low-cost, off-the-shelf computer hardware makes it a lot less costly to create a virtual train shot than to send a crew onto the Chicago El to take a real one.
Invisible effects, like the one that saw the end of Romano’s surgical career, have made a star of Stargate Digital, a South Pasadena, California—based company that serves such television hits as CBS’ CSI and NBC’s ER and Las Vegas.
ER could easily spend $150,000 to send a second-unit crew to Chicago to shoot five pages of script, says Sam Nicholson, Stargate’s president and CEO. By staying in sunny Burbank and hiring his company to re-create a snowy street scene as well as the El train, the production can cut travel and shooting time and avoid the vagaries of Midwest weather – while reducing costs by half.
Special effects is a cutthroat business. Many effects houses will work below cost to obtain a show’s other postproduction work. And with producers often showing more loyalty to particular visual effects artists than the houses that employ them, the fortunes of any company may wax and wane.
Last year, for example, Eastman Kodak shut its Hollywood Cinesite special effects site, unable to turn a profit. "We were a midsized player in a world dominated by George Lucas and Sony," Eric Rodli, president of Kodak’s entertainment imaging division, said at the time. "To succeed in this business you either have to be a nimble small boutique or a very large shop."
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| Digital effect shot from ER |
Stargate succeeds by handling entire productions for a flat fee rather than picking up one or two effects for various shows. While the per-effect profit may be reduced, Nicholson can be assured of a steady cash flow.
Besides the L.A. flagship, which employs fifty, Stargate operates smaller offices in Vancouver and London, and the locations are linked by voice and data. Thanks to a voice-over-IP network, phone communication is free. And through a connected data network, an artist in one office can comment on and even alter the output of a colleague in another, in real time.
Elements of any effect may be distributed among the three facilities. And all employees can access the central repository of digital effects, such as pre-rendered clouds, smoke or birds, stored on servers in South Pasadena.
When Las Vegas began production last year, Stargate created the opening sequence, which takes the viewer on a bird’s-eye tour of the city and then down into the Montecito casino, where the story is set. At the time, the city shots were captured in the traditional manner, using video cameras.
Since then, Stargate installed new computers, 64- rather than 32-bit machines from Boxx Technologies, allowing for effects that couldn’t be tried a year ago – and a more sophisticated opener. A crew reshot the Vegas Strip and an empty lot where the casino supposedly stood from various angles, including the point of view of a helicopter. Those sequences were digitized and placed in a computer grid along with a virtual casino. As a result, Stargate artists can now show the Montecito from virtually any angle, flying over, around and through the artificial hotel. And thanks to the increased processing power, Nicholson says, his team can create virtual buildings so detailed they can be shown in daytime, not just at night.
Meanwhile, back at the ER, Dr. Romano finally met his maker during November sweeps, felled by – yes – a helicopter, which crashes into the hospital roof, tips over and crushes him. This scene could be made even more realistic than the previous helicopter incident.
"The first virtual helicopter never crashed," Nicholson says, "because it would have been impossible to show it breaking up in a realistic manner. But now we were able to re-create the proper kinetics and dynamic simulation of pieces of the craft breaking up, bending and flying into a wall."
Stargate’s computerized crowd scenes are also more realistic than ever, thanks to AI.implant, a software package from BioGraphic Technologies of Montreal. For the USA miniseries Spartacus – starring ER’s Goran Visnjic and airing April 18—19 – Stargate created a crowd scene that included thousands of independently moving, computerized people.
The crowds were combined with footage of a small coliseum built for the production in Bulgaria, as well as computerized imagery of ancient Rome. The result? A dramatic flyover of an ancient city teeming with life. "The database to create this effect is so large that one year ago we could never have attempted this," Nicholson says.
To render, or draw, special-effects frames like these, Stargate harnesses the power of all its machines. A portion of the work is handed off to Vancouver and London, then transmitted back to South Pasadena when finished. Even when staffers are out to lunch or gone for the day, their desktops may be working to render images.
Using special effects in lieu of filmed images can save time and money for high-concept dramatic shows. But, as musicians discovered when moving from acoustic to digital instruments, this technology creates an entirely new language of creative expression.
"Thanks to computers, a show can go to Paris – not just once a season, but every week," Nicholson says. "But we don’t know yet how to harness all that freedom. The minute you depend on a new technology, it expands your ability to do something with it."
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