Buffy the Vampire Slayer is at heart a comedy drama show
- albeit with monsters and the undead. And to create this
seamless blend of spooks and spoof takes a lot of technical
expertise - and nowhere more so than with its special effects.
The
vast majority of the series' superb visuals are the work of
special effects company Digital Magic. And according to Loni
Peristere, one of its visual effects producer, they just keep
getting better.
The
opening episode of the new season kicks off with the robot
Buffy fighting off the vampire menace, but when the truth
gets out it's a blood open day (night?) at the hands of some
rather nasty biker demons. Fortunately, Willow has a plan
to bring the real Buffy back from the dead... "Willow enacts
a spell to bring Buffy back to life. It's not an easy spell
for her; cuts appear all over her body, and little bumps form
underneath her flesh that crawl all over her, like the scarabs
in The Mummy," explained Peristere to the VFXPro website.
"Willow
is overcome by the bugs under her skin, which actually come
together and form a growth in her neck that she later coughs
up as a rattlesnake. As luck would have it, the spell works
but there are some nasty consequences - not least is that
Buffy has to claw her way out of her coffin. And on her return
from the dead she discovers Sunnydale ablaze thanks to the
biker demons.
"In
the third episode, we realise that in Willow's process of
conjuring Buffy back to life, she also brought back another
entity. We later find out it is a drowned woman who is trapped
so she is disturbing and poltergeisting everybody around.
When we got this script it just said Buffy fights a vaporous
form of a woman."
With
a TV budget and limited time it soon became clear that a CGI
demon was not going to be possible so Peristere contacted
Gary Platek who shot the ghost scene in Raiders of the
Lost Ark.
"I
asked him how he created the ghost without CG," said
Peristere. "He said they had puppets on rods with fibre
optics inside and they ran them through water. He blocked
everything in reverse so that when the puppet is moving through
the water, it looks like its reaching out forwards instead
of backwards."
Over
the seasons there have been improvements in some of the more
routine effects work. For instance, the bursting into dust
that vampires do when staked has been regularly worked on.
"The dusting effect becomes more and more complex as we go
along," explained Peristere. "When I started working on the
show, they were dissolving the actor off and dissolving on
a series of particle explosions to achieve the effect. What
I proposed was to make it a more organic process. Then in
season three compositor Chris Jones introduced the skeleton
idea into the scenario. He thought it would be neat if the
audience saw the interim between the body and disintegration."
And
we can expect more. In fact, if producer consultant producer
David Greenwalt is to be believed, the show will run for 10
years. By which time the level of technical expertise deployed
on its special effects should make for truly breathtaking
visuals.
Note:
For a much longer and more indepth look at the work of Loni
Peristere visit the excellent web site www.VFXPro.com
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