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Eden FX Studios rest in the valley beneath the trademark HOLLYWOOD letters spread out over a hovering hill. It's located on the former home of historic Columbia Pictures, where today's TV and indie starlets mingle with yesteryear's glamorous ghosts. With this atmosphere drenched with past and present creative juices, Eden FX, founded in 2000 by John Gross and Mark Miller, produces visual effects for a broad spectrum of entertainment and corporate clients. Gross is no Johnny-come-lately to the visual effects business. In the early 90s, he began at Steven Spielbergs Amblin Imaging on the TV series, SeaQuest DSV. After that show went to Davy Jones' Locker, Gross formed Digital Muse and started a long relationship with the Star Trek television series, Voyager and Enterprise, which endured the transition to Eden FX. Over the years, the team of animators at Eden has garnered multiple Emmys for their Star Trek efforts. Since the beginning of his career, Gross has been a LightWave aficionado, with a repertoire of propitious stories to tell. He recently recounted one about their work on the television series, NCIS. In the pilot episode, Eden's assignment was to create a digital Air Force One and composite it into an airport scene with real people, police cars, ambulances and airport vehicles. The problem was that the airport footage was unacceptably shaky because the camera was perched on an 80 foot crane on an extremely windy night. "Enter LightWave to the rescue," described Gross, "Eden artist Steven Rogers decided to recreate the entire shot in CG. Rogers used reference photos taken at the scene of all the vehicles to map onto digital versions; and CG people were match positioned - all completed in the production time allotted to make and composites a single Lear Jet." "When shown the finished shot, Executive Producer Donald Bellisario remarked 'I wish we would have changed this camera move a bit.' When told we could change it however he wanted because the shot was now entirely digital, he was completely surprised!" Steve Pugh, an Eden FX producer, talked about the studio's current work and the company's long relationship with LightWave. "In the AS period," said Pugh referring to the era commencing After Star Trek, "we have done a lot less space stuff and a lot more creatures and water and real world effects and a lot more matte paintings." "This was an especially challenging year with some of the television deadlines. For one show, Surface, we delivered seventy shots in about a week and a half. Crazy stuff. Insanity. Surface was just a huge show that would not have been feasible on any other platform but LightWave." "Ghost Whisperer is another show with completely different effects from what we have done in the past. It's practically a different kind of effect every week where they try to tie the look of the ghost into something about how that person died or what that person was going through at the time. We also did a lot of green screen work, ghost replications and people walking through things." "In the last couple of years, we've worked on Alias and Lost. For Lost, we primarily do their creatures; smoke monsters, wild boars, polar bears, and birds. For this past season finale, we did a broader range of effects including matte paintings and other digital environment work. For Alias we did a variety of work like helicopters crashing into houses, collapsing stained glass floors, and city replications." "The advantage of LightWave is the speed in which you can get things done." "For Invasion, we did an awful lot of matte paintings. They shot it out in Fillmore (California) and it needed to be the Everglades, with a lot fewer hills and a lot more water. We did the creatures as well." Mixed in with the episodic TV assignments, Eden FX has worked on movies like Hellboy and Syriana along with a complement of commercials. Addressing the issue of using LightWave for feature films, Pugh observed, "It's interesting to see people's reactions when you take a LightWave team who is used to doing high quality television effects on a short schedule and cut them loose on a movie. The team turns around their first looks - fully lit and rendered - in half the time a (movie) supervisor was expecting. They can see the work earlier, which gives them more time for adjustments and yields a much richer product." Turning back to the exigencies of episodic TV, Pugh said, "The advantage of LightWave is the speed in which you can get things done. It's important to put the shots in front of the client quickly enough so that you can make final changes within the tight schedule." Eric Hance, a Digital Animation Supervisor on Surface, added, "Most of the artists on Surface took their shots from beginning to end. On any given shot you will get storyboards, build a matte painting, track the camera for a set extension and then take that all the way through to the final." LightWave's integrated animation, modeling, and rendering tools allowed them to maintain this streamlined pipeline. "We had episodes that needed to be done in three days. There's no way that you're going to animate twenty different shots and put them through several layers of different applications." Continued Hance, "We also like using LightWave for the control of separate passes. We do lots and lots and lots of separate passes because our clients have high expectations of the aesthetic. And on Surface, I would say roughly three quarters of the work involved live plates - set extensions, like adding Mim (a CG lizard) eating out of somebody's hand." "LightWave works nicely because its structure gives it a good overall framework to break up elements to send to compositing." Since they are integrating their CG into real world environments, they rely on LightWave's ability to produce photorealistic results. "It's been really helpful in pushing that extra ten percent," Hance said. "When we bring it into the composite, it might need that little sweetening, but generally LightWave gets us there very quickly." Pugh, who also maintains the computer systems at Eden FX and writes code, discussed another advantage of LightWave. "I'm working on writing my fourth render controller so I've always been a big fan of LightWave's beautiful renderer and the ease of getting it up and running on multiple processors. When we do get a film project in or a particularly hectic month of television work, we'll rent extra render engines. And it's fairly simple for me to put 20 or 40 nodes online in an afternoon. The 'systems guy' in me appreciates that part of the product." Reflecting on the CG challenges the company faces, Pugh said, "We stuck with LightWave because it does a wide range of tasks; and it does them all well. You can get into these really specialized tools that might do six legged walking creatures in zero gravity phenomenally well, but you can't use them to get the show done. You can have 75 packages in your arsenal, but by the time that you are done jumping from one to the next to the next to the next, someone else loads up LightWave and is finished in half the time. And it looks great. So guess who we'll keep going back to? It's been that way since Day 1." M.R. Dinkins & Dick De Jong have covered the computer arts for over ten years. They reside in Austin, Texas. |
