Vamped up. (broadcast).(Zoic Studios' 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer')

It seemed appropriate that the artists at Zoic Studios in Los Angeles worked late into the night to create the visual effects for the final episode of the long-running cult television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Since the 20th Century Fox Television program debuted in 1997, Zoic co-founder Loni Peristere has provided the digital backup to vampire slayer Buffy Summers and her friends from Sunnydale, California, as they tangled with vampires, demons, monsters, and just about every other imaginable creature of the night.

During the 144th (and final) episode, called "Chosen," Buffy and the gang confront an evil army of superstrong vampires as they prepare to take over the world. Once again, Buffy saves the day, as the town of Sunnydale--built atop Indian burial grounds that became a portal for all things evil--is finally obliterated, once and for all closing the gateway to doom.

For the finale. Peristere had a little more time than usual to develop the "show-stopping" effects. Wanting to provide the audience with a memorable experience, he worked within a budget that was several times that of a typical Buffy. segment. "In this episode, we employed the action-effects sequences fans have come to expect from the show but we stepped them up one more notch," he says. "The effects allowed Joss Whedon, the show's creator and director of this episode, to greatly expand the scope and scale of the danger threatening Buffy and her friends. But instead of just a few bad guys, there had to be thousands. Instead of just one of two effects sequences, there had to be many."

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The Living Dead

Some of the more challenging effects in the episode were used in an enormous underground cavern sequence. Zoic's CG team modeled and textured a large portion of this vast underground space, complete with bridges and bonfires, in NewTek's LightWave, matching the vir tual space to five-action sets and miniatures created under the supervision of Emmy-winning visual effects snpervisor/producer Ron Thornton. Then, the artists filled the scene ...