Like many nostalgic television series which once entertained the after-school crowd, Lost In Space has been revamped for the ’90s, hitting the big screen April 3 complete with over 700 complex visual effects executed in part by Toronto’s Command Post/toybox, which continues its move into the feature film domain.

The New Line Cinema film, packed with high-tech robots and creepy creatures from distant galaxies, called on half a dozen u.k. post-production facilities to complete the job. toybox, the only North American facility involved in what is essentially a made-in-England production, was entrusted to work on about 20 shots through u.k.-based post house The Film Factory, a division of vtr.

With only 10 days to turn the shots around, visual effects artists Alex Boothby, Jonathon Gibson, Rob Gyorgy and Paul Rigg composited live action with 3D elements and handled color correction on the shop’s Quantel Domino film system.

The scene delegated to toybox is the climax of the film in which Spider Smith (played by Gary Oldman) removes his cloak revealing to Professor John Robinson (played by William Hurt) his half-man/half-spider physique. Steve Robinson, vp of operations for cp/toybox, says the scene is one of the most technically challenging sequences in the movie.

The whole exercise was to make the 3D situation sit comfortably in the environment. The Film Factory put together background plates of Hurt playing out the action of the scene, created a 3D character to match with his actions, and sent the lot to toybox via the Internet.

Using the Domino, toybox visual effects artists combined the images and matched up the lighting, texture and grain, making the sci-fi scene look realistic.

‘The removal of the cloak was a very complex shot,’ explains Robinson. ‘Gary Oldman is wearing a green suit under the cloak, and what we had to do was produce a whole series of garbage mattes and tracking mattes to complete the reveal. There was a lot of color correction and balancing to make it look like he was actually the 3D spider creature under the cloak, which was probably the most difficult thing we did.’

Other feature films which have passed through the Domino over the last two years include The Game starring Michael Douglas and Miramax’s Mimic.

Although the folks at toybox will not reveal details at this time, there is some excitement in the air surrounding a large, new project for which they will be designing many of the shots.

According to Robinson, toybox is rapidly moving towards more feature film work. ‘Increasingly, what we are trying to do is offer a whole package of services to the client that would be doing a feature project. We are incorporating a full effects facility and offering high-end computer graphics for film in addition to motion-control work.’

Also under the Command Post umbrella, Manta Eastern Sound has had its share of feature work, recently recording the 25-piece Esprit Orchestra for the audio track of Don McKellar’s bittersweet comedic drama Last Night out of Rhombus Media.

The studio itself can handle up to an 80-piece orchestra, the only recording studio in Canada capable of holding that many musicians. The 2,400-square-foot orchestral recording stage played host to a 75-piece orchestra for Warner Bros.’s Free Willy 3, it was used for imax’s Space Trilogy, k.d. lang recorded the theme song for the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, and last fall U2 paid a visit to remix and rerecord vocals for a song.

Manta Eastern has recently upgraded one of its five digital workstations to a digital multitrack recording system called Octavia. The new system allows the Manta team to record many different tracks directly onto a computer hard disc and enables them to edit, manipulate, equalize, add reverb and digital processing in the computer very quickly. A second Octavia will be arriving next month.

Also beefing up its digital capabilities, Medallion pfa recently installed a Dolby Digital Discreet System for digital audio mixing, which gives the Medallion team control over the right, left and center sounds of the movie theater in addition to right surround, left surround, center surround and a sub woofer. With the new digital recording, specific sounds can move from the back of the theater to the front or stay in one specific area.

Medallion was recently honored with the Motion Picture Sound Editors Golden Reel award for best sound editing in a television miniseries – sound effects and foley, and a Gemini for best sound in a dramatic program or series for its work on The Arrow (The Film Works/Tapestry Films/John-Aaron Productions).