Vancouver: From the helicopter, the devastation of New York City is vast. City Hall has collapsed, the Manhattan Bridge is in tatters, One Police Plaza is crumpled beneath a shorn-away skyscraper.

At least this is the devastation created by the special effects artists at Vancouver’s Rainmaker Entertainment, which is handling the 100-plus effects shots required by the four-hour cbs miniseries Aftershock.

In the story, characters played by the likes of Sharon Lawrence and Cicely Tyson endure a major earthquake in the Big Apple.

The real tremors, however, are being felt at Rainmaker where the impact of Aftershock – at $20 million, the most expensive miniseries made in b.c. – has created the biggest effects job in the company’s history. At $3 million, the effects budget is bigger than last year’s milestone, the science fiction story Max Q.

The challenge for Rainmaker this time, though, was taking the modern-day facade of one of the most famous skylines in the world and believably turning it into rubble.

A key sequence for Rainmaker, for instance, is a helicopter aerial shot in which a reporter details the damage throughout the city.

It’s the same tour Rainmaker effects supervisor Lee Wilson took a few months back when he shot landmarks such as the Manhattan Bridge – before Aftershock’s mythical quake.

As part of one particularly complicated effect, Wilson’s helicopter flew over New York’s City Hall buildings on a Sunday morning, the chopper’s shadow moving across the ground cover. Post quake, however, the roadways are jammed and the two main buildings are in ruin. Tiny figures flee the buildings as smoke and dust rise toward the helicopter.

Using Wilson’s original flight as the basic plate, Rainmaker’s computer graphics and compositing team kicked into gear to depict the damage.

They built a new freeway filled with stalled cg cars. They rebuilt the City Hall buildings in rubble. They added debris and damage to the surrounding buildings. They planted cg trees. And they kept the shadow of the helicopter moving over top of the moving scene.

‘It’s more challenging than dealing with locked shots,’ says lead compositor Stephen Pepper. ‘The scenes have to look believable. You can see stuff like this in documentaries on tv and people have an idea of what a city would look like after a disaster like this.’

The show has many tracking shots requiring the cg artists and compositors to use smart software. The ruined buildings and other three-dimensional aspects of a scene are created in Lightwave 3D software. Tracking capabilities allow the camera to move realistically around the fictionalized cg buildings.

Aftershock has been composited on Henry, Inferno, Jaleo and Flame.

‘A show like this has every kind of shot,’ says Wilson, a veteran of the Robocop television series who began breaking down the script last October.

‘Certainly some of the complexity we haven’t done before, but the artists are up to the challenge and are coming through.’

Another aerial shot includes the destruction of One Police Plaza. As a squat building, it withstood the tremors, but the face of the telecommunications high-rise next door has fallen away, crushing Manhattan’s police headquarters below it.

Again the freeways are jammed, and tiny survivors run for their lives across the concourse.

A scene in which the helicopter flies down the East River across the city’s skyline includes a rendering of a cg helicopter, from which the reporter makes her eyewitness reports. The spans of the Manhattan Bridge have fallen away and the bridge decks have plunged into the water below.

‘There is no reason these effects wouldn’t hold up on the big screen,’ says Wilson in reference to Rainmaker’s longer-term goals to capture more of the feature work in Vancouver such as Disney’s Mission to Mars. ‘The only difference is rendering them in high resolution.’

A spectacular moving action shot takes place in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The original live-action shot – a tracking shot angled up across the face of a derelict Vancouver building – is almost completely remade with cg mattes and animation.

With Rainmaker’s computer graphics, the short brick building gains many new floors and a large vertical neon sign for the fictional White Tiger Imports.

In the midst of the quake (and the camera pan) the elderly building begins to fall away, with the White Tiger sign pulling off the facade and falling into the street below.

The breakaway sign is cg and blends seamlessly with the live-action sign that was dropped from a crane on the cars below. The cg artists and compositors added sparks, camera shake, falling cg bricks, dust clouds and reflections in the many layers of the scene.

More simple locked shots include the destruction of the fire hall.

Originally, the basic plate was a straight-ahead shot of the live-action scene staged against Vancouver’s old Woodward’s building: fire trucks stuck in their garages by debris, fires burning out front, stunned people milling about. While the bottom of the shot is dedicated to live action, the top of the shot is all cg, which masks out the Vancouver skyline, recreates a New York skyline, builds more floors onto the ruined fire hall and adds smoke and shafts of light.

Aftershock is produced by Hallmark Entertainment and Vancouver’s Pacific Motion Pictures and will air on cbs this fall. Rainmaker was recently nominated for its first two Emmys including one for Max Q in the category of special effects for a miniseries or a movie.