Green Meets Red

The majority of shots for the Sci Fi Channel's new series Sanctuary, which originated as eight webisodes before it caught Sci Fi's eye, combine greenscreen footage shot by DP David Geddes using Red Digital Cinema Red One cameras and visual effects produced by Anthem Visual Effects. Photo: Jeff Weddell © SCI FI Channel

In the hallway of a former bicycle factory outside Vancouver, British Columbia, a bloody corpse lies on a gurney, swathed unceremoniously in plastic wrap. It's not real, of course. It's just a rubber dummy — a victim of the monstrous creatures that wreak havoc in Sanctuary, a new series debuting on the Sci Fi Channel this fall. The dummy is one of relatively few physical props used for Sanctuary because the show is being filmed predominantly against greenscreen, with virtual sets and digital creatures added later by Vancouver-based Anthem Visual Effects. What makes this ambitious plan workable for a TV series is that the greenscreen footage is of such high quality — the equivalent of 8 megapixels — that it blends seamlessly with Anthem's digital imagery. Sanctuary is one of the first episodic productions shot with the Red Digital Cinema Red One, and this tapeless approach brings new meaning to the phrase “more bang for the buck.”

In the cavernous green space that dominates the Sanctuary factory, the actors have only one practical doorway to touch as a scene plays out. Director Martin Wood and DP David Geddes, CSC, confer with Anthem Visual Effects Supervisor Lee Wilson about the sharpness of one actor's shadow against the glowing green cyc. How this shadow will play later against Anthem's virtual background is a key plot point for the scene. The three men huddle around a trio of monitors that beam images from close-up, long-shot, and crane-mounted Red One cameras. But the 720-line progressive scan monitors they're watching represent just a fraction of what is actually being captured.

It's the job of Data Acquisition Supervisor Richard Winn, who's squirreled away with a Macintosh computer in a cubbyhole behind the set, to examine what's actually being captured in Redcode RAW mode by the Red cameras. These dailies, which are processed as .r3d files in Red's proprietary software, are backed up on a 9TB drive. Winn copies the Red data onto two other drives, too: one in standard def that goes to the inhouse editorial team and a 4K version for Anthem. By day's end, all dailies are in the post-production pipeline. “Eliminating the costs of film or tape stock and scanning, and going straight to edit and post effects is just amazing,” Winn says. “Especially for filmmakers on a budget.”

Sanctuary has actually followed an ambitious path ever since writer/producer Damian Kindler partnered with his Stargate TV franchise colleagues Wood and actress Amanda Tapping to launch the story online in 2007. They produced eight webisodes that chronicled the monster-hunter adventures of Dr. Helen Magnus (Tapping) who tracks down abnormal creatures that skulk around society's fringes. The sanctuary in which she shelters these creatures is an intricate seven-story gothic structure — the kind of place that could never physically be built. But judicious use of digital effects gave the Sanctuary webisode series a unique look, and it attracted more than 3.7 million views in six months. It even built a following of fans that were willing to pay for downloads. Directed by Wood, the webisodes were shot in HD with Sony HDW-F900 cameras, and the digital effects were done in Softimage|XSI. When the Sci Fi Channel ordered 13 episodes for television, some of the webisode elements were selected to be saved and “rebooted” by Anthem using Autodesk Maya, Apple Shake, Pixar RenderMan, mental images mental ray, and Adobe Photoshop. But most of the elements in the TV incarnation of Sanctuary had to be created anew.

DP David Geddes uses three Red Digital Cinema Red One cameras—close-up, long-shot, and crane-mounted—to capture footage for Sanctuary. The camera, whose 8-megapixel-equivalent images are backed up to 9TB drives daily, is ideal for the cinematographer because it allows him to use his preferred film lenses. Photo: Jeff Weddell © SCI FI Channel

As Sanctuary 1 Productions got underway in early 2008, the company considered a suggestion from Wilson that the team shoot with the Red One camera, which had garnered enthusiastic reviews from feature directors Peter Jackson and Steven Soderbergh. “But no one had shot a series like this with Red before,” Wilson says.

Geddes recalls that the insurance company backing the production was skeptical and wanted some quality-control testing to be done. “We wanted to be the first to use it for television,” he says.

The results dazzled him, and not just because of Red's ease of use, which allows Geddes to do 30 to 50 setups a day. “The biggest surprise was the image quality,” he says. A veteran DP with TV credits including 21 Jump Street, Men in Trees, Dark Angel, and Beverly Hills, 90210, Geddes is no stranger to shooting greenscreens for visual effects — including huge diorama sequences for Night At The Museum. Sanctuary represents the first time that this diehard film DP has shot digitally. “I skipped HD,” he says with a smile. Geddes quickly became a Red convert because the system allows him to use his preferred film lenses, including Cooke Optics S4/i primes and three Angenieux Optimo zooms: 24mm-290mm, 15mm-40mm, and 17mm-80mm.

“The cool thing about Red is that they've taken a 35mm gate or full sensor — to use film terms — and applied it to this medium,” Winn says. “So David can use film lenses rather than video lenses and get a very filmic look in terms of qualities like depth of field.”

Geddes says a lot of attention is paid to the capture capabilities of digital cameras, but that misses a crucial point: the power of the lenses in getting what a DP wants. “The biggest part is the glass,” he says. “Without that, it's like having the hairs missing on a brush.”

While Wood rehearses the actors for a shot in which they'll have to imagine the greenscreen floor caving in, Geddes pulls up a shot on his Apple MacBook Pro to illustrate what the Sanctuary team has achieved thus far. He plays a sweeping crane shot that flies from high above a cityscape down to a two-shot of actors standing on a parapet. It's a Hitchcockian move, and the only real elements are the actors.

