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Reality TV, plug-ins and more!

This month, we look at Reality TV — those shows that nobody admits to watching, but for some reason, are surprisingly popular? Let’s face it — they are inescapable! I can honestly say I’ve never watched Jersey Shore or Real Housewives, but when I checked

my own viewing habits, Reality TV programs kept popping up. My guilty pleasures are of the “Alaskan” and “Gold” genres: Gold Rush, Bering Sea Gold,

Wild West Alaska and Flying Wild Alaska to be specific. Heck, I even got roped into Jungle Gold, which takes place in Africa. The length that these guys go through to not find gold is astounding! I can’t stop watching. I’ve even caught a few episodes of Finding Bigfoot?! As if I expect them to actually find Bigfoot??

Finding Bigfoot researcher “Bobo” graces our cover this month, and if you turn to our Reality TV feature on page 18, you can read more about the challenges program produc-ers and post houses face in dealing with tons of footage, a wide range of acquisition for-mats, multiple storylines, and broadcast deadlines. Say what you will about Reality TV, but the “reality” is that it’s a serious business. One that helps manufacturers sell equipment. One that keeps post studios busy. And one that US audiences seem to enjoy. (Any Duck Dynasty fans out there?)

But there’s a lot more to this month’s issue. Iain Blair talks with director Peter Berg about the well-received feature, Lone Survivor (page 12). Jennifer Walden connects with a number of audio pros, each of whom reveals one their favorite problem-solving post tools (page 30). And on page 36, we have a gallery of VFX Plug-Ins that can improve the look of any project with only a minimal cash investment. Some of these plug-ins now benefit from GPU acceleration too, helping to speed up performance and save pros time.

“I think every artist, editor or animator I know has a set of plug-ins they just couldn’t imagine doing their jobs without,” says Greg Estes, VP of marketing at Nvidia, whose GPUs help power such releases. “And that’s really not surprising given the ability of many of the plug-in software vendors to be agile and get innovative new looks or effects to market quickly. These are sometimes very small companies, but they punch way above their weight in terms of technical ability. And one of the things they do extremely well is listen to their customers and respond with unique capabilities, profoundly impacting the effi-ciency of workflows and the creative process.”

Enjoy the issue and let us know what you think?

By MARC LOFTUS

Senior editor/ director of Web

[email protected]

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Reality Posting

Ghost Hunters, which is approaching its 200th episode, is cut on Avid Media Composers at Pilgrim Studios.

TV

www.postmagazine.com Post • February 2014 19

Unscripted reality programming poses unique challenges for the production companies that shoot crime shows, home-themed content and paranormal adventures, and to the post facilities that support them too. It’s a world where massive amounts of footage is the norm. Workflows can be tape- or file-based, or both, and color grading can range from filmic to edgy and authentic.

FINDING BIGFOOTFolks worldwide have been “Finding Bigfoot” for the eponymous Animal Planet series for three

seasons now. From West Virginia to Nepal, their quests have been documented by Ping Pong Productions (www.ppongproductions.com) in one-hour episodes that find the show’s investiga-tive team pursuing “compelling evidence” of the creature, says Jeffrey Williams, one of the show’s five editors. He and his colleagues cut Finding Bigfoot in the Hollywood offices of Ping Pong, which is equipped with Avid Media Composers and a Studio Network Solutions’ SANmp shared stor-age system.

The show is shot entirely on location with Sony XDCAMs as the primary cameras and an array of GoPros, Contour cameras and FLIR infrared cameras for night imaging rounding out field produc-tion. Three to nine cameras cover any given scene, Williams says.

“The field crew shoots for seven days and post will get 60-80 hours of footage for every episode,” he explains. “They also spend half-a-day shooting aerials that give a real sense of scope to these wild environments. These aerials help stitch the episodes together and really set the show apart.”

It takes the assistants two weeks to ingest and build group clips for the editors’ Media Compos-ers. “Every episode comes with a beat [scene] sheet and field notes, and the editors pretty much take over from there. We have a lot of creative freedom to tell the best, clearest story in post. There’s a fairly established rhythm for the show, but the field and post have been able to take chances with that structure this season to keep the storytelling fresh and exciting,” says Williams. “For each episode, multiple editors will contribute a scene or two in the early stages, but there’s ultimately one primary editor for each show and the team has six weeks to deliver the first cut to the network. It’s a tremendous amount of work in what feels like a very short amount of time.”

Despite the volume of material the “very organized and efficient workflow keeps everything moving smoothly,” he reports. “After we lock the episode and everybody signs off on it, another in-house editor onlines and color grades the episode on an Avid Symphony Nitris. We mix here and have just started to deliver to the network on LTO at their request, so we’re pretty much tape-less from start to finish now.”

Color grading consists of “balancing and enhancing daytime scenes of the beautiful locations,” he says. “Since this is a paranormal-type show, audiences enjoy the moody night-vision look, so we match multiple cameras to a single night vision look so viewers can experience them seamlessly.”

The challenge for the editors cutting Finding Bigfoot lies in “the storytelling,” Williams says. “There’s so much material to go through and we’re always looking for ways to make each scene stand out, but we have to stay true to what our cast finds with each encounter they investigate. There’s no faking it. So we focus on finding unique and compelling character moments, dramatic night scenes, and funny moments with the cast. That’s what makes the show so popular.”

Reality Finding Bigfoot uses Sony XDCAM as its primary acquisition format, but also captures on GoPros and infrared cameras.

This genre of programming

relies on efficient

workflows and lots of storage.

By Christine BunishTV


DEADLINE: CRIMEThe new investigative news program,

Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall, from NBC News’ Peacock Productions, debuted on Investigation Discovery last fall with the MSNBC anchor leading a team of correspon-dents who go beyond the headlines to report on what caused people to turn to crime and whether justice was ultimately served.

Technicolor-PostWorks New York (www.technicolorpwny.com) handles post produc-tion for a number of series and specials from Peacock Productions. But Deadline: Crime has “a very unique workflow for this type of programming — a much more feature film-style color grading process,” says senior fin-ishing editor and colorist Sean R. Smith.

“Creative editorial occurs in HD on Avid Media Composer 6.5 in the Peacock Produc-tion offices at 30 Rock, and I receive a con-formed XDCAM 50 HD sequence,” he says. “We open that sequence in Symphony, cre-ate a textless mixdown, and then import the mixdown into the [Digital Vision] Nucoda FilmMaster for color grading. Titling, blurs, compositing and outputs to HDCAM SR happen back in Symphony after the comple-tion of color.”

Deadline: Crime is entirely file-based, with the Canon C300 as the primary camera and Canon 5D Mark III and Mark II as the B and C cameras. “They shoot the C300 in Canon C-log mode for a filmic image

response,” Smith explains. “Within FilmMas-ter, we start by applying our own C-Log to Rec 709 transform. We then process the color essentially as we would for a feature digital intermediate.”

The show aims for a natural film look. “All options are available when starting with a flat image, so we try to take it in a different direction than the standard video look of most news magazine programs,” he says. “The C300 and Mark III do a very good job emulating natural grain in most low-light conditions, but when shooting conditions are extreme, I use the FilmMaster’s DVO Clarity to pull back on noise. When you’re grading on a higher-end system, you also have more sophisticated tools for isolating colors. It’s faster and easier to highlight eyes in an interview or draw out details to con-vey a certain mood.”

Smith also integrates archival stills provid-ed by family and news clips from high-profile crimes, which have been upconverted and captured in the Avid timeline. “The NBC News archives are on Beta SP, even some of their recent clips, so I do a little restoration on that material,” he notes. “We never want to make it look like that footage was shot yesterday; we just wanted to clean up the artifacts a bit.”

Since Deadline: Crime employs “a new workflow for this type of content, there were some elements we needed to streamline

during the first couple of episodes,” Smith reports. “By the second or third episode, we hit a good stride in knowing how to best direct Peacock to prep the sequence and split out certain plug-in effects from their mixdown. It became a very seamless pro-cess. We have since implemented that same workflow on the second season of another Peacock Productions show, Dead of Night.”

Matthew Schneider, director of technolo-gy at Technicolor-PostWorks New York, notes that, “with more cameras shooting Log in light-weight HD formats, a lot of reality TV clients are asking, ‘Is it worth it?’” He believes that more will opt to shoot Log in an effort to differentiate their shows from the compe-tition. “Most clients who ask about shooting Log — the cost, the workflow, the artistic advantage — are asking because they want their show to have a unique look and feel.”

Smith points out that one minor caveat of shooting Log is that “if you’re offlining in Avid V.6.5 or below, until you apply a custom color effect, you’re looking at very flat mate-rial. This is challenging for anyone that is unaccustomed to seeing footage this way, including network executives. To get around this I developed a quick one-light color effect, used like a LUT, to drop on top of the entire show to bring back some of the con-trast while they’re in the rough cut stage,” he explains. Smith adds that looking ahead, Avid Media Composer V.7 now offers these clients

Deadline: Crime posts at Technicolor-PostWorks in

NYC. The studio’s (L) Schneider and (R) Smith

are pictured above.

Posting Reality TV


the ability to apply a color transform in the form of a LUT to this raw material during the ingest stage.

Otherwise, “there’s no downside to shooting Log,” Smith says. “Once you under-stand what it means and embrace the work-flow that supports it, shooting Log can ben-efit any show out there.”

GHOST HUNTERSTV’s longest-running paranormal series,

Ghost Hunters is marking its tenth anniversa-ry this year, says Craig Piligian, CEO and executive producer at Pilgrim Studios in North Hollywood (www.pilgrimstudios.com). “Our 200th episode will air on Syfy in October,” he notes.

Over the course of a decade, the show has seen a number of technological changes, such as migrating from SD to HD video, but it remains true to the format that its loyal fan base expects: Jason Hawes and Steve Gon-salves, and their team of intrepid TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) members, meet a client, take a tour of the premises suspect-ed of hosting paranormal activity, strategize the nighttime investigation, then get to work ghost hunting.

The camera complement is a mix of tape-

and file-based media and includes Sony HCR-A1U and HVR-Z7U HD cameras manned by the crew, Canon 5Ds for B roll, GoPros and specialty cameras, such as FLIR infrared units. For the first time, the new season finds Jason and Steve donning glasses containing miniature IR cameras, made by paranormal enthusiast Pete Stagman of para-hunter.com, which enable viewers to see the

action from the ghost hunters’ perspective. TAPS also deploys its own cameras, including full-spectrum cameras that show any fluctua-tion of light in the room.

“There are a lot of cameras, but Craig wants the show to be very nimble, so we use small cameras, stay out of the way of Jason and Steve, and move quickly and quietly through the dark,” says executive producer Mike Nich-ols. The three TAPS teams shoot footage themselves and each team is assigned a cam-era operator from Pilgrim Studios; two teams also have sound engineers, but Jason and Steve prefer a lean crew to keep “contamination of the area” to a minimum, notes Nichols.

Footage adds up fast. “Our three cameras and their cameras are rolling the entire time of the investigation,” he explains. “So that’s maybe eight hours times 10 cameras — you get quite a bit of footage.” TAPS analyzes all the material so it can present its findings to the client, then shares the footage with Pilgrim.

Assistants ingest tape- and file-based media into Avid Unity shared storage, work-ing overnight in multiple edit bays at Pilgrim’s production offices. Material is grouped by timecode matching all cameras and angles to a given timecode. Then the editors watch all the footage to get a sense of the episodes.

Story producers in the field take detailed notes, which they later share with the edi-tors. But stories sometimes take a different turn from what was anticipated, depending on what transpired in the investigation. “They can steer the TAPS guys at the front end in terms of what story the client is interested in pursuing,” Nichols explains. “But once TAPS runs with it, you can’t manipulate what hap-

pens. As Craig says, ‘We don’t fake anything; we just embrace the reality.’”

