Virtual Helen

Stargate Digital used an extensive digital backlot to create CGbackgrounds for Helen of Troy.

USA Network's recent four-hour miniseries Helen of Troy,directed by John Kent Harrison, required visual effects capable ofshowing the scope of the ancient legendary war between theSpartans/Greeks and the Trojans. Of the show's approximately 250digital effects shots, most were built at Stargate Digital, Pasadena,Calif., to illustrate collisions of massive armies, large armadascrossing the ocean, and a gigantic, CG Trojan horse in the city ofTroy.

The “feature scope” of the effects, on a cabletelevision timeline and budget, was largely accomplished throughStargate's use of its virtual backlot of digital models, textures, andother assets, according to company president/CEO Sam Nicholson, whoalso served as Stargate's visual effects supervisor on the project.

“We worked on the show approximately a year,” saysNicholson. “The challenge was illustrating about 1,000 shipsmoving across the sea with digital sails, oars, oarsmen, 10,000 menfighting, the Trojan horse — almost all of those shots deeplylayered. In prep, about six months before the shoot, we startedgathering textures from our virtual library, including skies,landscapes, trees, rain, arrows, etc. We simultaneously startedbuilding new 3D elements [mainly in Maya and Softimage, later usingAfter Effects for compositing, in conjunction with 2d3 Boujou motiontracking software]. We knew, for instance, we would need a Trojanhorse, Greek ships, digital warriors, things like that.

“The first phase therefore consisted of gathering and buildingpieces we would need and making them photoreal. Many of these elementswe will now be able to repurpose for our next project for USA —their Spartacus miniseries. We don't deliver on that projectuntil Christmas, but we are now starting to prepare elements, and someof that material will come out of what we gathered for thisproject,” he says.

Nicholson adds that Stargate built a proprietary digital networkthat includes more than 25 terabytes of storage. This allowed thecompany to bring virtually all of Helen of Troy's footage intothe digital realm, letting artists in all departments worksimultaneously at HD resolution.

“Each shot in this show is deeply layered — some up to300 layers — and most every shot needs 30 to 40 revisions,”he says. “One shot in which Agamemnon greets 10,000 troops has370 layers — that's pretty dense. To do an entire four hours ofthat kind of stuff, we had to have tons of storage, combined with ahigh-speed fiber network and a render farm consisting of about 100dual-processor computers that we build ourselves. Our approach was totransfer virtually all the live-action footage [shot on location onMalta] into our tapeless environment, assemble the picture on our AvidDS, and work on the entire show in uncompressed HD.”