The scale of digital special F/X produced by Montreal’s BIG BANG FX/Animation for the new live-action family series The Neverending Story may accurately be described as fantastic, with as many as 250 to 300 F/X shots in the first nine (of 13) episodes alone.

F/X on the show include ‘complete virtual cities ready to be used from any angle – cityscapes in which we can actually land a plane,’ says series F/X producer and BIG BANG president Mario Rachiele.

Rachiele calls F/X such as The Neverending Story’s cityscapes ‘amortized effects, because it takes four months to build, but once it’s built it can be used throughout the series.’

BIG BANG has created major 3D elements that integrate with live-action footage in the series, which is set in both the real world of a young boy and the world of his vivid imagination, called Fantasia. These elements include a dragon-like airplane called The Flying Machine and the Dark City, a vast, hellish cityscape floating on a volcanic sea cloud ruled by the Dark Princess of Fantasia. The show features frequent shape-shifting and computer morphing, such as when a character changes from a wolf to a man, and extensive motion-tracking sequences, which requires a time-consuming production process that yields rewarding results.

Rachiele says the F/X work on The Neverending Story is likely to create ‘a new standard in episodic television storytelling, because half of every hour is set on Earth and the other half is set in Fantasia, the realm of the fantastic.’ He adds: ‘The future of digital special F/X is in their seamlessness and overall enhancement of the story.’

The Neverending Story is a Canadian/German copro between Muse Entertainment Enterprises and The Movie Factory Film GmbH of Munich. Exec producers are Muse’s Michael Prupas and Rolf Schneider of The Movie Factory. Dieter Geissler, a producer on the franchise’s feature films, is the series’ creative producer. The producer is Irene Litinsky. Supervising producers and writers are David Preston and Leila Basen.

The series is being shot in Sony CineAlta 24P High-Definition and is budgeted at close to $20 million, using cutting-edge design and techniques including matte paintings, models, mechanical trompe l’oeil and digital F/X.

Twelve-year-old Mark Rendall (Olivier, Screech Owls) stars as the imaginative boy who enters Fantasia. The series is based on the Michael Ende novel of the same name, which to date has inspired three feature films. The new series is the first live-action version for worldwide TV.

Benoit Briere, the series’ F/X supervisor on set, is part of a dedicated BIG BANG team of 10 to 15 full-time employees on the show, which includes 3D animators, digital compositors, storyboard artists and matte painters.

Careful preparation is the essential ingredient in meeting budgets and production deadlines, but Rachiele says one factor in BIG BANG’s favor is experience. ‘We have almost all senior [staff] working here because [that way] you can do a lot more with fewer people.’

Rachiele says an all-encompassing winning pitch submission for The Neverending Story included storyboards, concept boards, prices and the how’s and why’s of shooting.

BIG BANG is using a wide range of software on the show, including Softimage|3D, Discreet’s 3ds max 4 and AfterWorks’ AfterBurn.

‘We take the best parts of everything,’ says Rachiele. ‘The Discreet Flame and Inferno allow us to fix anything, whether it’s a mistake in lighting or a wrong-side source, but the producer doesn’t want that. They want us to shoot it right the first time.’

One of The Neverending Story’s most spectacular ‘amortized’ CGI elements is The Dark City. In one green screen live-action sequence, CGI enhancements and extensions turn a dozen or so Dark Knights crossing the bridge from the Dark City into an army of thousands.

Other F/X created at BIG BANG include vicious ‘snow snakes’ that fight live-action warriors, who in turn chop off their heads, and the Dark Queen’s ‘pet,’ an evil rolling cloud of smoke that envelopes peasants and turns them into zombies.

As with a stunt sequence in an action movie, digital F/X have to first serve the story, says director Giles Walker (Emily of New Moon, Princes in Exile).

‘It takes an enormous amount of planning,’ he adds. ‘I’ve been working with BIG BANG, which I think is an excellent company, and we’ve had to plan down to the frame. And the CGI contribution can’t be minimized, because it can’t sort of half work – it has to work perfectly for it to work at all.’

Careful planning and exacting constraints on an intense CGI shoot mean ‘You can’t be as flexible on the day,’ says Adam Weissman (Live Through This; Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), who shares directing duties with Walker. ‘You can’t be as spontaneous, because since you are doing this in pieces, one is forced to commit to something farther in advance (than) you might otherwise do with live-action only.’