Editors cut in low-res on Avid Media Composers linked to Unity. They up-rez to finish on Avid Symphony Nitris DX in-house. Dave Broadbent performs the color session on Avid with the mandate to keep the ghost-hunting footage authentically edgy. “He makes all the green IR footage black and white so viewers can see it better,” says Nichols. “We want as clean an image as possible; people like playing along with the ghost hunt.”

The sound mix is performed in-house by Marcus Pardo. Fans are so attuned to the show that they asked where Marcus was when a different mixer stepped in for one episode, Nichols recounts.

Pilgrim delivers Ghost Hunters via FTP to the network as an Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) file.

“Our biggest technical challenge is to show the audience what the crew sees — and with the new IR-camera glasses we’re closer to that than ever before,” Nichols says. “There are no second chances with a ghost. We have no choice but to show what hap-pens on a given night. If you embrace that, it doesn’t become an obstacle; it actually makes life easier.”

BOSTON’S FINESTOne of the first reality series to air on

TNT, Boston’s Finest chronicles the daily operations of the Boston Police Department (BPD) by following the day and night shifts of the gang unit, the patrol unit, the fugitive unit and a few detectives from District B2 — and their lives outside the BPD. Donnie Wahlberg executive produces and narrates the show, which is produced by Jarrett Creative Group (www.jarrettcreative.com) in New York City.

The post workflow established for the first season of Boston’s Finest worked so well that it remained in place for season two, which recently finished airing, says Timothy Dixon, creative director at Jarrett Creative Group and the company’s lead editor. The show is more unscripted than most reality series due to the fly-on-the-wall nature of covering the BPD units.

“You can’t really plan much of anything,” notes Dixon. “We had a long casting process because we had to find officers who were interesting and wanted to do it, and get them approved by the network and BPD. So we knew the characters we had, but you never know day to day what’s going to hap-pen with them.”

The main priority for the show is to “stay true to the case [shown] creatively and legally,” Dixon says. “You’re seeing what actu-

Jim Gallagher is an editor on Ghost Hunters, which is produced and posted by Pilgrim Studios.

Donnie Wahlberg narrates Boston’s Finest for TNT.

Posting Reality TV


ally happened. But it’s not all about the case — we also show the officers as human beings; we get into their world, go in and out of their personal lives. It’s not just chases, jumping over fences and yelling, ‘Freeze!’”

Three camera teams manning Canon C300s ride with the units. Vixia cameras are mounted inside police cars and run continu-ously throughout the shift. The C300s also capture sit-down interviews and personal moments outside the job. Aerial photogra-phy gives the big picture of the entire city of Boston and its component neighborhoods.

Each show features two or three stories. Dixon says the show’s 14 episodes to date approached 9,000 hours of footage. Season two’s six episodes consumed close to 20TBs of hard drive space. Before post begins, the field team lays out on paper how the units’ stories might come together and how they might work well with each other. “We want to make sure there’s a beginning, middle and end for each episode, so you see the arc of a character or a case,” he explains. Footage is downloaded in Boston so the story pro-ducers and show runners can see how cov-erage is progressing.

The camera cards are sent back and forth between Boston and New York. Footage from the cards was downloaded to drives in both locations so field producers can have footage in Boston and the post team can begin work in New York. Post takes place on Mac-based Avid Media Composers (V.6) with ISIS storage at Technicolor-PostWorks in New York City.

The paper story treatments done in Bos-ton serve as a blueprint for Dixon and his team of editors, but they have the flexibility to move stories and characters to other episodes for a better fit.

“Because we have so much footage, it’s

compressed to 14:1 SD for put-ting episodes together ; after the fine cut we up-rez to full HD,” says Dixon. “The last round of notes is done in the full HD path.”

When the picture is locked, sequences are sent upstairs to colorist Eli Friedman for grading on Assimilate’s Scratch. “We want the show to feel very gritty and real,” says Dixon. “Eli’s work adds the hallmark gritty, high-contrast look of the show by bringing out the richness of the color and deep shadows that the camera teams capture, espe-cially in low-light conditions dur-

ing the night shoots.”When Friedman finishes, sequences

come back into the Avid for the final online with graphics and text, and marriage to the mix performed by Mike Fisher at Broadway Video. “We ask the Avids to do a lot and they’ve worked flawlessly for us,” Dixon reports. “All the media manage-ment, this many hours, this many terabytes, going back and forth from SD to HD… The opportunities to mess up are huge, but it never happens.”

Donnie Wahlberg remains hands-on with the show, submitting notes for every episode to Jarrett Creative owners and executive producers Seth and Julie Jarrett. He also works with Dixon on the edit and records the voiceover.

“We were TNT’s first foray into the reality arena — they call it ‘unscripted drama’ — and we think we’ve turned out something they like and want to do more of,” says Dixon. “There’s a never-ending supply of stories to tell about Boston’s Finest.”

I BRAKE FOR YARD SALES & MORE

LA’s Hula Post Production (www.hula-post.com) provides facilities and services for a number of reality series, which follow vari-ous models for post.

HGTV’s new I Brake for Yard Sales features celebrity reporter Lara Spencer hunting for stylish, one-of-a-kind pieces to decorate her friend’s new home. The series, along with season three of HGTV’s Flea Market Flip, has a “classic, simple, tape-based workflow,” says Josh Rizzo, vice president of technology at Hula Post. “They shoot DVCPRO HD, so there are no piles of hard drives and very straightforward asset management. Each show uses a four-station digitizing rack we

designed and built, and a 16TB Avid Unity, which expanded from the original 8TB fully-mirrored system. Each show has four or five Avid Media Composers and two or three software-only systems for producers and story editors to use on their workstations.

“Footage rolls in, they’re hooked to the Unity and keep feeding machines tapes at 20:1 resolution, which is the flavor of choice for reality programming because of the volume of media and shooting ratios,” Rizzo explains.

The shows’ parent company, Banca Studio, also produces TBS’s Deal With It, which has a completely file-based workflow. “We pro-vide them with 48TBs of nearline NAS stor-age for raw material and back up to LTO,” Rizzo says. “They hook up multiple editing systems to the NAS and batch transcode in overnight renders to the Unity at 20:1.

“In furnishing their edit suites and on-site tech support for Deal With It, we guide them through the offline and a bit of the con-form. They relink to the high-res source mate-rial and consolidate on a hard drive, so when they roll into the finishing bay, everything is ready to go,” Rizzo explains. I Brake for Yard Sales and Flea Market Flip conform via tape off-site as part of the traditional online.

Hula Post also sets up mobile post facilities for clients. One major producer of numerous reality shows has an “enormous installation” featuring 50 to 60 Avid systems and an 80-plus terabyte ISIS 7000, Rizzo reports.

Yet another post model is followed by The Amazing Race, with whom the team at Hula Post has worked for its 24 seasons on the air. The production’s offices in El Segundo, CA, boast 12 Avids and a 16TB Unity Media Net server. “They shoot XDCAM HD pri-marily, plus a large number of file-based camera sources such as the contestants’ GoPros and helicopter aerials,” says Rizzo. “We assisted them with a workflow that homogenizes all the file-based systems to an XDCAM disk with timecode. Our XD Direct product provides faster-than-realtime ingest of XDCAM proxy video with high-resolution audio. XDCAM really benefits them since they can archive the disks and treat them as files, so they get the best of both worlds.”

Hula also supports a hybrid model clients that purchase their own equipment, “We often continue to provide overflow Avid and storage rentals, day-to-day tech support, as well as our XD Direct and WorkflowEngine products,” says Rizzo. “We see growth opportunities with companies that want to buy equipment but still need a resource for high-level technical and workflow expertise.”

Hula Post works on I Brake For Yard Sales, which is

shot on DVCPRO HD.

Posting Reality TV


Hear WHat You Want

L OS ANGELES — Eddie Kim of Therapy Studios (www.youneedtherapy.tv) created the sound design featured in Hear What You Want, a new spot for Beats by Dre that features San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick.

Paul Hunter directed the 2:45 short, which gives viewers the QB’s perspective as he arrives at the home field of the rival Seattle Seahawks. Unruly fans show their displeasure with the team’s arrival, but the play-caller is able to stayed focused by putting on his noise-canceling Beats by Dre wireless headphones. Aloe Blacc’s soulful “The Man” track plays, and Kaepernick gracefully exits the bus.

Kim worked on the spot over the course of two weeks, using Avid Pro Tools as his DAW. The biggest challenge, he notes, was to make the hostile fans sound authentic and to have their energy escalate as the spot plays out.

Agency R/GA conceived the spot, which was produced by Pretty Bird. Therapy’s Eric Ryan mixed the project, with Eric Shin assisting.

postings

tHe CroWd

W EST LOS ANGELES — Visual Creatures (http://visualcreatures.com) worked with the non-profit orga-nization Samahope recently to create an animated spot that showcases the outreach of the company,

which crowd-funds resources. Money is then given directly to doctors, who provide medical treatment to women and children unable to afford them in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

Visual Creatures incorporated their playful vision into the :30 spot, which appears as bright and uplift-ing while still conveying the message of need. The commercial uses the example of one person, pedaling their bicycle to light a light bulb. A team of bikers could, in theory, light a city. The animation in The Crowd has a simple, blocky and cut-out style.

Music for the project was created by Virginia-based Black Iris, which used untraditional sounds to delivered the right emotional tone.

Visual Creatures’ credits include creative directors Ryan McNeely and John Cranston. McNeely, Crans-ton, Tony Banik and Shawn Lee served as designers. Animators included Banik, Lee and Frank Shi, with Rachel Yonda handling character animation.

SleepY HolloW ’s VFX

B URBANK — Synaptic VFX (www.synapticvfx.com) recently con-tributed visual effects to the first season of Fox’s Sleepy Hollow.

The series uses VFX to help illustrate the re-telling of the legendary story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman.

Synaptic VFX worked with the show’s overall VFX supervisor Jason Zimmerman, who, in tandem with the show’s VFX producer, Eddie Bonin, breaks down each episode to develop a shot list. Mark Miller serves as Synaptic’s in-house VFX EP for the series. The studios work included set extensions, fluid simulations, head removals for the Headless Horseman, and CG prosthetics. Each episode can contain up to 300 digital VFX shots. The studio relied on PCs and Isolon servers, along with The Foundry’s Nuke and Adobe After Effects for compositing. CG tools included LightWave, 3DS Max, Maya, Fume and Krakatoa.

X-trail

C ULVER CITY, CA — Zoic Studios recently created visual effects for a new Nissan spot

aimed at the Japanese market. X-Trail was con-ceived by TBWA, Japan, and produced by Ban-dito Brothers. The :30 spot features a Nissan SUV towing a snowboarder across a high-alti-tude mountain range. As the vehicle approaches a cliff, it turns sharply, sending the snowboarder off the mountain. The athlete deploys a para-chute, and when he lands below, the Nissan is there to give him a lift.

Zoic handled comprehensive post, including on-set supervision for the five-day shoot in Chile. The studio also provided visual effects, color grading, editorial and finishing for the spot. The shoot involved stacking two high-speed cameras, which allowed Zoic to create slow-motion effects by moving both sets of footage through compositing, morphing and quick crash zooms. Additional effects included clean-up work to transform the resort mountain into a more weathered and raw environment. To heighten the VFX, Zoic artists amplified the reflective sections on both the snowboarder’s suit and the vehicle itself. Autodesk Flame was used extensively. Credits include editor Dmitri Gueer, assistant editors Alison Veneto-Grady and Tawny Hsin, lead Flame artist Robert Mog-gach, and Flame assistant An Dang.

