Earth2/The Straight Dope
Jim Holloway
Jim Holloway, who's posting this, alerted me to the conversation on what or
what wasn't used to do the effects for Earth 2. As I did many of the effects in
the pilot and virtually all of the effects in the episodes, I'm in a position
to give you the REAL skinny.
The pilot was all done at either 2048x1536 or 1024x768 (depending on the scene)
and output to 35mm film at full silent aperture for DATV protection. The
artists on the pilot were: Supervisor Tim Landry on Mac, Tim Sassoon (me) on
Mac, John Murrah on Mac and Wavefront Composer on Indigo2, Amy Pfaffinger on
Mac and Composer, Blaine Kinnison on Composer, and Marlo Pabone on Composer.
Model photography by Mike Shea and the stage crew. Models by Dave Goldberg and
the model shop crew. Scanning and film recording by Jason Piccone and Brian
Adams. Dan Lombardo and Mark Axton produced for DQ. Most of the spaceship shots
were physical models shot motion control against bluescreen, including the
launch portal interior. Tim Landry did the full exterior space stations as
still frames in Infini-D, though some of the elements, such as the portal and
foreground elements were models. The only Infini-D animation was the globe that
Yale projects from his arm, which also has a lot of After Effects processing.
I'm recycling it into the episodes. The TV bomb that gets jettisoned was
modeled in Alias on SGI, then textured and animated in Electric Image by me.
The actual Earth 2 I think Tim Landry also did in Infini-D. Why Infini-D?
Because Tim likes it, that's why. Most of the 2k shots were done in Composer,
and all of the 1k and the rest of the 2k were done in After Effects. We had to
go to 2k on a lot of the space shots because the stars were twinkling too much
on slow pans at 1k, and currently Composer is more suited to heavy 2k work,
since it can disk cache. The interior vibration shots when the ship was
breaking up were first done in Composer, then vibrated in After Effects, which
has excellent motion blur. Most all the Telescanners, Jumpers, Gear Displays,
etc. were designed and done by me in After Effects.
I'm doing the episode stuff at 720x486 almost entirely in After Effects, and of
course Photoshop. Last week I did some 20 shots, a total of 3500 frames or so,
mostly hand animation of sparks in PS, in 5 days! Check it out, it looks pretty
good considering. I only have a week to do all the effects for an episode, and
the deadline's a week ahead of air, so it's real tight. They barely have time
to slug in sound effects. Other things used; Peter's Player (frame numbers,
please!), Missing Link (essential), and DeBabelizer (less). I'm looking forward
to my 840av (128MB RAM, 7GB HD) at Dream Quest being upgraded to an 8100/80
next week, and even more to the Daystar PPC cards for '030 Macs so I can
upgrade my IIci (w/33mhz '040 & 20MB RAM) at home, on which many of the episode
shots are being done over weekends. Trivia questions: How do I (A.) ...do the
number displays? (B.) ...do those long, soft streaks in the pilot? (C.) What
program by Kevin Bjorke makes an appearance in every Gear Display?
Have fun, and I'm really glad you guys like the show! I've got to get back to
redesigning the Zero POV display. No, I did NOT do the one in the pilot! No
offence to whoever did it, but I think it looks like a leftover from The
Six-Million Dollar Man.
Tim Sassoon
tims94...@eworld.com
PS For the answer to (B.) check the CoSA forum on AOL.
SpecularI
Holloway) writes:
<<Tons of great info left behind due to size>>
Thanks for the info!!! Tell Tim Infini-D 3.0 is coming along quite well
right now, and you guys should be pleasantly surprised.
Your message just goes to show that it takes whatever tool neccessary to
do the job needed. When we saw the space station scene files Tim made
using Infini-D, we were stunned. Absolutely gorgeous stuff. I just wish
the show had more space action like the first episode. The Utah-Like
planet for the main plot is getting tiresome for me...
Keep up the good work. Nice to have a company like DreamQuestto keep
companies like ILM in check.
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Andrei Herasimchuk / Director of 2D Applications
Specular International
AppleLink: SPECULAR / AOL: Speculari / CIS: 75300,2715
Internet: spec...@aol.com / eWorld: SpecCollage
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