It’s spring and post-production minds are busting out all over with a typically all-encompassing range of projects; the weird, the wonderful and the invisible.

Some of the industry’s best and brightest shared the gritty details of recent post-production and effects efforts and they appear to have all the bases covered. The time-tested classics were there – aliens, explosions, adrenaline-addled acts of derring-do, rendered in new and inventive ways – as well as the classics-to-be – caged musicians, peripatetic tattoos and, naturellement, talking dogs.

Also in this report:

Krech transports tattoo, factory p. 16

First pal/widescreen series goes to the dogs at Supersuite p. 17

TOPIX’s retros scenes are for kids p. 18

Airwalk extravaganza at Rainmaker p. 18

CGI ante up at Cinar Studios p. 19

A chilling number of poltergeist effects at Northwest p. 20

All-CG aliens land at John Gajdecki p. 21

Eyes strives for best of both worlds p. 24

Network: Ole! p. 25

The people at Montreal’s Buzz Image Group have world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma locked in a virtual prison while Francois Girard (Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould) forces him to play Bach. You’d think such a celebrated musician could expect better treatment

While it may sound like a serious human rights violation, it’s really an exercise in art. Buzz is creating a 20-minute segment of ‘The Sound of the Carceri,’ one of six episodes in Rhombus Media’s tentatively titled Inspired By Bach series. Other episodes combine Mr. Ma and Bach’s cello suites with gardening, choreography, ice dancing and Kabuki.

‘The Sound of the Carceri’ places the cellist inside 3D interpretations of architecture, more specifically, the jails of Italian illustrator Piranesi.

The performance was shot on blue screen with Discreet Logic’s Glass system, allowing capture of the movement of the camera and the ability to recreate camera trajectories to be applied to the computer-generated models and background tracking.

Using SoftImage on a Silicon Graphics platform, Piranesi’s illustrations were interpreted in technical drawings and modeled in three dimensions, adding realistic textures and lighting to make them convincing.

Right now, animator Pedro Pires is handling the time-consuming part – putting the live action and the 20 minutes of cg background together.

Effects supervisor Rick Ostiguy says some frames take up to an hour and a half to render. Once they get into final compositing, which is expected to happen some time late this year, a few more Flame animators will be getting in on the act.

In the meantime, the push is on to get a one- or two-minute sequence done to enter in the show at siggraph in August, a show surely Yo-Yo Ma never expected to play.