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Reader SurveyVirtual Helen
May 1, 2003 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
 Stargate Digital used an extensive digital backlot to create CG backgrounds for Helen of Troy. |
USA Network's recent four-hour miniseries Helen of Troy, directed by John Kent Harrison, required visual effects capable of showing the scope of the ancient legendary war between the Spartans/Greeks and the Trojans. Of the show's approximately 250 digital effects shots, most were built at Stargate Digital, Pasadena, Calif., to illustrate collisions of massive armies, large armadas crossing the ocean, and a gigantic, CG Trojan horse in the city of Troy.
The “feature scope” of the effects, on a cable television timeline and budget, was largely accomplished through Stargate's use of its virtual backlot of digital models, textures, and other assets, according to company president/CEO Sam Nicholson, who also served as Stargate's visual effects supervisor on the project.
“We worked on the show approximately a year,” says Nicholson. “The challenge was illustrating about 1,000 ships moving across the sea with digital sails, oars, oarsmen, 10,000 men fighting, the Trojan horse — almost all of those shots deeply layered. In prep, about six months before the shoot, we started gathering textures from our virtual library, including skies, landscapes, trees, rain, arrows, etc. We simultaneously started building new 3D elements [mainly in Maya and Softimage, later using After Effects for compositing, in conjunction with 2d3 Boujou motion tracking software]. We knew, for instance, we would need a Trojan horse, Greek ships, digital warriors, things like that.
“The first phase therefore consisted of gathering and building pieces we would need and making them photoreal. Many of these elements we will now be able to repurpose for our next project for USA — their Spartacus miniseries. We don't deliver on that project until Christmas, but we are now starting to prepare elements, and some of that material will come out of what we gathered for this project,” he says.
Nicholson adds that Stargate built a proprietary digital network that includes more than 25 terabytes of storage. This allowed the company to bring virtually all of Helen of Troy's footage into the digital realm, letting artists in all departments work simultaneously at HD resolution.
“Each shot in this show is deeply layered — some up to 300 layers — and most every shot needs 30 to 40 revisions,” he says. “One shot in which Agamemnon greets 10,000 troops has 370 layers — that's pretty dense. To do an entire four hours of that kind of stuff, we had to have tons of storage, combined with a high-speed fiber network and a render farm consisting of about 100 dual-processor computers that we build ourselves. Our approach was to transfer virtually all the live-action footage [shot on location on Malta] into our tapeless environment, assemble the picture on our Avid DS, and work on the entire show in uncompressed HD.”