Bits & Pieces

8 Post • March 2014 www.postmagazine.com

Bits & Pieces

ABC’s Mistresses to employ cloud-based workflow

L OS ANGELES — DigitalFilm Tree provided consulting and post services for the first season of ABC’s Mistresses, star-

ring Alyssa Milano, Yunjin Kim, Jes Macallan and Rochelle Aytes. Produced by ABC for the network, the show is a provocative drama about the scandalous lives of a sexy and sassy group of girlfriends, each on her own path to self discovery.

At press time, DigitalFilm Tree was helping the show gear up for production of the second season. Post caught up with CEO Ramy Katrib, who was very excited about the cloud-based workflow the show will be implementing for Season 2.

DigitalFilm Tree has been specializing in creating workflows using desktop technologies and digital files since 1999. Early on, the business collaborated with the producers of the TV series Scrubs, as well as on the features Cold Mountain and Napoleon Dynamite. Today, file-based workflows are the norm, notes Katrib, who sees the cloud as the next step in the evolution of post workflows.

For Season 1 of Mistresses, DigitalFilm Tree built three Avid-based edit stations and three assistant editor stations at ABC. The company also set up a color room with Blackmagic Design’s Da Vinci Resolve, as well as an online room, facilities for titling, and a dailies room. All of the systems were con-nected to a 76TB SAN. The show’s 13 episodes were shot with two Arri Alexas, mostly on a stage, though occasional location shoots also took place. DigitalFilm Tree, says Katrib, would create the DNxHD36 files for editorial.

For Season 2, Mistresses will employ a cloud-based work-flow. “For us, it was an evolutionary process,” he explains. “It’s cool to have mini post house where you want it, and there are benefits for the DPs and for approving color and titles,” he says of Season 1’s workflow. “[But] cloud-based is more

profound. How you connect people is a game changer.”OpenStack — a cloud operating system that controls

large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources — he feels, can greatly enhance workflows. “This season, all files — camera negatives, etc. — will be on one OpenStack cloud storage. A local SAN can never be OpenStack block

storage. It’s a self-healing storage, and is also replicated to use at any other locations.” In addition to redundancy, OpenStack offers remote access to outside vendors, such as VFX facili-ties, as well as to ABC’s own promotions department.

For Season 1, assets were archived to LTFS. This included all camera negatives, online archives, and corrected masters. But the cost of cloud storage has come down, and no longer are studios compelled to free up storage space as they have in the past. “The brilliance is we can scale just like big boy cloud providers,” he notes. “In addition to self healing [fea-tures], cost has come down. These are two factors why stu-dios are not compelled to delete [material] as quickly as possible. Cloud storage does not represent the cost chal-lenges it did just two years ago.” By Marc Loftus

Zoic helps Fox promote new 24C ULVER CITY, CA — Visual effects house Zoic Studios helped boost anticipation for

the return of the Fox series 24. The studio recently worked on the :45 Street Chaos promo for 24: Live Another Day, which aired during Super Bowl XLVIII. The trailer was directed by Three (One) O’s Norry Niven and celebrates the triumphant return of 24 hero, Jack Bauer, who treks through London street wreckage, fearlessly carrying Chloe, to face the danger head-on.

Zoic worked in partnership with Fox to craft the VFX for the trailer, including massive explosions and extensive building and car damage. 24: Live Another Day will debut on May 5, and will consist of a 12-episode season.

Generator Films, Ltd., in London provided production services for the project. Zoic’s Mark Stetson served as on-set VFX supervisor. Simon Scott was the lead Flame artist. Michael Kirylo acted as 3D supervisor and Andrew Bardusk was 2D/compositing supervi-sor. Kirylo and Scott Rosecrans created models for the promo.

Caleb Pennypacker served as tracking lead and Fumi Mashimo handled compositing. Roto/paint artists included Todd Groves, Erik Carlson and Wes Heo.

Hollywood’s Light Iron, which specializes in workflows for con-tent originated with file-based motion picture cameras, has hired Marc Vanocur. A 20-year industry veteran, he will serve in the newly-created position of chief operating officer. The appointment comes after Light Iron experienced a 50 percent growth in personnel in 2013.Vanocur previously held executive roles at Technicolor, Todd-Soun-delux, and Weddington Produc-tions, overseeing business opera-tions and navigating technological change. His top priorities in 2014 will be creating new strategic and financial partnerships for expand-ed service offerings.

“NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and Adobe Creative Cloud work together seamlessly, enabling digital artists like us to work at the speed of thought.”

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4 Post • April 2014 www.postmagazine.com

editor’s note

Television today and NAB 2014

For pros in the post production industry, April marks a time when they head to Las Vegas for the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention — a place where they can check out all of the latest products and even get previews of upcoming technolo-

gies that may affect their studio’s workflow. Manufacturers also place incredible importance on the NAB show, as it’s a platform to debut new products and even more importantly, create a buzz that can reverberate long after the show’s week-long run ends.

As members of the press, we are often tipped off to pending announcements planned for NAB, and this year is no exception. Canon, Panasonic and Sony will all show new cameras at their booths. Sony, in fact, will preview an upgrade path that will allow buyers of its F5 to step up to the F55’s features at a later point in time. This is part of Sony’s plan to future-proof technology and reassures buyers that they are making the right invest-ment. Sony will also preview V.4.0 of its “crown jewel,” the F65 digital cinema camera, which, going forward, will feature live grading capabilities.

This month, Post takes a special look at broadcast content, with two features that focus on television programming. Christine Bunish checks in with studios that are providing visual effects services for shows such as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Under the Dome (pictured) and Dracula (our cover this month), among others (see page 16). In each instance, efficiency is key in making their client’s broadcast deadlines while ensuring the shows look top notch.

Jennifer Walden also looks at television content in her “Audio For TV” feature on page 36. Specifically, she focuses on audio post facilities that are creating supernatural soundtracks for science-fiction programming — including the show Supernatural.

If you are wondering how pros score jobs at facilities like these, check out our “Getting Started” feature on page 28. Here, seven pros detail their career paths, dating back to early inspirations, training and first jobs. So many wanted to share their experiences that we are posting more online, so visit postmagazine.com for more first-hand accounts on breaking into this field.

And Iain Blair talks with Noah director Darren Aronofsky, who was tasked with creating an end-of-the-world, theatrical epic during a real-life hurricane.

There’s lots more too, so enjoy the issue!

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Iconic characters, both fictional and historical, and a tale from suspense

master Stephen King have come alive on the small screen with help from VFX studios. From creating digital

environments, futuristic transports and retro inventions to crafting supernatural beings and otherworldly

events, VFX enhance the stories of superheroes, pirates, retail magnates, time travelers, small-town Ameri-

cans and the world’s most famous vampire.

Black Sails is set in The Bahamas, but shoots in South Africa. Crazy Horse Effects is a lead VFX provider for the series.

vfxfor TV

Studios enhance small-screen

stories and engage audiences with

visual effects.By Christine Bunish

www.postmagazine.com Post • April 2014 17

Agents of s.H.I.e.L.D.ABC’s new Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Marvel’s first venture in

live-action television, features the Avengers storyline and characters coupled with extensive VFX by lead vendor FuseFX (www.fusefx.com). With such iconic characters at the core of the series there are frequent references to their incarnations in the comics and on the big screen — ILM has even shared assets created for the films — so consistency is critical. But FuseFX has been able to create and interpret a num-ber of new elements, which make the world of the agents larger-than-life.

The series is shot in Culver City, CA, where show VFX supervisor Mark Kol-pack is on-set. FuseFX’s artists work from the company’s Burbank office; their numbers have swelled to deliver the large volume of complex shots, which 22 episodes of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. demand. With a highly efficient custom pipeline management system and nearly 60 employees, FuseFX has managed to deliver VFX for the series while continuing VFX work on many other shows and projects, including American Horror Story, Hell on Wheels and Criminal Minds.

“We have staffed up and reallocated resources so we have two independent teams working on different episodes of S.H.I.E.L.D. with creative supervision overlapping,” explains FuseFX CEO/VFX supervisor, David Altenau. The company also upgraded to a 300TB Isilon cluster, which doubled its storage capacity, added render nodes to its render farm, and more workstations and software. The chief software tools are Autodesk 3DS Max, Chaos Group’s V-Ray and The Foundry’s Nuke.

One of the signature elements in the show is The Bus, a modified C17 military transport plane outfitted with S.H.I.E.L.D. technology. It acts as the agents’ mobile HQ and can travel anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice. FuseFX con-tributed significant design input to the plane, building “vertical take off and land-ing into the design from the pilot, although those capabilities weren’t revealed until Episode 8,” says Altenau.

“A very complex rig controls every aspect of the plane: the landing gear, engine transformation, doors opening, lighting — even the wings have flex con-trols for the animators to sell the weight of this massive aircraft. When the engines are in vertical flight mode, they have several degrees of rotation, which give the jet a lot of maneuvering ability.”

For Lola, the classic 1962 Corvette that appears on the show, FuseFX added hover capabilities, turning its wheels to a horizontal position and exposing hid-den jet-engine ducts. Once again, FuseFX led the collaborative design process with Kolpack and production for Lola’s undercarriage and jet engines. Sometimes the real Corvette is shown transitioning to its hover mode with Sitni Sati’s FumeFx adding volumetric dust and exhaust, and Side Effects’ Houdini particle effects. Sometimes FuseFX is required to use a fully-digital model of the car, which matches the real vehicle precisely.

On the human side, FuseFX provides robotic leg replacement for Mike Peter-son, or Deathlok, and digital doubles for augmenting stunts and performing fully-digital stunts. In a dramatic one-off stunt sequence, two of the main characters jumped out of the back of The Bus with only a single parachute; the sequence included 30 shots and was a combination of a fully-digital environment, digital doubles for wide shots and actors shot on greenscreen with a gimbal rig.

In another one-off shot, the team battles one of the key villains, Ian Quinn, who creates a massive machine that harnesses the exotic substance, gravitonium. The episode culminates with Dr. Franklin Hall falling into and getting consumed by the gravitonium — giving FuseFX the opportunity to help visualize the gen-

esis of one of Marvel’s classic characters, Graviton.One of the keys to doing VFX for TV successfully is “client-VFX chemistry”

and constant close communications, Altenau says. “You need to head toward the target as quickly as possible creatively. On features you have the luxury of taking a detour to try something new, but on TV you don’t. Everyone has to be on the same page in terms of creative direction so you can get to the end game on as direct a path as possible. Marvel has been really great at collaboration and work-ing constructively with us to achieve that. We’re very excited to be working on the show. We couldn’t imagine a better series to be involved with.”

DrAcuLADracula’s back and he’s never looked so good. In the guise of American entre-

preneur Alexander Grayson, the iconic vampire, elegantly played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, is alive (or undead) and well in Victorian London, surrounded by lush locations and beautiful costumes. Little wonder that the woman who appears to be a reincarnation of his long-dead wife falls under his spell.

He can’t escape his blood-soaked past (and present), but NBC’s Dracula draws the line at excessive gore. In fact, its London-based producers, Carnival Films, are the folks behind Downton Abbey. “They bring a Downton aesthetic to the show,” notes the show’s VFX supervisor Kent Johnson, who serves as VFX supervisor/producer at LA’s Stargate Studios (www.stargatestudios.net). “The violence in Dracula is very subtle; they didn’t want it to be in your face.”

The challenges for this new interpretation of Dracula concerned inventing his world, says Johnson. “We had to answer a lot of big questions and determine the visual aesthetic.”