The color and the subtleties of the images Geddes is capturing are striking, with subtle details even in the shadows. Geddes runs the color-correction program Apple Color on his laptop to get what he calls a starting point. “It's part of Final Cut Studio,” he says. “The final coloring is done with Color in 4K at Anthem.” Geddes acknowledges that the dynamic range of color he's getting with Red might not equal what he can get with 35mm film, but on balance, he says, things even out. “If you shoot film and then scan it for visual effects, you lose some of that range anyway.”

“The Red camera records from 100 ISO to 2000 [ISO] — a pretty good range terms of sensitivity,” Winn says. “Film stock only goes up to 1000 [ISO] right now. If I want, I can add light artificially.” With a few keystrokes on his Mac, Winn tweaks an image to demonstrate the amount of latitude that exists. “The possibilities are endless. But people shouldn't think they can fix something in post just because there is more latitude to play with. If the exposure values aren't there, it translates badly down the pipeline. It's not easier just because you have more options.”

To accomplish the goal of photorealism for the show, Visual Effects Supervisor and Co-producer Lee Wilson and his team at Anthem Visual Effects use 2d3 boujou and Science.D.Visions 3D-Equalizer to integrate CG elements with the high-resolution Red footage. In many cases, the actors have few or no physical elements to interact with on the greenscreen set. Photos: Sanctuary/Anthem Visual Effects

While Winn's position as data-acquisition supervisor is a new job category, the challenge for the digital-effects team is as daunting as ever, considering that RAW files from the Red camera arrive at Anthem on 10MB drives every day. Anthem, which is a Mac-based studio located in downtown Vancouver, makes regular use of Apple iChat software to communicate with the editorial staff back at the bicycle factory.

“We always have a cut from them so I can see how a shot plays at full res,” Wilson says. Anthem's visual-effects comps are then shown for approval to Sci Fi Channel execs via secure FTP sites. While the Sanctuary team is proud of being an all-Canadian production, they can't let physical distance slow them down. Especially when they have only about seven months to complete 13 episodes containing thousands of effects shots.

Because digital effects are so central to Sanctuary, Wilson is actually a co-producer of the show as well as visual-effects supervisor. From his office at the bicycle factory, he can pull up any element from Anthem's archives. But what he calls his favorite shot from Sanctuary — at least so far — isn't an elaborate landscape of the Himalayas or Rome, or the virtual stone-and-glass cages where Dr. Magnus houses her exotic creatures. It's a shot of Magnus walking down a long corridor talking to a colleague. As the camera tracks with them, the spacious interior of a building Anthem created digitally recedes into the distance, just as it would if it really existed.

Unlike the virtual sets in the films 300 and Sin City, which conveyed the feeling of graphic novels, Sanctuary aims for a more photoreal style. The production has photographed a variety of locations, such as gritty alleyways in Vancouver, and Anthem has blended them with pure CG to create hybrid environments. It's not unusual for a scene to begin with a shot following a real police car down an actual street, only to have it turn a corner and enter a virtual environment. It's up to Wilson to determine which environments are worth doing later in CG and when shooting practically makes economic and creative sense. Wilson definitely photographs practical effects such as fire whenever possible. “I'm the one who has to ring the reality bell,” he says with a wry smile.

Wilson, who co-founded Anthem four years ago with Visual Effects Producer Lisa Sepp-Wilson and Digital Effects Supervisor Sébastien Bergeron, brings 30 years of experience to bear on Sanctuary. He has worked on both optical and digital visual effects for miniseries, television movies, and feature films — including director David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He has also earned Emmy nominations for the Sci Fi Channel shows Legend of Earthsea and Tin Man.

For his visual-effects team on Sanctuary, the use of the Red One camera has meant that it's faster and cleaner to pull keys. The greenscreen footage that Anthem gets every day is copiously dotted with tracking markers, and the studio uses both 2d3 boujou and Science.D.Visions 3D-Equalizer to integrate CG elements with Geddes' camera moves. But Wilson says that the integration process is far from automated. “A lot of hand-tracking is still required,” he says. “I want these effects to hold up on my big plasma-screen TV.”

Sanctuary features lots of digital extras, but Wilson says that cyber-scans of actors weren't required. “Where we needed digital avatars, we got the information from photographs,” he says. The bigger challenge for Anthem's CG Supervisor Les Quinn is modeling and animating the show's bizarre digital creatures — which includes a mermaid, a creepily hairless wolf, a human-sized lizard, and a man with faces on both the back and front of his head. One of the more difficult of the abnormals, as the monsters in Sanctuary are called, is a boy with a snake-like tentacle that sprouts from his torso. The production uses prominent makeup effects, but achieving what series creator Damian Kindler has called the “freak of the week” usually falls to the CG animators at Anthem. “And there are episodes that have more than one creature, too,” Wilson says with a sigh.

The completed shots from Sanctuary are being delivered to the Sci Fi Channel on HD tape, and Winn notes the irony of that. “HD technology hovers around 2 megapixels, and the Red image [information] is HD times four,” he says. “So what will be broadcast is only going to do one-quarter justice to these images. But that's where TVs are right now.”

Sanctuary 1 also has to keep 1/2in. magnetic tapes in its archives to satisfy the concerns of its insurance company. Capturing camera data direct to disk is so new, Winn says, “that it worries some people. With digital, nothing feels tangible.”

At the last stop in the process, the 42-person crew at Anthem is working day and evening shifts to finish Sanctuary by mid-December. Wilson was able to hang onto several of the talents that Anthem had hired for Tin Man, but he says, “I could do this show more comfortably with twice as many people as I have now!”