It’s late in the 21st century. The earth’s surface has become uninhabitable, forcing humankind underground where a modest, yet successful, functioning civilization exists. Making that journey down the dark passage to the underworld appear as if shot on camera, not created in a computer, was a challenging feat for Doug Campbell and his crew at Toronto’s Sundog Films, Stargate Studios’ feature post division.

Shepherd is an apocalyptic fantasy feature out of Toronto’s Producers Network Associates that takes place in a cybertech wasteland. Producing the film, ball-parked at $2.5 million, are G. Philip Jackson and Daniel D’or. Peter Hayman is the director, Graeme Mears is dop and Nelu Ghiran wrote the script.

The players include C. Thomas Howell (e.t., The Outsiders) as Boris Dakota, an assassin who wants out of the killing business, and Roddy Piper (better known as ‘Rowdie Roddy Piper’ from the Wrestlemania ring), who plays Miles, a psychotic television evangelist and leader of The Holy Process cult.

According to Campbell, the problem with a lot of cg is that it doesn’t look believable or realistic – ‘It screams cg.’ And when it came to adding some sci-fi effects to Shepherd, Campbell was shooting for a film look, especially difficult to achieve in this case because there were no photographic elements to work from and everything was created from scratch.

The sci-fi adventure is the tenth feature for pna and the latest in a long list of collaborations between Sundog and the production company. Titles include The Cusp (featuring 20 minutes and over 150 scenes of cgi including starfields, asteroids and composited scenes of astronauts), Future Fear and Deadly Wake, their first job together which cemented the relationship.

To get the opening ‘money shot’ which transports the audience underground, animator Mario Ferreira blocked out the shot in basic wire form and built a camera move using that data. Once happy with what was on screen, details, textures and geometry, created by May Leung and Kent Ing, were added as needed.

Aside from the opening scene’s tricky cgi sequence, done on Alias Power Animator, the film is filled with holographic effects, created using a traditional black-and-white displacement map, to create the ghostly images roaming the streets of the sci-fi underworld.

There are a total of seven minutes of special effects in Shepherd (a relatively small amount compared to other pna movies), including numerous background elements. Sundog also created the gothic-styled opening title, the credits and some psychedelic backgrounds.

In the scene calling for the psychedelic effects, Dakota dons virtual-reality glasses in an effort to revisit happier times with his murdered wife and child and finds himself dancing on the front lawn of his home. In contrast to the realistic film look Campbell wanted for the film’s opening, these backgrounds – created by Mac artist Cisco Ribas on Photoshop using After Effects and composited on Flint – have a syrupy-sweet surrealism to them to put a ‘nice piece of art behind those shots on the green screen.’

And while there is still a month’s worth of work to go on Shepherd, pna’s Jackson says the wheels are already in motion for a sequel, with Sundog handling all special effects.

Aside from the mountain of work that has come Sundog’s way from pna since it opened its doors early last year, the post house has applied its expertise to 12 features including love story The Assistant and romantic comedy Dinner At Fred’s, both from Paragon.

Although 90% of the work coming out of Sundog is features from Canada and l.a., the company continues to be strong on the commercial front.

‘Because we are so busy on the feature end we are able to get more artists in. The more artists you have, the more you can draw from them. You get better tools to work with and a better end result,’ says Campbell of the spots coming out of Sundog.

As for software, Sundog’s third-floor, back-alley studio is fully equipped with Flint, Alias, SoftImage and Hollywood as well as Henry and Harry, enabling them to do high-end, multilevel compositingr. The post house is also investing heavily in Windows nt, which they now have running on Intel and Alpha.

Campbell says the Canadian post-production climate looks better than ever, with Canadian houses gaining worldwide recognition and more local digital artists and animators choosing to keep their talent at home.

Among the projects Sundog has quoted on recently is a project Campbell is particularly keen to do – a big-budget, non-North American feature film requiring a lot of high-end equipment and staff which Sundog would composite as well as shoot parts of, and which, Campbell says ‘would put Sundog Films on the map.’