He spent six-and-a-half months in pre-pro and production in Budapest, which doubles for Victorian London. He met early on with the producers to discuss some very “high-concept ideas,” including how to visualize the mystic visions of vampire seers and Dracula’s own point of view, which manifests itself when the blood-starved vampire sees people’s pulsing hearts and veins as he walks down the street.

But first Stargate had to transform the 400-year old corpse of Dracula into the young and vital Alexander Grayson. “That effect took a great deal of devel-opment,” Johnson recalls. “There was a puppet Dracula corpse at the start and Jonathan in make up at the end; using hundreds of photos of the puppet and Jonathan, we constructed a 3D model to transition between the two.”

VFX were key in Dracula’s fight to the death with a vampire huntsman on a London rooftop. Stargate created a cityscape from 3D models and matte paint-ings, which acted as the backdrop for stunt performers and actors rigged on flying harnesses. A CG arrow pierced Dracula’s leg and CG swords were extended from practical hilts to ensure safe combat.

“They went to great lengths for an accurate recreation of Victorian-era Lon-don,” says Johnson. “The producer had done the two Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes films, so he knew where to go to shoot the architecture of the period. We did a big VFX location shoot in London — I took about 15,000 stills from

FuseFX creates many of the VFX featured in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.


rooftops and church steeples. A cherry picker took me up in the middle of a bridge over the Thames to get the perfect shot of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. And I was 45 feet in the air at dawn over Trafalgar Square.” Johnson’s vast library of stills was used to create photographic matte paintings that were projected onto 3D geometry.

Grayson’s resonator, which generates wireless electricity, went through a lot of creative R&D. “We started with steampunk-esque Tesla coils, but Carnival’s aesthetic kept wanting it to be more subtle so as not to distract from the dialogue and action,” says Johnson. “This wasn’t Frankenstein’s lab.”

Grayson’s demonstration of the technol-ogy elicited “countless discussions” among the creatives. Hundreds of spectators were shown holding clear light bulbs in their hands, illuminated by the wireless power of the resonator. “Because the producers wanted to see the filaments in the bulbs, it was important that they be regular incandescent bulbs,” Johnson explains. “So they ran electri-cal lines to every bulb and did the effect in camera. Although it took us a great deal of time and labor to paint out the electrical lines to 300 extras holding bulbs in a ball-room, it was still less expensive than hiding wires in clothing and sets. And the lights are so close to people’s faces that they’re part of the lighting for the scene and create a warm glow captured by the camera.”

Stargate was also responsible for some organic VFX. When Dracula is infused with Van Helsing’s serum to allow him to stay out in the sunlight, his CG veins appear engorged as the serum flows through his body. But the treatment doesn’t work exactly as hoped and Dracula’s skin begins to redden and burn

after more than a few minutes of exposure to the sun.

“The make up department started the process on Jonathan, and we stepped in when his skin blackens, chars and smokes,” says Johnson. “We had hundreds of photos of Jonathan to work with. We used [Autodesk] Maya and [NewTek] LightWave [3D] to get the look in 3D, and integrated it with his moving body with [Imagineer Sys-tems’] Mocha and [Adobe] After Effects. Later, when Dracula feeds and heals, we filmed Jonathan with make up and without, and transitioned between the two to create a sense of the skin growing back as he heals.”

Johnson admits it was “a bit of a challenge to be in Budapest and supervise artists in LA,” but lots of video conferencing with Stargate VFX producer Tyler Foell and remote access to the artists’ work-in-progress helped to close the geographical gap.

In the end, Dracula is not really a VFX show, Johnson says. “It’s more love story than supernatural thriller.”

Mr. seLfrIDgeLondon-based DNeg TV, the tele-

vision division of Double Negative Visual Effects (www.dneg.com), com-pleted VFX for Season 2 of Mr. Self-ridge, a co-production of ITV Studios and Masterpiece, which is currently being broadcast in the US on Sunday nights on PBS’s Masterpiece.

The second season of the popular show, about the retail empire of the American-born founder of London’s Selfridge’s depart-ment store, takes place in 1914. DNeg TV was charged with recreating the exterior of the store and updating the look of Oxford

Street, which had changed dramatically since Season 1, set five years earlier.

“The exterior is like another character in the show,” says Hayden Jones, VFX supervi-sor and one of the founders of DNeg TV with Jonathan Privett and Louise Hussey. “It’s such an iconic building that we knew it had to look correct; viewers would know instant-ly if it wasn’t right.”

Exterior shots typically show “the tapestry of life” on Oxford Street, with “people walk-ing down the street, chatting as they go into the store, workers preparing for a royal visit by rolling out the red carpet. All sorts of action takes place outside.”

A small section of the exterior was built as a set on Chatham Docks, says Jones. “It’s one-story high and covers three windows and one set of double doors. We built the other four floors and the other half of the building. Everything beyond the greenscreens on set is all digital — cars, horse-drawn buses, carriages, people, street lamps, build-ings,” Jones says. “It’s an amazing challenge.”

In the interest of “matching CG down to the millimeter” of the exterior set, DNeg TV did a LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) scan of the set to facilitate an accurate digital recreation. “It allowed us to make sure the set extension model fits perfectly to the set,” Jones explains. “It can’t be a millimeter off.”

The exterior of Selfridge’s features “so many vertical uprights that it’s very unforgiv-ing to do match moves,” he notes. “One of the joys of working here is our fantastic R&D department, so a lot of our tracking tools are bespoke. They produce excellent results on shots that normally would be extremely dif-ficult to track.”

DNeg TV had to recreate different day parts for Oxford Street, too. “Now [World War I] is upon us and they’ve dimmed down

lights for blackouts.” In one shot, “the DP left all the lenses wide open for a short depth of field, giving a nice textural feel to the out of focus areas of the image,” says Jones. “We had to match that, even to the model and the optical quality of the lenses. It’s a subtle

Stargate’s Kent Johnson: The LA studio’s work ranges

for the series Dracula.

Much of DNeg TV’s work on Mr. Selfridge involves the street where the store is located.

VFX for TV


effect, achieved primarily by using Nuke, but it adds so much.”

Maya is the main animation tool for the show, with rendering done in Pixar’s RenderMan.

Once the producers of Mr. Selfridge saw how quickly DNeg TV could turn around shots, Jones found the company advising on new shots for episodes, one of which also ended up in the title sequence. “We went up five stories on the building opposite with the camera then tilted down for a super-high wide shot where Selfridge’s looks almost like the prow of a ship,” Jones says. “We weren’t sure it could be done within the budget, but we were confident in our tracking tools and delivered the shot on-time and on-budget. It looked so great that they decided to put it in the title sequence, too.”

Although barely 10 months old, DNeg TV has a host of other credits: all three seasons and the forthcoming season four of the mystery series Death in Paradise for the BBC; a new Sunday-night family drama series for BBC One; a new drama series for Sony/Starz; and a pilot for NBC/Universal. And DNeg TV will be back adding more details and texture to c. 1919 Oxford Street for Season 3 of Mr. Selfridge.

unDer tHe DoMeThe CBS summer 2013 hit, Under The

Dome, gave viewers a look at the personal and political dynamics of a small American town that’s suddenly covered by an imper-meable, transparent dome, which isolates them from contact and communication with the outside world. Based on the novel by Stephen King (who is an executive producer, along with Steven Spielberg), the series returns this summer — possibly with some explanations of the dome’s secrets, and defi-

nitely with more mysteries.Since the dome plays such a big

role in the show, developing its look was a crucial part of the VFX work. “When Episode 5 was filming, I was still creating looks for the dome on my laptop and showing them to the executives,” says Stephan Fleet, executive creative director at

Encore (www.encorepost.com) and VFX supervisor for Under The Dome. “We couldn’t see it in every shot or the whole show would be a VFX shot. But when we got close to it we had to know what it looked like, what it felt like when people touched it.”

Some properties of the dome were pre-established. “We always knew it would slice through things,” Fleet says. “It had to be hard, not wobbly. It was semi-magical but had to be believable — it couldn’t look like ice or be too supernatural. And it couldn’t be reflective because that would pose huge production issues” for an episodic show. Fleet put up pieces of plastic for the actors to interact with on set but avoided any complicated props that would require a lot of time in post to remove. “For TV, you aim for as little foot-print as possible on the set,” he notes.

That the dome could slice through things was evident from the start, when one of its edges came down on a farm, cleaving a cow in two. The first proposal called for a stuffed cow prop, sweetened with VFX blood and gore. When that didn’t work as well as desired, it was ultimately recreated in CG. “And the half-cow became the icon of the show: It’s on T-shirts and posters,” Fleet exclaims.

A truck and plane crash from outside into the dome were also CG. The truck crash was initially planned as a practical effect. “It almost worked, but when we blended in CG enhancements, it read too fake, so we went with 100 percent CG,” he says.

Monarch butterflies were a recurring motif. A flock of them first appeared inside the dome wall, fanned out in all their glory. Later in the episode, a nuclear missile failed to breach the dome (the complete destruc-tion on the other side was full CG environ-ment replacement by Encore). Then, a single monarch reappeared and landed on the

dome. The butterfly also played a key role in the season finale.

“We didn’t know that the monarchs would be a huge theme in the show” at the outset, says Fleet. “We built about 14 quality butterflies for that opening sequence on the dome wall and a detailed butterfly for the very end of the show. An individual butterfly model is fairly easy to execute, but we needed to use particle simulations to multi-ply them. It took a lot of math and horse-power to make them realistic.”

Encore also created VFX for the mini dome, which formed around a mysterious egg found in the woods. The mini dome turned white before it exploded and dis-solved to dirt — all VFX shots. Encore enhanced the egg itself, which typically appeared as a prop, creating “pink stuff ” that crawled up its surface and a caterpillar that transformed into the hero monarch butterfly, which appears to select a leader from the town’s supernaturally gifted young residents.

Fleet, and Encore’s other VFX supervisor, Adam Avitabile, opted for practical solutions whenever possible. “I’m a big fan of practical effects,” says Fleet. “We use a process of elimination to determine what will be VFX shots. I’m not a fan of up-selling people.”

For the long-awaited pink falling stars — referenced in the first episode and finally visualized at the end of Season 1 — Encore had few specifics to guide them. The team initially created pink stars that “looked more like fireworks,” Fleet says. Then he and his art-ists suggested having them shoot up the sides of the dome in otherworldly straight lines — a hauntingly-cool image that everyone loved.

The stars were a mix of particles compos-ited with treetops and other natural ele-ments captured by Fleet with his Canon 5D camera and used as plates. Autodesk 3DS Max was the show’s main 3D software, with Nuke the primary compositing tool and Andersson Technologies’ SynthEyes the tracking software. Encore handled post for the series as well.

Fleet notes that creating VFX for TV “gets harder every season because the stakes are raised with every show.” He approaches a series with a sense of restraint, however. “We have an

Synaptic’s Shant Jordan, Ken Gust and Shahen

Jordan all contribute to the VFX featured in

Sleepy Hollow.

VFX for TV

Crazy Horse Effects’ Christina and Paul Graff: The studio will be back for the second season of Black Sails.

honest dialogue about what I think is feasible and what isn’t. I want shows to look good with quality VFX — I’ve seen too many with too much stuff going on, and the VFX suffer.”

sLeepy HoLLowRevolutionary War soldier Ichabod Crane

has awakened in present-day Sleepy Hollow, but he’s still pursued by The Headless Horse-man in Fox’s new hit series that mingles eras, history and mystical practices. Synaptic VFX, which has offices in Burbank and New Orleans (www.synapticvfx.com), provided a wide range of VFX for Season 1, including the villainous Headless Horseman, digital envi-ronments and a demonic possession.

