DUNE BUGS.(Company Business and Marketing)

ANIMATORS OF THE SCI-FI SERIES DUNE FIX THE FLAWS IN A LIVE-ACTION SHOOT

Nobody likes to work under the constraints of a tight deadline and a small budget. But in television, such limitations are common. "So, when directors and producers reach the end of a shoot and they've accomplished as much as they can with the time and money they have, they rely on effects companies to bridge the gap between what they had hoped to get on film and what they actually got," says Tim McHugh, visual-effects supervisor at Area 51 (Burbank, CA). "On Frank Herbert's Dune, that was a pretty long bridge."

Frank Herbert's Dune, which aired on the Sci Fi Channel, is a six-hour miniseries based on one of the most popular futuristic stories ever published. Besides Area 51, three other facilities created visual effects for the show: AI Effects (North Hollywood, CA); and Flat Earth and Netter Digital, both of which have since closed their doors. Originally, 250 effects shots were scheduled for the miniseries, but by the time principal photography finished, that number had grown to more than 500.

"As the footage started coming in, our jobs grew bigger," says Frank Isaacs, CEO and effects supervisor at AI Effects. It also quickly became apparent that the facilities would not only be handling the shots they'd been hired to work on, but that the work would become more involved in order to compensate for time and money shortfalls in production.

Offtrack

For the show's "Hunter-Seeker" sequence, AI Effects was asked to model and animate a CG robotic dart (the Hunter-Seeker) and composite it into live-action footage. The Hunter-Seeker--which AI Effects' Michael Hoover created in NewTek's LightWave on NT-based PCs--travels from an intricately designed wall, stops in front of the veiled face of a maiden, moves across the room to confront the main character, Paul, and extends a poisonous needle toward his eye.

According to Isaacs, this sequence was more involved than originally anticipated because AI Effects received very little camera information from which to work. As he explains, a sequence in which a moving 3D CG element must interact with characters or objects in moving 2D footage ideally should be shot with a camera outfitted with a motion-controlled rig that records the camera's movements. The visual-effects artist would import the camera-movement information into the tracking software, feed the tracking data into the 3D animation package, and use the software's virtual camera to animate the CG element based on the tracking data. Because the virtual camera would now be moving perfectly in sync with the real camera, it would look as though the CG element was part of the original shot.