Space Invaders
Reprinted without permission from Sci-Fi Universe, September 1996. © L.F.P., Inc. 1996

Area 51 created the star wars of Space

Visual effects producer Tim McHugh and Pasadena-based Area 51 were charged with luring the audience of Space: Above and Beyond into a computer-generated universe they couldn't see anywhere else.

"Those guys at Area 51 are amazing," says co-executive-producer Glen Morgan. "We started out saying we'll have about thirty CGI shots per episode. Well, we've had sixty shots in some episodes."

From the beginning, McHugh was aware that his work was being created for a television show, but he refused to see the medium as a limitation. "While we wanted to make the graniose, Star Wars-type of movie, the reality is that most people are going to watch this on a nineteen-inch Sony or something," he says.



"You don't get the width on television, so instead, we tried to go with a lot of depth in our shots," he adds. "We do a lot of foreground, midground and background elements. We're very conscious of trying to break it up, so there's a lot of foreground, and the equivalent of a horizon."

An example of this can be seen in the pilot episode. The Tellus colonists walk across a gantry to board the AeroTech rocket which will hurl them into space. "The only thing that's real in that shot is the actors," says McHugh. "Everything else is artificial. To give the shot a little bit of depth, we added a helicopter way off in the background. It gives some dimension, some realism."

A primary element in many of the show's effects shots would be the 58th's Hammerhead fighters. "Knowing they wanted a World War II look, we looked at the Corsair fighter airplane and I said, 'I want this thing to look like this is the great, great grandson of the Corsair,'" says McHugh.

"Our notion was that in the future, the Earthlings are new to space exploration, and so everything we do is based on the jet. We took our jets and moved them into outer space," he says. This extended to the fighters' movements. "We look at horizons, we fly in formations. It has a very earth-bound feel to it, because we're new out there."

The enemy Chig fighters, on the other hand, would be distinctly alien. "The Chigs, we decided, have been in space much longer," says McHugh. "They've been running around, destroying civilizations, having a good old time. They fly differently. They kind of swarm. We very specifically designed [the Chig fighter] so that you're never quite sure exactly what it looks like. It doesn't really give off light, it just reflects it."

Lighting effects opened up numerous dramatic possibilities for the effects artists. But since many of the shots in Space involved blue-screen elements of, say, a pilot sitting in a fighter cockpit, McHugh and Visual Effects Supervisor Glenn Campbell had to ensure the lighting in the CGI matched what was being filmed on the soundstages.

"I'm not sure where it's written, but the blue screen stuff is always the last thing shot," says McHugh. "It's the last night, the last hour, the guys have been working a fourteen-hour day, and then they turn the blue screen on. It's hard on an actor."

"When Glenn Campbell went down to film plates for the Hammerhead cockpit shots, we got a big lighting rig and swung it up there so there's light raking across the guys," says McHugh of using lighting to make scenes more dynamic, as well as to aid continuity. "You get real dramatic lighting, working interactively. That makes a huge difference.

"We have a magic universe in terms of lighting," he adds. "No matter where you are, you're backlit. It comes from the same place as the music does."

Area 51's computer effects sequences begin as carefully detailed storyboard scenes. After the action is choreographed, the team often bypasses creating any three-dimensional models, and simply inputs the action onto the two-dimensional canvas of the computer, building wire-frame models and then adding details.

"Some people build actual models and then scan them into the computer," says McHugh. "We kind of work the opposite way. We go in and put a lot of the preliminary work into the computer directly, rather than doing it another way and then transferring it in. It's sort of a more direct approach. It's more efficient."

The Area 51 team uses DEC Alpha computers, running Windows NT software. Rendering and compositing is accomplished using Newtek's Lightwave.

During the course of the season, the effects artists sometimes didn't wait for scripts to plan their sequences. They'd come up with suggestions and bring them directly to the writers.

Says staff writer Matt Kiene, "Sometimes they'd have an idea for a really cool scene that they wanted to do, and that would be a springboard for a scene in a script. We'd structure the story so we could do that scene."

But it was sometimes a balancing act for the writers to determine just what Area 51 could and couldn't do on a television series budget. "It's weird," says Kiene's partner, staff writer Joe Reinkemeyer, "because sometimes really big things are OK, and really small things are OK, but it's the middle things that aren't OK. If you write, 'a guy lights a cigarette,' it's OK, because it's just a CGI shot. But if you say, 'the debris of a ship falls onto the ground,' that's too much, because then somebody would have to build that debris. So it's actually cheaper to blow up Jupiter than a spaceship."

As a result, ships were blown up only in space, with spectacular CGI results. "Yes, we do see gas explosions in space," says McHugh, "because it looks really cool."

Luckily for the show's heroes, those cool explosions happened mostly to the enemies' spaceships.

Explains McHugh, "We're carrying on a grand science fiction tradition in our universe: the aliens are really lousy shots. They have the technology to destroy the universe, but if you're ten feet behind them or in front of them, they can't shoot you, they'll always miss."

"We were a little concerned about that, but then we started watching Star Wars and the bad guys there are lousy shots, so we think it's OK," adds McHugh.

On the de facto final episode of the season, Sugar Dirt, Reinkemeyer and Kiene finally got their wish to blow up a fighter, then see its debris fall onto a planet surface. Perhaps the most complex sequence of the series, it was accomplished using a combination of CGI and live-action.

"There's one shot where Rodney [Rowland] and Lanei [Chapman] are running down this runway, and this Hammerhead flips behind them and explodes. It just looks amazing," enthuses co-executive producer James Wong, as he plays the shot over and over again in an editing bay.

And if a jaded television producer can get this excited about a special effect, even after looking at it fifty or sixty times in an editing session, think of the reaction it should get from Mr. Channel Surfer, unsuspectingly flipping up and down that dial...
Disclaimer: The characters and situations of Space: Above And Beyond are legal property of James Wong and Glen Morgan, Hard Eight Production and 20th Century Fox Television. No copyright infringement intended.
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