“For a number of VFX, my brother Sha-hen did the concept art,” says Shant Jordan, a 3D artist and compositor who founded Synaptic VFX with Shahen Jordan and Ken Gust. “Synaptic provided a complete solution for the show, from concept to execution.”

Jordan notes that the company’s roots “are in TV and film. In TV we expect to do feature-level VFX for smaller budgets and faster turnarounds. But we can do 300 shots in seven days instead of four months because we have an established pipeline that can be tailored to a show’s needs. The most impor-tant part of the process, though, is communi-cation. Without that, even the most refined pipeline falls apart.”

Synaptic already had close ties to long-time friend and show VFX supervisor Jason Zimmerman, who worked on-set in North Carolina for the duration of Season 1. “We could ask him questions at any point in the day” as live-action plates were funneled to Synaptic, says Jordan. “It’s what defined the success of the show.”

The Headless Horseman, a key recurring player in Sleepy Hollow, was performed by several stuntmen wearing green masks. For his sequences, Synaptic removed his head, replaced it with a bloody stump and painted in the background. In one scene, for which Shahen did the concept art, The Headless Horseman gallops through the woods as the environment catches fire around him, embers flying in the air.

“The challenge for this character is that he’s always moving,” notes Shant Jordan. “He’s rid-ing, swinging an axe or other weapons — there’s a lot of animation. We have tracking markers on his head and around his collar; we put in a CG collar to anchor the neckpiece.”

Episode 4 flashed back to the Boston Tea Party, with a Synaptic digital matte painting depicting the harbor and ships. “We used pro-jected matte painting techniques along with 3D geometry to achieve the desired look, just like we do with films,” says Jordan. Reference

material helped create authentic geography.For the horrifying demonic possession of a

teenage girl, Synaptic replaced her arms with CG limbs and altered her already distorted face. “When the make-up wasn’t scary enough, we built a model of her face, warped it and replaced it,” Jordan explains. Earlier, the com-pany augmented the make-up for Serilda the witch, adding fire and glow under her skin.

Synaptic’s toolset includes LightWave 3D, 3DS Max and Maya, with Nuke and After Effects for compositing and Science D-Visions’ 3DEqualizer for match moving.

As Sleepy Hollow heads into its second sea-son, Jordan tells fans to “look for more” VFX as the plot lines of the cliffhanger season finale are explored. By operating with a different paradigm, with “teams of multifaceted artists who understand a sense of urgency,” Synaptic will prepare for Season 2 as it crafts VFX for a “very demanding” Fox pilot, Hieroglyph.

BLAck sAILsThe new eight-episode Starz series, Black

Sails, tells the tale of early 18th-century pirates in what’s now Nassau, The Bahamas, and their quest for gold from the legendary Urca de Lima. Crazy Horse Effects, Inc., in Venice, CA (www.chevfx.com), was one of the lead VFX vendors for Season 1, creating the environ-ments for Nassau and nearby islands.

“Production had a clear idea of what they wanted: the shape of the bay and Hog Island (now known as Paradise Island) that protects the bay, the beach with shacks below the fort, the rocky area with shipwrecks,” says Crazy Horse VFX supervisor and creative director Paul Graff. “This wasn’t Pirates of the Caribbean. Starz wanted it to be realistic. Previs from the VFX department and a few sketches from the art department helped direct the look of our work, but our creative team also ran ideas by them. It was a very collaborative process.”

The panoramic view of Nassau and the bay was a big Photoshop matte painting with CG models, created in Maxon Cinema4D, embedded with After Effects. When Graff thought the shot needed real water plates, he flew to The Bahamas to direct a live-action shoot and compile a library of water plates, palm trees and other native vegeta-tion to populate the 3D environments. The series is shot in Capetown, South Africa, where show VFX supervisor Erik Henry was busy on-set. Paul Graff and Crazy Horse VFX executive producer Christina Graff had pre-viously worked with Henry on the award-winning John Adams series.

“We got as much for the library as we could — shots of beaches, surf from all angles, water from the perspective of a tall

ship and low from a skiff,” he explains. “We still created some CG water with 3DS Max, but CG water tends to look a bit repetitive while real water is infinitely random.”

Graff notes that with freeways in close proximity to the Capetown location, it was hard to get the camera any distance from the set. “So whenever there was a shot in the bay looking back at Nassau, we had to patch together images from the set with plates of our own.” Crazy Horse did a roof replace-ment on a real Capetown farmhouse to change its architecture. The company also built out the big fort from “a bit of raised set with a turret and a few crenellations,” says Christina Graff. The fort was seen in a num-ber of shots: big reveals of the island terrain, crane moves and approached from behind by a character walking up a hillside. A spec-tacular high-angle view from the fort over the bay showed CG ships, beaches and Hog Island. Paul’s real water plates were com-bined with water-tank plates that were roto-scoped and painted below the surface to give the look of greater transparency.

Paul Graff observes that many VFX shots were “creative journeys” for the Crazy Horse team and the production. A night shot of Nassau by torchlight evolved to versions overlooking the bay and a view of a gloomy area on the edge of town. “Then the matte painter said, ‘Let’s lose the background of the town and the island, and focus on the silhou-ette of ships, like in a graveyard,’” he recalls. “The shot went from defining territory to being a vehicle to tell the story.”

All of the VFX for Black Sails went through Crazy Horse’s LA office, which was also working on the features White House Down and Vice. The New York office was busy with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and the feature The Wolf of Wall Street.

“There’s no difference in our workflow for a movie or a TV series,” says Paul Graff. “There’s only one way to work: as good as we can. This is never factory work. Every shot offers new possibilities and a new learn-ing experience.”


Werewolf sounds are just some of the sound effects Levels Audio creates for MTV’s Teen Wolf.


Admit it. If you used The Six Million Dollar Man sound on-air these days, audiences would say it’s cheesy. (Yes, I know it’s iconic.) So what do supernatu-ral/sci-fi series sound like today? A lot more subtle and believable. That’s almost an oxymoron: believably fantastical.

To explain, sound designers aren’t beating audiences over the head with super synthy otherworldly sounds. The trend is toward organic, natural sounds with a sci-fi twist. Start with something real, and mutate it beyond what’s natu-ral. Come to think of it, isn’t that what supernaturalness is all about? These four supernatural/sci-fi series sound out of this world, yet still of this world.

Teen Wolf Bryan Parker, at Levels Audio (www.levelsaudio.com) in Hollywood, is the

supervising sound editor on Teen Wolf. Levels Audio offers everything from sound supervision and custom sound design, Foley, ADR and dialog editorial, to the final 5.1 mix. They also provide multitrack music mixing. The facility has seven dub stages equipped with Avid ICONs for 5.1 mixing, three sound edi-torial suites, an ADR/Foley stage, two kitchens, and even a loft guest apartment. Levels Audio has received primetime Emmy nominations for their work on TV series like American Idol, The Amazing Race and Whale Wars.

Teen Wolf Season 3 is currently airing on MTV, with new episodes every Monday at 10pm EST. Teen Wolf, created by Jeff Davis, is a supernatural TV drama following the life of Scott McCall, a teenager who transforms into a werewolf after being bitten by one. Even though the show involves many supernatural elements, the focus is on the teenagers’ lives, and how they deal with the supernatural events happening to them. Parker notes that by remain-ing anchored to the human space, the sound team has room to create huge supernatural sounds when they need to.

“Sometimes we want to remain very practical and believable, and some-times, especially for this season, we want to get extremely wet and gross, and reach for that cringey gore factor,” explains Parker.

Parker and his team keep the supernatural sounds fresh by designing as much as they can ahead of the season’s tight schedule. They build a custom library of sounds to draw from for the entire season.

“Dealing with fantasy creatures, I don’t ever want us to be in a position where we’re reaching for ‘Werewolf Growl 2’ from a sound library,” says Parker. Based on the scripts, they were able to design specific creature sounds, like growls, roars and screams for the werewolves, and specifically for Season 3B, the appearance sounds and attack screams for the Oni — demonic Japa-nese warriors that materialized from supernatural firefly-type insects. To cre-ate the Oni appearing sound, Parker used the transient shaper in DMG Audio’s Compassion software to enhance the transients of dragonfly and grasshopper sounds. “I’ve made seven or eight different iterations of that raw ‘tut-tut-tut-tut-tut’ sound,” he explains. “The transient shaper inside Compas-sion has been extremely useful all season long, especially on these fluttering sounds for the Oni.”

To create the Oni sword swishes, Parker played cricket and locust sounds into a talkbox. A talkbox directs sound from an instrument (or other sound source) into the performer’s mouth via a plastic tube. The performer modifies the source sound by changing the shape of his/her mouth. A separate mic is used to record the sound coming out of the performer’s mouth. It’s what recording artist Peter Frampton used to make his guitar talk. Instead of putting the tube in his mouth, Parker explains, “I swung the tube past a set of stereo microphones. That’s how I made the Oni sword swishes. I created them from the sound of bugs using the talkbox.”

Parker also routed several of the longer werewolf growls through the talk-box. Over the past three seasons, Parker finds he’s being asked for longer wolf growls. The longest growl this season was :16, which Parker points out, is way too long for any actor or creature on Earth to physically perform. To create the super-long growls, Parker used the iZotope RX3 Spectral Repair function to extend the sound files. In Pro Tools 10, Parker cut the growl files into chunks and spaced them out. Then he used Spectral Repair to interpolate the data between the gaps he made. Parker also used a software program called SPEAR, created by Michael Klingbeil. It’s an audio analysis, editing and synthesis program that allows users to manipulate individual frequencies in a sound. “It’s a standalone application that I found to be super useful,” he says.

As you’d imagine, Teen Wolf requires a large variety of werewolf sounds.

Sound pros create out-of-this-world tracks that are grounded in reality.

By Jennifer Walden

Supernatural Audio for TV:


Parker admits to performing some of them himself, especially when there is a very pre-cise envelope or emotion he wants to cap-ture. He also has the on-camera actors per-form vocalizations for their own characters. In the beginning of Season 3A, the cast of werewolves dramatically increased. Parker and his audio team knew early on that the voices of the werewolves needed to be dis-tinct so that, during a large fight scene, the vocalizations wouldn’t turn into a mush of sound. Each actor performed vocalizations for delivering punches, pain, screams, wails, and other reactions.

“Then based on each character’s voice, I paired them up with various animal sounds that contributed something to the character-istics of the actor’s voice,” notes Parker. There is a tendency to go as big as possible with every werewolf, but keeping the synergy between picture and sound is the main goal. You should believe the sound is really coming out of the character on screen. Parker tried different audio tools, like vocoders and other software, to streamline the process of com-bining the actor’s vocalizations and the ani-mal sounds into one. The most effective way, he finds, is to manually fine-tune pitch, and most importantly, to get the timing right. How the sound starts, and how it ends, are the most important things when syncing it to picture, says Parker. “The animal sounds and the actor’s vocalizations have to line up in such a way so it all seems like one sound.”

One of Parker’s favorite scenes to sound design was Season 3: Episode 12 “Lunar Ellipse.” The scene involves character Jennifer

Blake, a dark druid who has been committing murders to regain power. She levitates bro-ken glass from the ground and the pieces twinkle and spin before they all come together. Then they are hurled at alpha were-wolf Kali.

To build the sound for the scene, Parker started with the gritty sound of the glass against the ground, then added singing wine-glasses as the pieces rise and spin in the air. The shards of glass resonate in different frequencies. Parker pitch shifted the wine glasses so they were all in tune with each other. Then he reversed the sound files and drew pitch envelopes in the Waves Sound-Shifter plug-in. He drew a different pitch envelope for each of the eight layers of sound, so that they were all going away from the same pitch. Parker processed the files, then reversed them again, so that the sounds all start at different pitches but end up at the same pitch. There was also a twin-kling glass layer playing underneath the wine glasses. “It conveys a sort of dissonance and chaos that comes together into one pitch before the glass shards shoot forward in the attack,” he explains.

