CREATING COMPUTER-GENERATED VISUALS FOR TWO TOP SWORD-AND-SANDALS US SHOWS COULD WELL HAVE BEEN HERCULES THIRTEENTH TASK, AS FLAT EARTH'S BOSS KEVIN O'NEILL TELLS JOE NAZZARO...
The sea monster battle in the episode where Hercules' mum gets married was something the fx team suggested. There's more to CGI on TV than spaceships on B5. The visual effects team at Flat Earth have been conjuring up fantasfical imagery of a far different kind. Under the supervision of Kevm O'Neill Flat Earth use cutting edge computer technology to bring a medley of ancient mythical creatures to life - everything from centaurs and sea serpents to hydras and harpies, for cult US hits Hercules and Xena.
"The shows now have a much higher rate of special effects than they were designed to have in the first season," O'Neill explains. "And, of course, you can't have everything looking the same, so you've got to come up with new designs. Every season we say, 'We'd really like to do this particular creature or this sequence,' and then come up with something new and interesting. We're usually shaking in our boots, thinking, 'What the heck is Rob [Tapert, producer] going to ask for now?' In most cases, we're our own enemies, because we end up saying, 'Sure, we'll do it."'
The key to Flat Earth's success is clearly down to the diversity of artists: former stop-motion animator Doug Bestwick, digital computer wizard Kevin Kutchaver, Emmy award-winning make-up artist Everett Burell, ex-New York fashion photographer Phil Carbonaro and visual effects supervisor Mitch Suskin. "They've all become essential assets into the aesthetic of how things get done," says O'Neill. "We all want a thumbprint on every episode from a creative point of view."
Flat Earth makes those myths come alive: Xena faces a watery god rising from the sea. One of O'Neill's personal favourite creations to date is the mandrake, a giant, lightning-fast lizard that scampers across the walls and ceiling of Hercules' cell in "What's In A Name?" "We were able to accomplish something I don't think anyone else has really done with a 3D object, and that was to have it running around on a set. When something walks on the ground and it's 3D, it actually needs to feel like it's got weight and substance, and if you watch that episode you'll see that the mandrake has a certain gait about it that Doug Beswick came up with which looks really cool. The other problem with a lot of our 3D stuff was that we really hadn't accomplished a good contact shadow, but we came up with a way to render out a shadow in a 3D environment [for that one]."
For the wedding of Hercules' mother Alcame [sic], the script called for a voracious sea monster to crash the party and make off with Herc and his future father-in-law Jason into the ocean. Simple, right? Not for O'Neill's team, who decided to throw in a second sea monster just so they could choreograph an undersea battle between the two leviathans. "The sea monster itself was really cool. It had an upper jaw and two lower jaws, like a crab. A couple of those shots with the creature probably needed to be dirtied up and cut a little so it looked more fleshy. I think it was the last episode in one schedule so some of the shots were rushed."
(left to right): Hercules jumps into the jaws of a sea monster; Xena has troubles with harpies; It's that wedding gatecrasher again; an electrifying experience in Xena. While Xena isn't nearly as creature-intensive as Hercules, the odd monster does make an appearance. Indeed, the most outstanding effect of season one had to be the pair of harpies in "Mortal Beloved." "There was this whole flying attack sequence, which had to be shot up into scaffolding. We said: 'Okay, you're not going to build a set that big, so we'll shoot it all against a blue screen and do the rest on computer.' They built the courtyard and we threw the blue screen behind every set up. We ended up delivering 92 fx shots in five week. I'm glad we did it, but it had us up for three solid days towards the end."
WITH THE NEW SEASONS OF HERCULES AND XENA well underway, the Flat Earth boys are currently cranking out new monsters as fast as their smoking CPUs can handle them. "Rob was so happy with the harpies in 'Mortal Beloved' and the skeletons in 'Once A Hero,' he came up with a skeleton/harpy called a dryad for a new Xena episode. We're also going to have a disembodied talking head which people are going to be carrying around. Kevin Kutchaver and I both worked on The Addams Family films, so we're using the approach [we used for Thing]. And we just finished a Hercules episode called 'Mercenary', with these really cool sandworms. They're man-eating creatures which look like manta rays."
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys is more reliant on monsters than its sister show, Xena: Warrior Princess It's a hell of a workload - and O'Neill is pragmatic about the results. "We're always going to follow in the footsteps of some of the bigger productions - Dragonheart, for instance. We're doing a talking dragon episode in Herc, which'll be a challenge. Movies are in a position where they can do something no-one else has done yet, and we're in a position where, after those guys have done it, we can study it and try to make it as efficient as we can in terms of time and cost. We won't have as many shots, but from a design point of view, I hope our dragon looks cooler, and I hope it becomes a character everybody believes in. That's probably the most important thing happening this season. We're trying to go for character animation in a way that represents performance, whereas in the past we've really just thrown creatures at Herc and they've never really had any personalities.
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