It’s spring and post-production minds are busting out all over with a typically all-encompassing range of projects; the weird, the wonderful and the invisible.

Some of the industry’s best and brightest shared the gritty details of recent post-production and effects efforts and they appear to have all the bases covered. The time-tested classics were there – aliens, explosions, adrenaline-addled acts of derring-do, rendered in new and inventive ways – as well as the classics-to-be – caged musicians, peripatetic tattoos and, naturellement, talking dogs.

Also in this report:

Krech transports tattoo, factory p. 16

First pal/widescreen series goes to the dogs at Supersuite p. 17

TOPIX’s retros scenes are for kids p. 18

Airwalk extravaganza at Rainmaker p. 18

CGI ante up at Cinar Studios p. 19

A chilling number of poltergeist effects at Northwest p. 20

Buzz lands Yo-Yo Ma in jail p. 22

Eyes strives for best of both worlds p. 24

Network: Ole! p. 25

The people at Toronto’s John Gajdecki Visual Effects, normally a solid, down-to-earth bunch, are gaining expertise in what it’s like to be totally transparent while assembling the special effects for the Cannell pilot Them, which shot March 7 to April 6 in b.c.

They, of course, are space miscreants who employ electrical energy to travel to Earth to collect humans to transport back to their home planet for purposes of evil experimentation.

The aliens conduct themselves on Earth in human form, but occasionally transform themselves into their natural state – a translucent humanoid form with innards, including mutated skeletal frame and pulsating organs on full display.

John Campfens, a director at John Gajdecki Visual Effects and effects supervisor on the project, says one of the biggest challenges in the show was creating the aliens and incorporating the human-alien character transformation.

Campfens says the transparent aliens will be 100% cg – no blue screens, no prosthetics, no stop motion.

‘It’s very difficult, everything is made on a 3D cgi platform,’ says Campfens. ‘The usual way to do this is to do a transformation from a live actor into a prosthetic and do a morph between the two. But we decided because of the transparency of the alien it would be best to do everything on the computer.’

The creatures will be built with Alias 3D animation software, and Campfens says the creation process includes a series of tests for building each element of the alien, including skin plates, skeletal plates, vein plates, and compositing them so one layer becomes more prominent than the next.

3D artist Thomas Schelesny of Vancouver’s Northwest Imaging and FX is also contributing to the creation of the aliens.

Campfens says the show, which will air on an as-yet-undetermined date on the United Paramount Network, contains 59 effects sequences thus far, which may climb to about 70, making for a very effects-intensive pilot.

According to Campfens, the show’s executive producer, Kim LeMasters, envisioned the aliens as ‘scary but not grotesque,’ and a series of alien designs were considered before the current model was accepted.

Shooting took place at the Britannia Mines near Vancouver, which serves as the alien headquarters, while models of parts of the mine and a derrick, which serves as a main transporter for electrical energy, were built in Toronto by The Model Shop. Models will be blown up and composited with background plates and a pyro shoot for one of the explosive final scenes. Campfens says both Flint and Flame will be used for compositing.

Campfens will also have to deal with making an evil space dog get sucked into the grate of a car and disappear in a flourish of electricity and sparks.