When scheduling permits, Parker prefers to cut the dialog himself, so he knows each episode down to the shot, making it easier to communicate with the director and the pic-ture editor.

“The story is in the dialogue,” he says. “Everything you do has to be a function of the story. It’s important to be really familiar with the dialogue.” As he’s doing the dia-logue, the Foley team and sound effects edi-

tor are using Parker’s notes from the spotting session to do their work. They have two days per episode. Once sound editorial and Foley are complete, they send everything back to Parker, who checks that the sounds line up with the spotting notes, and that they achieve the sound goals for the show.

“I’m the point person between the pro-duction side and the sound editorial side,” says Parker. “I design sounds and send them off to picture editorial. The files I create have a distinct filename, so when they come back in the OMF from the edit, my sound effects editor, John Warren, recognizes them as sounds I created.”

Since Parker’s sounds go through picture editorial and are already approved, Warren simply builds around them. He pulls his effects from the custom library they created for Teen Wolf prior to the start of the season. Working this way allows Parker and his audio team to deliver consistently-creative sounds even with a tight schedule.

“When we’re in our turnaround, which gets shorter as the season goes on, we don’t have to feel rushed and reach for something that isn’t custom to the show. The hero moments that feature the creatures or vil-lains all have custom sounds that reflect the theme of each season.”

HelixDavid Gertsman, at Premium Sound in

Montreal (http://www.premiumsound.ca), is the supervising sound editor for Helix. According to Gertsman, Premium Sound is a niche audio post facility, since they mainly provide services for English original content in a French city. Premium Sound has nine sound editing suites, two mix rooms, two ADR/Foley stages, and two multi-functioning rooms that can be used for recording and mixing. All the mixing and editing suites are setup with 5.1 surround systems and equipped with Pro Tools 10. They provide audio post services for the film and televi-sion industries.

Helix recently completed its first season on the Syfy network. The season finale aired at the end of March. Helix follows the story of researchers at an Arctic bioresearch sta-tion. A viral outbreak leads to most of the researchers being quarantined. Some of the infected researchers transform into vectors — violent zombie-like hosts capable of spreading the infection to others.

A month before Gertsman saw the first episode, he began work on the sound for the vectors. Though the show is about an infec-tion, the show’s creators didn’t want to have typical drooling zombies. They had two

Levels Audio’s Bryan Parker and the studio’s

ADR/Foley stage.

Supernatural Sound


Supernatural Sound

parameters for the sound. First, they wanted to hear the sound of the infection inside the host. They also wanted the vector vocaliza-tions to be within the human vocal range.

Gertsman spent most of his time creating the sound of the infection, which was described to him as being like the sound of 1,000 hummingbirds. “We tried recording the actors humming on-set, and doing some modulation on that. We tried many different things that would sound like the humming-birds idea, but the problem with vibration is, once it starts going, it sounds like a mechani-cal tone. It doesn’t matter if it’s humming, or cats purring, or whatever, once it starts repeating, it feels very mechanical,” says Gertsman.

The final sound is a combination of the actors humming on-set, large wild cats purr-ing, and wet sounds, because in early epi-sodes the throats of the infected shake. “The creators kept saying, ‘It needs to feel more organic.’ So we spent a lot of time dabbling with what could make this sound,” he confesses.

One of the directors recommended the sound of a Howler monkey for the vector vocalizations. Gertsman describes it as being an extremely loud, constant, breathy sound. The Howler monkey, he explains, has a very wide, loose throat, with a little bone in it to amplify the sound. The Howler monkey’s vocal range is in the low-end of the human range, so it’s right in-line with the direction for the vector sound.

“The source recordings for that particular monkey are very limited,” says Gertsman.

“We tried a couple recordings, but they all had background ambience, like crickets, cica-das, and birds over top of the sound.”

Instead of making a trek to Central America to record a Howler monkey in the wild, Premium Sound hired vocal artist Sebastien Croteau to perform a variety of Howler monkey sounds. “When we called Sebastien and told him we wanted to do the Howler monkey, he said that’s been his inspi-ration for many years. He knew all the differ-ent vocalizations this monkey can make.”

Croteau has done vocal work for Assas-sin’s Creed 2 and The Colony. He also per-forms in the metal band, Necrotic Mutation. “Sebastien did hours of screaming, and yell-ing, and breathing, and other little vocaliza-tions. When we needed larger groups, he had some bandmates come in, with different vocal ranges, and we were able to record a bunch of different Howler monkey sounds.”

The environmental sounds on Helix play a prominent role. On many TV shows, the dialogue is foremost in the mix, followed by the music, effects, and then the ambient sounds. In contrast, the backgrounds on Helix are mixed at the same level as music, to cre-ate the feeling of an oppressive, claustropho-bic space.

“Sometimes you’re not sure if you’re hear-ing music or ambience because we did them very tonally,” notes Gertsman. “There are a lot of hums, buzzes, and hisses. For example, in Dr. Hiroshi Hatake’s office, we always hear wind against the side of the building. We always hear ice creaks and metal settling, as if the base is always in constant motion.”

The facility is supposed to have 140 scien-tists, but once they’re quarantined early on in the series, there’s not much happening in the backgrounds. By playing up the ambiences, Gertsman makes the environment feel very close and confined. As for sound choices, the upper floors of the facility, where the labs are, have lighter, more high-tech sounds. The lower in the facility you go, the more groany the sounds become.

“That’s where all the machinery is, so there are more hums. If you watch the show with a sub woofer, you hear a lot of activity happening in the low-end frequencies as we go lower into the bowels of the facility. It was all about making the environment feel very claustrophobic,” says Gertsman.

The constant note from production, Gertsman says, was “louder.” They wanted the show to be loud all the time. The Premi-um Sound audio team used the Waves WLM loudness meter to keep the levels within broadcast spec. One challenge in particular, Gertsman notes, was the Arctic exterior. When the shots were outside the facility, the background ambience was a raging storm.

“The storm was so loud it was like listen-ing to white noise,” says Gertsman. “You could practically calibrate your room with it. The problem with that is, when you’re trying to hit your broadcast number of -24 LKFS for the whole program, after having a one-min-ute sequence outside in the wind, our num-ber would go to -21 LKFS. So that one min-ute negatively affected our number for a program that is 45 minutes long.”

They used subtractive mixing as a means to bring things back into check while still try-ing to keep the sound feeling energetic, loud, and powerful. “The WLM loudness meter was by far the most vital piece of gear on the show. Every episode, it was the same battle over loudness,” he says.

Warner Bros.’s (L-R) Lawshé and Meyer have worked on Supernatural

since its pilot.

The Premium Sound team that works on Syfy’s Helix.

The CW’s Supernatural has an organic soundtrack that stems from reality and is then augmented.

Gertsman, who also worked on the Syfy series Being Human, feels that Helix had one of the tightest schedules he’s ever experi-enced. As the season progressed, Gertsman says, the visual effects were coming in later and they only had four or five days before each episode aired.

“We’d print and visual effects would still come in even after we were supposed to have delivered,” says Gertsman. Since all the mix rooms and edit suites at Premium Sound are using Pro Tools 10, Gertsman says making changes are easy.

“If I have to run back-and-forth between the dub stage and my editing suite, it’s really easy,” he notes. “We can send fixes over our network and the mixers slug them in on the dub stage. It’s become a very streamlined process.”

There was no physical media on this show. According to Gertsman, the picture came from LA, and a few other editors in Montreal, via the Internet. There were also sounds coming from Toronto.

“Everything was coming in virtually,” he

recalls. “Honestly, a couple years ago, we couldn’t have done a show like this. We’d need everyone in-house. It just would not have worked.”

SupernaTuralMichael Lawshé, at Warner Bros.

Studios in Burbank, CA (http://www.warnerbros.com), is the supervising sound editor for Super-natural. He’s been with the show since the pilot, which was nine years and 19 episodes ago. For over 20 years, Lawshé has worked with Supernatural’s executive producer Robert Singer, co-execu-tive producer Philip Sgriccia, and producer Todd Aronauer.

“We all have a really tight shorthand,” says Lawshé. “We’ll lob questions at each other on things that are coming up on an episode, or that happened on a past episode. We have an idea of what we can pull back from the library.” Being able to communicate so effectively adds a continuity and consistency to the show’s sound.

Supernatural follows brothers Dean and Sam Winchester as they hunt demons, ghosts, monsters and other supernatural beings. The show has been renewed for Sea-son 10. New episodes air on The CW, Tues-days at 9pm EST. Despite the show’s super-natural story-points, the direction for sound, from the very beginning, was to be organic and realistic to start with, and then augment the sound from there. Lawshé has worked with sound effects editor Marc Meyer since the show’s pilot. With almost 200 episodes

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under their belts, there are certain sounds they don’t need to discuss; they just know what to do.

For example, since the pilot, they’ve used loop group and actors’ voices to add human vocals to the sound design. “It gives you a really eerie and unusual sound and a sense of movement you don’t get any other way,” Lawshé explains. “We have a really talented group of voice actors who do effects for us.”

Lawshé will even perform sounds himself. When they wanted slowed-down breathing

of a dog that shape shifts into a person, Lawshé recorded his breathing for that for an entire epi-sode. “I know dogs really well, so I could basically put the sound in the cen-ter of my chest and give a big throaty kind of pant to the dog,” he admits.

Lawshé and Meyer keep a library of all the custom sounds they’ve created for Supernatural. They can quickly find and reuse signature sounds. “When we have a vam-pire, it has a certain type of hiss that’s more ani-malistic, sort of like a cat. When we have a were-wolf, I’ve actually used the sound of my dog for some of the growls, as well as for the invisible hell hounds on the show,” says Lawshé. Another recurring sound is a bizarre, throaty growl that happens every time there is a high level

demon. “It sounds almost electronic, but it’s actually made from a parrot, which is pretty weird,” notes Lawshé.

One audio tool Lawshé couldn’t live without on this show is a portable recorder. He’s constantly collecting sounds from the world around him. The werewolf growls are a good example. Using a portable recorder, Lawshé was able to put a mic inches away from his dog’s throat as she was pulling on a chew toy. The recorded sound was huge, Lawshé says.

“One time we took baseball bats to a pumpkin after Halloween, because you never know when you just might need the sound of good cracks and a big smack. That wound up being a sweetener on top of this monster that was breaking its way through a wall in an episode of Supernatural.”

Lawshé uses several different portable recorders, but his favorites include the Roland Edirol R-1 and the new R-09HR. Lawshé even travels with them, recently taking the R-09HR to Australia. He particularly likes the gate and compressor on the recorders. “I can set the gate and compressor, put the record-er inside a trash can, and hit that with a ham-mer and the sound would not distort. It just folds over like analog tape would,” he notes.

Lawshé and Meyer often talk about sounds as their elemental form of fire, water, earth or air. “We get into these philosophical discussions when we’re spotting the show. Like, this is a fire but it’s for a demon, but does the demon actually burn? Well, it burns but it’s not consumed,” says Lawshé. They use wind elements for when creatures appear and disappear. They’ll use a big gust of wind when someone is thrown across the room. For the breath of the hell hounds, they dou-ble the sound of wind with a horse or a rhinoceros breathing. At times, Lawshé and Meyer will choose physical sounds, like clicks or impacts, to highlight a supernatural event. For example, when a demon’s eyes turn black, you hear a mechanical click-clack sound. “You hear that every time their eyes flash between black and normal. It gives you a sense that something is not quite right. If you heard that when you are looking at somebody, you’d freak out,” says Lawshé.

