Vancouver: For Vancouver’s Northwest Imaging and FX, completing Zenon Girl of the 21st Century was remarkable not only because of the scope and demands of the sci-fi MOW but that the company could rally from a summer of poaching by rival Rainmaker Entertainment.

According to VP and GM Alex Tkach, Northwest lost 11 people – or 33% of its staff roster – to Rainmaker, which was bolstering its own visual effects department for projects such as the recently aired Max Q. He scoured the globe looking for talent, finding, for instance, compositors from Australia.

At the same time, Northwest expanded its services to include film transfer with its new Ursa Diamond, installed in August.

It was a dynamic period into which fell the Disney Channel MOW Zenon, the family-oriented story of a 13-year-old tomboy who foils a plot to sabotage the space station where she lives. The first Disney project ever to walk in Northwest’s door, the MOW was budgeted at US$5 million, while the effects budget came in under $500,000.

Tkach says Northwest, in its bid to win the job, was able to dissect the Zenon script and provide Disney with examples of shots completed for other shows, such as The X-Files.

All through production in August and September at a studio on Williams Street in Vancouver, Northwest supervised the visual effects on set and fed 175,000 feet of 16mm film through its transfer unit.

Modelers and renderers began preliminaries on the gyroscope-inspired space station and the space shuttle. Then, as production was winding down, the effects department – overseen by visual effects director Paul Cox and creative director Carlos Rusansky – geared up to complete 49 visual effects shots by the first week of November.

‘We were able to work with the same plans as the set builders,’ says Cox, who supervised the visual effects elements shot on set, ‘and we were able to build in parallel to the live-action production.’ The goals, he adds, were to create realistic images that were not too ‘CGI-ey.’

‘Audiences are visually literate, so you can’t scrimp,’ says Cox.

In one scene, for example, Zenon visits her parents in their lab in which a lab rat is suspended in a zero-gravity cylinder. Normally, the rat would have been created on computer, but Disney wanted a more realistic look.

In the live-action portion, Zenon sits at a console with the cylinder, though the cylinder’s front is removed. The actor puts her hand into the cylinder to poke at the soon-to-be-added rat, which was separately shot on blue screen. (Actually, a rat wrangler had accustomed two rats to being suspended and moved by wires.) And then the front of the cylinder was shot against black.

Assembled, the elements merge seamlessly and, according to Northwest, Disney was so impressed with the effect that the rat was used in two scenes.

In another major effect, a space shuttle lands on a pad in False Creek, just outside the futuristically designed B.C. Pavilion building. A so-called ‘hero’ shot for its importance in the story line, the shuttle landing connects the space shuttle to Earth. (For her mischievousness on the space station, Zenon is ‘grounded’ by her parents and sent to her aunt on Earth.)

The sequence uses 130 layers of imagery.

The live-action portion is a manual pan in Vancouver’s False Creek with people milling about the pavilion and the leaves of a tree in the foreground. CGI artists, using Soft Image, created the space shuttle and moved its landing pattern in concert with the pan. The fuselage, windows and navigational lights are separate CGI elements, while compositors in Henry created water ripples, reflections and mists.

The big establishing shot, however, comes within the first frames of the production. Zenon, waking up on the space station, takes a casual look out of a porthole. The ‘camera’ then pulls back to eventually show the rotating space station in orbit around Earth – a kind of homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For the scene to work aesthetically and depict the scale of the images with any justice, the shot had to be extended from the budgeted 12 seconds to 25 seconds, says Cox.

A live-action sequence of groggy Zenon peering through the slats of the window and walking out of frame was composited with the all-CGI elements of the space station, including the textured exteriors of the station, the star field background, the shadows moving across the station and Mother Earth in the distance.

Other shots included space-walking effects and 11 shots of a hologram teacher transmitted from Earth to a virtual classroom on the space station.

An air date for Zenon was not known at press time.