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

All-CG aliens land at John Gajdecki p. 21

Buzz lands Yo-Yo Ma in jail p. 22

Eyes strives for best of both worlds p. 24

Network: Ole! p. 25

Animators at Vancouver’s Northwest Imaging and fx are channeling their energy, so to speak, into your tv set for the new mgm pilot Poltergeist.

gm Alex Tkach says over 1,000 visual effects were used in the two-hour pilot that’s expected to be broadcast mid-May on Showtime in the u.s. before making its way to Canadian tvs as a movie.

Compare this with roughly 130 visual effects in an episode of The X-Files to get an idea of the attention to detail in this project. mgm is spending $500,000 in digital effects for the pilot.

Flame artist Brian Moyland and Henry artist Jim Flinn are just two of the animators breathing life into an alien whose skull breaks through its head, and who takes over people’s bodies. Besides skull reveals, expect weird perspectives and background compositing – like things happening in the sky and people walking through closed doors.

In another Northwest project, visual effects producer Tony Dow joins producer Tony Weir to recreate Dr. Who. This is one show that boasts transparent characters, literally. When a 3D visible model of an alien is changed by a lightning strike, it appears organic with the help of see-through type effects. Animators are also busy morphing faces like the demon with an animated serpent’s tongue whose facial features contort into something evil.

Not strange enough for you? Northwest is also working on Profit by Cannell and New World, due in April on Fox. The nighttime drama is set around a weird character named Profit who, while sitting naked in front of a computer in a den, climbs the corporate ladder. Using virtual reality imagery like that found in the movie Disclosure, Profit climbs into a supercomputer database to find out personal information about people and blackmail them.