To give realistic sounds a sci-fi twist, Law-shé uses plug-ins like Serato’s Pitch ‘n Time, and the INA-GRM plug-in bundle from GRM Tools. Meyer also uses Native Instruments’

Kontakt as a sequencer to layer sounds on top of each other. After he tweaks the sounds in Kontakt, Meyer records them back into Pro Tools. Lawshé notes that creating sounds using Kontakt keeps them from being stuck multichannels deep in Pro Tools. “It also allows us to have the flexibility of delivering, in some cases, effects with the 5.1 already set. We can plug in the 5.1 part of the sequence, and have several discrete channels for the mixers to dial around the room as they see fit, to work around the music and dialogue,” says Lawshé.

Designing for a supernatural series isn’t always about what sounds you put in. Some-times, it’s about what sounds to take out. When dealing with ghosts, should there be footsteps? For certain “dead” characters, like Bobby Singer, who Lawshé describes as a very earthy guy who wears a trucker cap and weighs about 250lbs, it’s ok to hear him walk.

“It’s not cool if it’s a spirit moving across the room, because that’s more ethereal,” Lawshé notes. Episode 14 this season fea-tures Kevin Tran, a ghost stuck between the living world and the afterlife. As Kevin and his mother are walking up the stairs at the end, there is only the sound of his mother’s foot-steps. “When the footsteps are there on the production track, sometimes we just have to cut them out in sound editorial. We have enough rabid fans of the show who would be getting back to us saying, ‘Wait a minute — ghosts don’t have footsteps.’ We have these esoteric conversations, that might go a third of the spotting session, on what can happen, what doesn’t happen, and oh, by the way, did we do this before?” says Lawshé.

Another important consideration is how the sound design plays against the music. Lawshé and Meyer go through each episode scene by scene with the composer. There are two composers on Supernatural: Jay Gruska, who worked with Lawshé on the series Lois & Clark, and Christopher Lennertz. Both composers have a great shorthand with Lawshé. He says, “We will look at each other and say, ‘You go high and I’ll go low,’ back-and-forth to really create something visceral that affects you right in the chest all the way up to the head. You’re not quite sure what’s music and what’s effects and what part we’re doing together.”

Lawshé likes to add effects to the LFE track when a scene is supposed to be scary. He uses a rumble ahead of the action to cre-ate a mounting tension. “The rumble will come up not only in level but also some-

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continued on page 50

Tattersall Sound & Picture helps create a Victorian-era mood for the horror series, Penny Dreadful.

times in pitch, leading up to an event. If someone is sneaking through a house, in a scene that is totally quiet, there’s a sense of an ominous presence rumbling away until an action happens. It leads you up to that moment,” says Lawshé.

With an average of six days per episode, including the mix, Lawshé feels the hardest part of the show is time management. Often they’ll get last minute visual effects changes that require them to tweak the sound effects, and the mix. Using Pro Tool 10 to keep the workflow virtual from sound editorial to the mix helps them make changes quickly. Another boost to workflow efficiency is the synergy between sound editorial, dia-logue, and the composers. By allocating the sonic space for each scene, all three components compliment each other, instead of compete in the mix.

“That can be really hard on a show like Supernatural,” says Lawshé. “When it gets really busy and people are tossed across the room, we have to meld the tension with the music, but we have to feel the effects of them being thrown from place to place, as well as hear the vocals for the guys, or the beasts, or the demons, along with all of that. It really helps that our communication is so great.”

Penny DreaDfulJane Tattersall, at Tattersall Sound & Picture (http://

www.tattersallsoundandpicture.com), is the supervising sound editor for Penny Dreadful. Tattersall Sound & Picture in Toronto is a full-service post production facil-ity that offers both picture editorial and audio post services. They have won many awards for their audio work, including two MPSEs for best sound editing, and an Emmy for outstanding single camera sound mixing. Their credits include TV series such as The Tudors, The Borgias, and Vikings (Season One), and films such as Resident Evil: Afterlife and Red.

Penny Dreadful is their latest Showtime series. It will have its television premiere on Sunday, May 11 at 10pm EST. Penny Dreadful is a horror series set in Victorian-era England. It weaves together classic horror tales of char-acters like Dracula, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, in a realistic way. The monsters are meant to be more human, and not so fantastical.

The first episode they created premiered at the 2014 SXSW Festival in March, during the Episodic event — a showcase previewing upcoming TV series. Tattersall Sound worked with director Juan Antonio Bayona and his sound designer Oriol Tarragó, who were both in Spain, and with producer Sheila Hockin, who was in Ireland where shooting and picture editing was taking place. Though she had worked on several other series with Hockin, this was Tattersall’s first time working with director Bayona and sound designer Tarragó.

“We essentially had to collaborate with a sound designer we didn’t know, and who we were never going to actually physically meet,” Tattersall says. “We had a Skype conversation with me, my sound effects editor Dave Rose, our assistant, and Oriol, the sound designer in Spain. We talked about what we thought the sound should be, based on the script, and what we knew from show creator John Logan. The director in Spain also wanted a certain style.”

After the Skype meeting, everyone began working on the sound independently. Tarragó had six scenes in the first episode, though he ended up designing a few more. Tattersall and her team also ended up creating sound design for the entire episode. After working separately, Tattersall, Rose and Tarragó swapped their sound design ideas. Tattersall says, “Suddenly there was a really good trust factor because Oriol realized that as North Americans, we weren’t totally oblivious to the sensitive or creative use of sound. He learned that he was working with people who were truly willing to col-laborate, and who are very joyful about the prospect of exchanging sound ideas.”

Tattersall explains that Tarragó incorporated some of their sounds into his work, and she incorporated some of his sounds into their work so that it became a unified idea.

Tattersall sent the sound design to producer Hockin for review. After three days of changes based on Hock-in’s comments, Tattersall Sound sent the mix to Dublin where Hockin, director Bayona, and sound designer Tarragó had met up for a final review. During an eight hour ISDN session between Dublin and Tattersall Sound, changes to the soundtrack were made on the fly.

“The music changes, sound design changes, and dia-logue changes were done with all of us in the session but in two different locations. It was a great combina-tion of all these creative minds working together with-out physically being in the same space,” says Tattersall.

Show creator Logan and director Bayona had two very different directions for sound. Tattersall explains that Bayona’s idea was to use sound to give the viewer a sense of the spirits out there, to highlight the horror component of the show. He was willing to try interest-ing sound design mood changes. The direction from Logan was the exact opposite. He wanted it to sound very real, says Tattersall, and to not hear a sound unless there was a reason for it. Logan would let music provide the mood, and not the sound design.

Tattersall gives an example of how the two different approaches worked on the opening scene. It starts with a woman waking up in the middle of the night. She’s in bed with her child, who’s probably five years old. The woman gets out of bed and walks down the hall to the bathroom. This is the Victorian-era, so there is no plumbing; it’s more like an outhouse but it’s inside. The wind is blowing wildly. The house is meant to be quite poor and rickety, so you hear creaking as the wind blows around the house. While the woman is in the bathroom, something terrible happens to her.

Based on Bayona’s direction, Tarragó used ominous sounds from the very beginning to create a mood, and signal that something terrible was going to happen. Tat-tersall’s approach used creaks and rattling windows and the wind to tell the story, but not necessarily set a mood.

“What we managed to do was actually a meld of the two ideas. The creaking and the wind are still there, but it’s much more believable. You really do feel as though you’re in an old house. As she gets close to the bath-room door, the music comes in and there’s subtle sound design to complement the music. So it’s not until she gets to the bathroom door that you start thinking

something is going to happen. When it does happen, it’s very startling,” says Tattersall. So within the parameters of sounding very real, yet otherworldly, they were able to negotiate a direction that incorporates both ideas.

Tattersall pulls sounds for Penny Dreadful from other projects she’s worked on, such as The Tudors, which also required a variety of horse sounds. For that series, she went to a horse farm in the country and recorded horses running up and down the road, walking, and cantering at all different paces, with and without horse shoes. She also received roughly 20 different recordings of just horses on cobblestones, some with carriages, from fellow Toronto sound designer David Evans.

“The nice things about working on a show set in Victorian England is getting to use horse sounds on cobblestones,” Tattersall says. “The streets are quite nar-row so you get a lovely ‘clop, clop, clop’ sound. It imme-diately makes you realize that the era is old.”

Penny Dreadful is full of period-specific sound details, like those Tattersall created for a tavern scene. She took a collection of pewter mugs home and recorded them in her dining room.

“We have a wooden dining room table and a bunch of wooden furniture. I got another person to come with me and we made many ‘pewter mug on hard wooden table’ sounds. Though they could have done it in Foley, I wanted it to have the sound of the space, with the right dimensions and the right acoustics,” says Tat-tersall. She records her sounds using a Scheops CCM 4 and a CCM 41. “We have five Schoeps in total and use either a stereo setup or a three-channel setup, depend-ing on what suits the circumstances,” she adds.

According to Tattersall, there is a class of creature in Penny Dreadful known as the familiars. They are people caught between this world and the afterworld. They have a human form, but they look very pale and vam-pire-ish. Since it’s important to Logan that things sound as realistic as possible, the familiars needed to have human-type voices. Rose did a lot of work on their sound. In the first episode, the familiars are all women so Tattersall and five other women from the facility individually performed crying, screaming, and different vocalizations that could be altered to sound like they were coming from the creatures’ mouths. Rose used plug-ins such as Audio Ease’s Altiverb, reFuse’s Lowender, Mutator Evo and Throat Evo by Antares Audio Tech-nologies, and software like Native Instruments’ Reaktor 5, and SoundMorph’s Wave Warper, to create the human-in-transition sound for the familiars.

“We were told over and over again that it has to sound human but it can’t sound human,” Tattersall says. “They couldn’t explain it any more than that, but they said they’d know it when they heard it. We never got exact direction so it was a little harder to figure out what they wanted. ”

Tattersall feels that pitch shifting, in all its various forms, is a very effective way to change a sound while still retaining a sense of the original sound. “By slowing down, or pitching down, or speeding up a sound, you get a sense of the sound, but you get a very different mood,” says Tattersall. This is really useful on a show like Penny Dreadful, where many of the supernatural sounds start from real, recorded sounds.


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New additions and initiatives

4K in full gear

This issue wrapped up following several busy weeks for the Post staff, including time spent in Las Vegas for the annual

NAB show. Luckily, we were able to cover lots of new product announcements thanks to the reporting of Linda Romanello, who recently joined Post as our new Managing Editor.

It’s great to have Linda on board. She jumped right in, interviewing many industry pros on-cam-era for Post TV at NAB, and writing news for post magazine.com. Collectively, her and I shot over two hours of interviews at the show with all the top manufacturers in the post business. We also sur-veyed our studio contingent to come up with our annual “Post Picks,” which highlight the top product and technology announcements made at the show. You’ll find complete details on page 4, and you can turn to our “Products” section on page 42 for additional NAB coverage, as well as on our Website.

With this issue, we are also launching a new column that we hope to publish regularly in the

months ahead. “Primetime” will focus on top televi-sion shows, and their production, editing, and spe-cial effects challenges. This month we connect with Refuge VFX and Animation in Portland, OR, which handles many of the key character visuals that help tell the story in the popular NBC series Grimm. Turn to page 16 for this inaugural installment of “Primetime” and look for others throughout 2014.

I also want to call your attention to our “Green Practices” feature on page 36. Post spoke with a number of studios and manufacturers about their green initiatives and we’re pleased to report on some innovative practices that are lightening these companies’ environmental impact. There are some cool ideas in effect that are easy to implement.

