The skewed, stylized look of Alliance Atlantis Communications’ new kids’ series I Was a Sixth Grade Alien incorporates a colorful mix of temporal and esthetic references, combining low-tech visuals, b-movie-grade effects and retro design with high-end, high-tech gadgetry and physical and visual effects. But every off-kilter, low-end element in the show is purely intentional; for the show’s producers, delivering an overall top-quality look was paramount, and it was this meeting of a strict quality mandate and a strict budget that resulted in the decision to shoot the show on digital high-definition video.

Twenty-two half-hour episodes of I Was a Sixth Grade Alien are being shot in Toronto over the next five months for eventual delivery to ytv and Fox Family in the u.s.

The show is being shot film style, using one Sony HDW 700 high-definition camcorder package, provided by Toronto’s Sim Video. Toronto’s Optix Digital Post & fx will offline and online the hd acquired material using a newly installed Sony HDW500 digital vtr with an HD525 down-converter in conjunction with the shop’s existing Jaleo system running on Silicon Graphics Octane. Audio will be handled at Crunch Recording, located in the Optix space. Additional effects and animation will be handled by Toronto’s toybox.

The current production/post setup has hd footage down-converted to 601 using the Sony system at Optix. The Sony hd vtr allows for 1080i digital hd output together with a 601 serial digital stream, where the image is displayed letterbox, squeezed or with edges cropped.

With this production/post configuration, producers have the advantage of being equipped to face an uncertain world of broadcast standards with the knowledge that shows are future-proofed for the possibility of high-definition broadcast down the road.

While there are several phases to hd production and post, and Optix plans further hd gearing-up to provide full hd post and up-conversion, Optix director of operations Robert Peace says the hd system at the shop allows producers a viable option for future-proofing and maximizing the cost/quality equation right now.

‘Clients have the option for projects with longer shelf lives to shoot on hd and reconform down the road,’ says Peace. ‘But even if there are no plans for hd broadcast and you’re down-converting material, this is about getting a great look and feel and quality.’

For the show’s producers, the primary concern wasn’t a high-definition tomorrow, it was delivering a high-quality fantasy look today within a reality-grounded budget. At $333,000 per episode, the show’s budget was austere for the number of effects planned, the detail of the sets and the overall look producers intended.

A visit to the set reveals the intention, to present a human and an alien world, both of which challenge the well-established conceptions of what end-of-millennium school, home and alien outpost look like.

Originally set on shooting on 16mm, executive producer Daphne Ballon and producer Claire Welland began maneuvering within budget boundaries and conducted a comprehensive investigation into various production possibilities.

The show originated with a series of books by children’s author Bruce Coville, optioned by Seaton McLean, president of Alliance Atlantis Television Production.

Ballon and writer/coproducer Sheri Elwood created the bible for a tv series interpretation, which chronicles the adventures of a small purple child alien navigating a new world of sixth grade on earth.

The story centers on Pleskit (played by Ryan Cooley) the titular school-thingy struggling with the juxtaposition of Earth norms and his alien heritage. Pleskit was brought to Earth by his parent, Meenom, played by Julian Richings (Hard Core Logo), an also-purple alien diplomat on a trade mission to Earth from the planet Hevi-hevi. As sidekicks and cultural filters, Pleskit adopts best friend Tim, an oddball sci-fi nut, and McNally, a styling bodyguard who accompanies his charge to school every day. Tim is played by Daniel Clark (Eerie, Indiana) and McNally is played by Panou.

Pop sensibility

The tales of sixth-grade turmoil unspool with a twisted sensibility, say producers, and the physical worlds of Pleskit and Tim as created on set reflect that skewed take on alien and kid life.

All the shooting takes place in a large northeastern Toronto studio, formerly an industrial switch factory. The primarily interior-shot action takes place among several focal points, including the hovering alien embassy, the classroom and Tim’s house.

All of the sets, which were designed by Tim Bider and Bill Fleming, are interpreted with a slightly slanted outlook. The embassy features grand intergalactic-type architecture but delivered in unexpected shapes and hues of purple and pink. The embassy houses Meenom’s office, guarded by the bouffant-coiffed secretary Buttsman, as well as Pleskit’s bedroom, featuring a spiky foam bed, which will levitate courtesy toybox visual effects.

toybox is providing visual effects to establish and enhance the look of the set, including enhancing the embassy, which is part physical model on set and part computer model created by Michael Starr.

toybox will do about 10 to 15 effects shots per show as well as create opening animations based on aac creative.

