For special effects supervisor Bruce Turner, The Book of Jamie G. is at once a challenge and a breath of fresh air sweeping clean the lingering vapors of death and destruction: ‘It’s refreshing to work on something where nobody dies,’ he says.

The show, a half-hour pilot from Alliance in association with Disney, recently shot in Vancouver over six days. The half-hour is packed with a startling 87 effects shots, being handled out of Toronto’s John Gajdecki Visual Effects, with Turner overseeing the high-volume job and splitting up shots between Gajdecki and Vancouver’s Northwest Imaging and Effects.

Turner has been on the spook-and-space circuit for the past few seasons, working on series like mgm’s Poltergeist and Stargate and mgm/Atlantis’ The Outer Limits, shows that Turner says typically have about 30 to 40 effects shots per hour.

The density of Jamie G.’s effects put a greater emphasis on preplanning, work sharing and cost-effective alternatives for shots.

‘The biggest challenge of the show is the huge number of effects shots and doing them in such a way to get the most bang for the buck,’ says Turner. ‘The budget is pretty good for a half-hour, but once you start talking about 87 shots, it requires pulling a few rabbits out of hats.’

The show, aimed at youngsters aged 11 to 15, centers on an out-of-this-world laptop with magical properties belonging to the titular character, who had used the book as a diary. The foundation for the show is laid when Jamie loses the book and it ends up in the hands of the central character, a young girl named Mo, played by Jillian Harte Smith.

Having been passed over for admittance to space school, Mo, whom Alliance associate producer Tracey Dodokin says is an atypical 13-year-old girl, is seeking some alternative amusement. The book opens and Mo is introduced to Jamie (Dominic Zamprogna) and his plight; he has been shifted to a parallel universe and she decides to undertake his rescue.

Learning about Jamie through his diary entries and with the many powers of the book, including a cloak of invisibility and a matter-scanning and reproduction function, Mo is in for, ideally, a series’ worth of adventure.

‘The main character Mo is an interesting girl,’ says Dodokin. ‘So what interests her had to be something special and different. That’s where John Gajdecki Effects came in as far as creating something for us that would represent that to the viewer.’

Jamie G. was created and written by executive producer Steve Berman and directed by Ron Oliver, with Rose Lam producing. Disney will broadcast in the u.s. and the show has been licensed to the cbc here.

Five of the six days of shooting took place on location, including a ritzy home which was made over to look like a haunted house. The sixth day was in studio, with a half-day of green-screen shooting of Jamie and other characters to be composited later into different environments with Flint, Flame and Inferno.

Turner was heavily involved in preproduction and supervised the live-action shoot, which he says helped in delivering the producer’s vision accurately through the whole process. ‘It gives you a better feeling of continuity,’ says Turner. ‘I got a good feel for what the producers were looking for and was better able to deliver what they wanted.’

Shots were divvied up between the two facilities based on time constraints and the respective strengths of each, says Turner. One of the factors in bringing some of the shots to Northwest and a strategy for delivering all the shots cost-consciously was to plan and then execute some shots in an online suite with Northwest editor Rob Appleby.

‘When I was planning the shots in prepro I knew there were a lot, so I designed a lot of them to be put together in online because I knew that would make the best use of the budget and because Northwest has a great online editor,’ says Turner.

Turner says he planned about a quarter of the show’s compositing to be done in online by Appleby, who works on an Axial 20/20 edit controller with Charisma from u.k.-based Questech. The system allows the editor to undertake functions like mattes and more complicated positioning, color correction and keying for some of the shots.

‘For certain types of shots it’s a good and cost-effective way of doing things,’ says Turner. For a number of shots, for example, that feature Jamie against various backgrounds, landscapes were created at Northwest on Macs with Electric Image and Photoshop software. Backgrounds were then brought into online where details like moving clouds were added, and subsequently, elements of the characters shot on green screen were composited into the backgrounds.

Turner says because only locked-off shots were used for these sequences, things such as the tracking functions of more expensive systems like Henry were unnecessary.

The cg version of Jamie’s book was created at Gajdecki in Toronto, based on the physical model of the strange contrivance. The book provides the focus and is a key creative device in the show.

‘The book has capabilities and functions that Mo progressively learns about,’ says Turner. ‘And the basic concept for the book will give them a lot of latitude. It won’t get boring.’

In its resting state, the book looks like a flat blue stone with a symbol on it. As it magically opens, the book becomes a round configuration of about five stones, with a larger stone becoming the screen where Jamie G. appears to Mo.

Gajdecki’s Wendy Whaley created an animation for the book and the opening using Alias, texture mapping the stone to resemble the glass-like look of the model. Gajdecki’s David Alexander created the original tests for the book and Joel Skeete and Dug Claxton composited the book into scenes with Flint and Flame.

Turner says the book is shown opening and closing several times throughout the show, with the 3D model composited into scenes such as a background plate of Mo’s desk. The book begins to open on the desk and that composite is brought to Northwest, where 3D supervisor Matthew Talbot-Kelly composites Jamie into matte painting backgrounds created in cg. Talbot-Kelly then composites Jamie in his matte painting world into the screen of the 3D prop.

‘So what you get in the final shot is the prop sitting there and it comes to life and unfolds in this nice animation, and as it finishes unfolding, the screen comes to life and there’s Jamie talking on the screen,’ says Turner. ‘It’s a nice fluid shot.’

No air date has yet been set for the show.