And of course we have “Reviews” in this issue, including Gary Adcock’s evaluation of a brand-new, eight-core Apple Mac Pro (page 48). It’s unlike any Mac that you may have used in the past, he notes.

There’s a lot to take in, so enjoy the issue, visit our Website for exclusive content, and see you again back here next month!

Anyone who attended this year’s national Association of Broadcasters convention

could not have missed the almost total domi-nance of 4K on the show floor. Manufacturers across all areas of the industry — from acqui-sition and editing to display and storage — introduced all sorts of solutions that included cameras, lenses, workflow systems, displays and more to stake their 4K claims.

understandably, there is some skepticism. As an industry, we’ve been discussing 4K for years. But this year’s nAB showed that we may finally be making some serious inroads into the 4K market.

Blackmagic Design, for instance, generated lots of buzz with its new ursa digital 4K film camera. AJA Video Systems, too, introduced its new CIon, a new production camera that’s capable of shooting at 4K/ultraHD and 2K/HD resolutions. You’ll find both products included in our “Post Picks” coverage, on page 4. other companies demonstrated 4K workflow solutions, such as Rohde & Schwarz DV, with its new SpycerBox Cell scalable storage solution that delivers data rates for all uncompressed and compressed formats, including 4K. Late last year, Canon made its entry into post with its brand new DP-V3010 4K reference display and also introduced its

Cine-Servo 4K lens at this year’s show.We caught up with a few industry pros at

nAB, including Heath Firestone, president of Firestone Productions, who says, “Definitely this year, there’s a focus on 4K. everybody talk-ed about it last year and showed some prod-ucts. now, everybody’s actually using it and the products have matured. It’s nice to see.”

“4K certainly gives you an extremely crisp, high-resolution picture that looks gorgeous on big screens,” adds Dave Walton, assistant VP of marketing and communications, JVC. “But the question is, who has or will have a screen that’s big enough, or be able to or willing to pay for that extra detail on those screens? That’s the big question the consumer side has to wrestle with. on the pro side, we already know all the advantages of shooting in 4K.”

I also wanted to mention that having worked in the industry for more than 17 years, how honored I am to join the team of Post. The publication has always had a stellar reputation and I am thrilled to be able to help take it even further. Already, we are increasing our TV coverage by premiering our new “Primetime” column on page 16.

In an industry that’s ever changing, I look ahead and am excited to see where we can grow together.

By LindA ROMAneLLO

MAnAGinG editor

[email protected]

P O S T S C R I P T





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P ORTLAND — NBC’s hit drama, Grimm, inspired by the classic Grimm Broth-ers’ fairy tales, is centered around

Portland, OR, homicide detective Nick Bur-khardt and his unique abilities (as a descendant of an select line of criminal profilers known as “Grimms”) to spot often ghastly-looking crea-tures (“Wesins”) that walk among us.

Currently wrapping up its third season, and returning for a fourth in the fall of 2014, Grimm heavily relies on a team of makeup artists and VFX specialists to bring the assort-ment of good and evil creatures to life. In fact, the character-centered VFX are central to the show’s plot lines.

The series is shot on-location throughout Portland, and one of its key boutique creature shops and visual effects houses is Refuge VFX and Animation, lead by VFX supervisor Fred Ruff. He officially launched the studio in 2013, after working as a lead product designer at Autodesk on 3DS Max, and working with other studios. Here, Ruff talks to Post about how he and his team of eight to 10 artists create VFX and animation for one of TV’s hot-test shows.

POST: What was the initial goal for the visual effects on Grimm?

FRED RUFF: “They wanted us to make these creatures and have them transform on camera. At the time of the pilot, it was a little open ended. They wanted this morph trans-formation; they wanted these people to wiggle their heads around and violently

transform. And during the pilot episode we explored that and they didn’t like it. So, they decided they wanted to show some sort of movement under the skin. We did a few tests, like I made this one character’s jaw pull out, break off and then go back into position. Some of the bones under the skin would shift. It was really pretty violent and in the end, they

went with more of a ripple effect that goes across the characters’ face as it transforms and that’s what you see now on the show.

“But that work, especially in the first sea-son, was extremely challenging — to take a human and make them morph into a creature that is not always the same shape and size of the head, and the features are different. Espe-cially to do it in TV budget timeline. We don’t get more than four weeks to do an episode. We could do 20 morphs in one episode, so it’s intense. Luckily we worked out a lot of good workflows.”

POST: It seems like the visual effects are a huge part of the overall storytelling?

RUFF: “They are. Bigger than anything else you see on TV. If you think about it, Grimm is one of the few shows that has a significant budget to do that every week — who trans-forms is such an important part of the story line. So the effects aren’t just something extra that’s sprinkled in, but they are really central to the plot line.”

POST: Compared to other TV series that also emphasize VFX, it seems that these effects are more character-based?

RUFF: “That’s true, and that’s the part I love about it. I love that type of work — mon-sters, creatures, good versus bad, all of it. Portland has had a lot of stop-motion work over the years and because of that, I think Portland’s animation community is really top notch. Because we do these creatures on Grimm, I consider us a boutique creature shop. We do set extensions and greenscreens, as well. We’re not the only vendor but we still do the main characters — we do Monroe and Rosalie, and a lot of others. So, we’re really a big part of the show. We’ve been involved with it for three seasons.”

POST: What tools you are using?RUFF: “Well, since I did work for Autodesk,

and it was a big part of my career, I continue with that as I move forward. We are a shop that uses 3DS Max to pretty much do all of our 3D animation. We also use V-Ray as our renderer and are big fans of Hair Farm, a plug-in for 3DS Max that does hair. We do a lot of the furry creatures like Rosalie, who is Mon-roe’s girlfriend, and she’s a fox, so she’s cov-ered in fur. It gives us such a nice look for hair. We also use Nuke from The Foundry for compositing — and it also adds to our pipe-line; it makes it really efficient to get shots in and out.”

POST: What is the show shot on?RUFF: “They shoot on the Arri Alexa cam-

era — because of the workflow of it. Every-thing’s in ProRes and can come right off the camera. They just send us a classic DPX file and we return them right back to them in the same format.”

POST: You made references to your pipeline and workflow earlier ; can you go into a little more detail?

RUFF: “It’s a very fluid, very simple kind of pipeline that keeps us able to make changes in time for television. Also, one of the keys to our pipeline, when starting my own studio, was to rely on Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Com-pute Cloud). I realized I had the horsepower of Amazon’s computing cloud behind me, and these machines to render for me. I didn’t have to shell out the $120K for 60 to 100 comput-ers, find a spot to put them, get air condition-ing, network them. I actually have one com-puter in the cloud and that computer can easily be converted to like a 100. And I don’t pay for what I don’t use.”

POST: What’s are the keys to doing VFX successfully for TV?

RUFF: “One thing is, that after four weeks, you aren’t going to hate the shot you are working on. But if you work on a shot for nine months, there’s definitely going to be a point where all of a sudden you don’t want to work on the shot anymore. There’s just so much noodling and fussing, that you start to lose interest. Unfortunately, that’s when you start to lose productivity. In TV, you have a new shot to look forward to in the next couple of weeks.

“Also, there are a lot of people involved in making a TV show. You really have to be able to be willing to extrapolate what they’re looking for and roll with stuff. You have to be willing to adjust and adapt and be honest with them. It’s a tough business, but the people at NBC and Grimm are the best clients I ever worked with, and that’s saying a lot.”

Refuge VFX brings Grimm’s creatures to life

Creating as

many as 20

morphs per

episode.

By Linda RomaneLLo

primetime

Fred Ruff supervises VFX at Refuge.

Bits & Pieces


N EW YORK — The Looping Division (www.theloopingdivision.com) launched in 2013, offering loop group services for both televi-

sion and film. On the feature side, the company recently contributed to Non-Stop, starring Liam Nee-son, and the theatrical animated film, Rio 2. They’ve also been working steadily on FX Network’s The Americans, starring Keri Russell. The show’s audio is posted at Sync Sound/Digital Cinema in NYC, so The Looping Divi-sion’s Jason Harris has been at the studio, coordinating voice talent for looping sessions, and even handling some voice work himself.

The Americans is a period drama about the complex marriage of two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington, DC, shortly after Ronald Rea-gan is elected President. Their marriage has been arranged, and their two children know nothing about their parents’ true identities. As the Cold War escalates, they maintain a range of dangerous and dark relation-ships in their network of spies.

Harris says The Looping Division has been contrib-uting to the series since Season 1, and when Post caught up with him, he had just wrapped a session for the conclusion of Season 2.

“The Loop Group is a vendor, just like VFX or Foley or a caterer,” says Harris, whose background is that of a voice actor. A little over a year ago, he and his wife — a classically trained actress in her own right — started the company, after working for a stretch with another group offering similar looping services. Com-petition is tough in this segment of the business, but they’ve already been able to score several projects.

“It’s always the most intimidating to start with Epi-sode 1,” he says of their work on the FX series. “The

tone is still being decided.” The show’s ADR editor, John Bowen, is his point person at Sync Sound.

“I’ll watch episodes,” says Harris, “and talk to the post producer. The show is shooting in New York, but is supposed to be in Washington, DC. We couldn’t use ‘New Yorky’ people,” he says of the looping talent. “They need actors that speak fluent Russian. It’s a spy show, with Russians that are pretending to be Ameri-can. They don’t want to hear a trace of Russian, so we had to find Russian actors and speakers who could drop the accent entirely.”

For an episode in which President Reagan gets shot, Harris had to help re-create period newscasts with deep-voiced anchors reporting on the incident. They also needed background dialog that would reflect viewers watching the news on TVs in busy area bars and hotels.

The show’s budget normally doesn’t allow for more than six voice actors, so Harris says it’s important to find voice actors capable of performing a number of roles. “We used an older bilingual Russian actor on Season 2 , who was in ‘group’ on Season 1,” Harris recalls. “He was our Russian ringer, but also speaks English.”

A group for The Americans is typically made up of four men and two women, reflecting the heavy male presence in government in the 1980s. In addition to the assassination attempt, some of the series’ other challenging scenes included creating background voic-es for a rebel training camp.

“We hired an actor who is relatively new, but spent six years in Iraq as a weapons trainer,” notes Harris. “He ran our drills, and we recorded it all. He was per-fect vocation wise.” Check out FX’s The Americans on Wednesdays at 10pm. By Marc Loftus

Giving FX’s The Americans its Russian vibe

Forbidden Technologies enhances cloud platform

L ONDON — Forbidden Technologies plc (www.forbidden.co.uk), developer of the

cloud video platform FORscene, announced new features and integrations for its cloud-based post production system at NAB.

FORscene’s new high-resolution proxy allows users to choose the resolution they want — and swap between resolutions while working — to accommodate bandwidth availability and project requirements. Working with proxies, even for high-resolution viewing, means that the original source remains on the clients’ servers.

Forbidden has also made updates to the FORscene edit interface and toolsets that speed up workflows and keep the focus on creating the story. With new customization options, users can now set up and save differ-

ent keysets and interface layouts to suit their preferences. Other edit interface upgrades include a new record timeline patch panel, half-speed playback for improved logging and transcription, and improvements to trimming, audio editing and publishing tools.

As part of a cloud upgrade to support new file formats, Forbidden has updated the operating system on the ingest server to Raspbian Wheezy, which includes the latest FFmpeg and other transcode-related libraries. This move enables support for more file for-mats on ingest and also increases the security of the server.

In addition, improvements to FORscene Server Lite allow for even more efficient remote workflows. Users can now regulate the use of upload bandwidth in Windows so as to limit interference with other bandwidth-intensive applications.

The Looping Division is creating background tracks for The Americans, starring Keri Russell.

FORscene received several updates to its editing interface.

Documents

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