In a scene mixing live-action with blue-screen elements, Weissman shot two speaking parts separately, first framing the Fly Girl and then using the existing taped background with the Fly Girl to correctly position and shoot a wired animatronic Turtle. Many scenes incorporate ‘extensions,’ which means extending a real set to outsized, fantastic proportions through CGI, such as in the case of the Wizard’s infinitely long library.

HD Origination

Cinematographer Daniel Villeneuve (The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, Karmina 2) says he mainly shoots ‘straight images’ originating on HD tape, with finishing done in the PAL format at Global Vision, where the main post work, including color-correction, is also handled.

Villeneuve says HD is a very viable medium for intensive CGI production.

‘Many people will say 16mm doesn’t cut it for special F/X, which I agree with,’ he says. ‘If you shoot 35mm you have to scan it back to 2K resolution, which is a bit less than what HD provides. So you save all the scanning in and out, which costs a tremendous amount of money and [the F/X producers] can work directly from the originating material [input] into the computer and direct the effects.’

Villeneuve is using Sony HDW-F900 cameras, which record at 24 frames per second, emulating film by creating a natural ‘motion blur’ typically lost in regular 30 fps video. The lens set-up includes the new Canon 5.5-50mm zoom and 7.8-144mm. ‘The short zoom [in the new Canon package] is great, but there’s room for improvement with the long one,’ he says.

And although care has to be taken lighting actors as they stand in front of the green cyclorama, Villeneuve says the oft-cited ‘depth of field’ issue is ‘mostly a lame excuse.’

‘I use neutral density filters on the camera to control aperture and exposure,’ he explains. ‘Smaller apertures increase depth of field, so I never close down to more than T2.8 or 3.5. I also try to use longer focal lengths for shots.’

Villeneuve says HD cinematography is still in its early days. ‘We cannot be wireless. We have to use a down converter [for onset monitoring].’

Design and physical F/X

Production designer Colin Niemi (All Souls, Red Violin, Barney’s Great Adventure) signed on early to The Neverending Story. His first task was determining whether certain F/X could be done with CGI or as less costly animatronics or mechanical F/X: ‘After that, the director and I sat down with the storyboard artists and storyboarded all the F/X shots for each episode.’

Despite various existing adaptations, Niemi says he wants this production to ‘stand on its own merit’ in design terms.

‘I intentionally didn’t watch any of the [feature] films,’ he admits. ‘There was no point, because the technology has changed so much in 20 years, as have the look and styles. [Our production] primarily reflects the original book and our scripts, and from that we just tried to create a world that is as fantastic as we could make it.’

The show’s ‘real world’ look is contemporary, with a slightly nostalgic small-town film noir feel.

Niemi says one of the shoot’s biggest challenges has been to create a huge multi-purpose German forest in the studio, ‘and then recycling that set and making the forest turn into a jungle.’

The show’s key animatronic piece is Morla, a wise, 10,000 year old turtle. Niemi says CGI was used to matte in the turtle’s extending neck. ‘It’s so seamless between what we do with animatronics and CGI.’

Two major props include the Luckdragon and the Flying Machine, in both mechanical and CGI representations.

Twins FX is handling the shoot’s prosthetic specialty make-up and also constructed Morla and a smaller hand-held puppet called the ‘Crack Monster.’

Other ‘in-house’ F/X artists who have worked on the steel-framed dragon-like Flying Machine and the associated rigs include Martin Lanneuville, Matt Faulkner, Patrick Lee and sculptor Pascal Dufaux. Ronnie Gosselin is the builder of the shoot’s miniatures and specialty props.

Cineffects Productions (Abandon, Lost Junction) Ryal Cosgrove’s company, is handling Neverending’s atmospherics – all the smoke, wind and flying sparks. It is also performing custom mechanical and rig-effects, including scenes where doors fly off hinges and air cannons are used to generate bubbles from below the surface of the Red River in a plane-crash sequence.

‘What I want to feel is seamlessness between the CGI and what we shoot,’ Niemi reiterates. ‘It’s very important the texture matches everything we do and there’s a certain realness to everything.’

The Neverending Story will be edited in half-hour, one-hour and eight two-hour packages.

Hallmark Entertainment has rights in English-track international markets, including the U.S. and the U.K. Shooting at the Ice Storm Studios in Montreal continues through to August. *