John Gross
Co-president/creative director, Eden FX, Hollywood, CA
Current Project: CG creature effects for NBC’s Surface
F&V: So, what’s Surface about?
It’s pretty much about things underwater. There are creatures
underwater, so we’re doing character animation that we’ll integrate
with live-action water. But they’re all CG creatures, so it’s difficult
to get them integrated on an episodic delivery schedule. Right now,
there’s at least 50 to 80 VFX shots per episode.
F&V: How do you execute the effects?
We use LightWave 3D for animation. As far as getting live-action
water elements, we’ll go out and create turbulence. We’ll paint a
two-liter bottle black and then drag it through the water,
half-submerged, to create a wake, and then we’ll cover that up with a
creature swimming through, so we have a real water wake.
F&V: How does the underwater setting affect your work?
You have to account for all the different refractions of light,
and the way light works— the deeper you go, the lighting changes. You
change light temperature over time as you get deeper. At 100 feet down,
you don’t see any red. Things like that. Also, we have to make the
creatures appear wet. They may pop out of a swimming pool and run
across a deck, with water coming off of them and leaving a trail
behind. The hardest part is really the interaction with environments.
10 years ago, I came out to Hollywood to work on SeaQuest DSV. Then it went away, and the next trend was space stuff and other FX. Now, water shows are back in — we’re working on both Surface and Invasion.