The show’s other non-human characters, like Grandpa – essentially a talking brain – and Pleskit’s pet Veeblax were created as physical effects by Walter Claasen.

The overall effect of the set is a low-tech/high-tech hybrid with a decidedly retro feel: more Jetsons that Star Trek, according to Ballon. The Earth-based sets, too, are outside of 1999 standard issue: Tim’s house is kitted out with several ’50s-through-’70s era-spanning design touches and a strange color palette.

‘It has a pop sensibility, drawing on older shows like Get Smart and Batman and Robin,’ says Welland.

Avoiding a `tapey’ feel

The stylized nature of the show meant that production values had to be carefully minded, says Welland, which informed the decision to opt for hd.

‘We wanted to invest the show with as much production value as we could; I think the sets are evidence of that,’ says Welland. ‘There’s sometimes a sense that because it’s a kids’ show you can just shoot it on video, but this show has such a high level of stylization that it kind of demands the production value that film lends.’

While looking to avoid a ‘tapey’ feel, the producers were compelled to investigate their video options. Examining the available high-definition footage yielded the expected wow factor, but Ballon says it was difficult to make a relevant comparison between beautiful shots of ‘daisies’ or ‘aardvarks’ and hd for a series like Alien.

‘We had to look at the tests and think what would happen if we shot our wacky little premise that way,’ says Ballon.

The producers sussed out digital video with film look added, which compared unfavorably to the hd with film-look approach they eventually chose. During research, the producers also checked out Filmline International/Talisman Crest’s 22-episode Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, a Montreal-based production which was the only other Canadian series to shoot in hd.

The end result, shooting in hd and applying a film-look process in post at Optix, has saved the project about $7,000 per episode in transfer and stock costs, money Welland says can then be put back into the show via set design.

The down-converted hd plus film-look process provides about a 15% improvement in quality over digital Betacam, as well as ensuring a 16:9 aspect ratio, says Optix owner George Levai.

The process also sidesteps the process of dubbing onto digital Betacam. At Optix, show footage acquired at 1080i with the Sony hdcam is converted to Beta sp and the edges cropped to 4:3 aspect ratio; the hd system at the shop allows this down-conversion with the options of squeezing, letterboxing or edge cropping the 16:9 image. The Beta sp material is offlined in Avid, the resultant edl is loaded into the shop’s system and online is done in Jaleo directly from the hd master.

Achieving a high-quality film look is a function of a four-step film-look process at Optix, facilitated by in-camera technique by dop Harald Bachman.

For the show’s hd tests, material was captured on set at high black levels, allowing more latitude during the online for color correction and other film-look processes. That process consists of color correction followed by application of a Jaleo tool called Equalize, which affects a film feel by ‘burning out’ highlights, lending softness and a feeling of depth.

A grain filter is then applied and the process is capped with application of a tool which approximates a 3:2 pull-down, serving to take away smoothness from motion on screen, applying a slight, filmic stutter.

‘It eliminates a lot of the giveaway characteristics of video,’ says Bachman.

On set, lighting is executed much as it would be shooting film, paying due attention to creating depth and to highlight details, says Bachman.

Major expansion

With its new hd capability, Optix is looking to u.s. as well as Canadian producers as markets for a down-converted, and eventually, a complete hd solution.

Optix is undergoing a major expansion, taking over the 5,400-square-foot C.O.R.E. Digital Picture space adjacent to its current office and effectively doubling in size. The shop has been working to provide a one-stop post solution, with offline, Jaleo compositing and effects and an Alias|Wavefront Maya animation system.

The company has already expanded with two new Avid offline suites dedicated to series work as well as a second Jaleo room for compositing. 3D graphics and animation work is currently underway for a two-part Cine Nova project on Cleopatra as well as a documentary project on Napoleon from that company.

Post expansion, Optix plans to continue with the next phase of its hd initiatives with a full hd suite for editing in hd and up-conversion, pending equipment availability, including the new sgi i/o card for hd, expected to debut at nab.