Yeah, We Do Monsters
Joe Nazzaro meets the legendary team at Flat Earth Productions, responsible for building the many CGI creatures and other illusions which colour the worlds of Xena and Hercules.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 07
It's a paradox of sorts: using cutting-edge computer technology to produce a virtual menagerie of mythological creatures. But for the past five years, that's just what the high-tech magicians at Flat Earth Productions have been doing.
Whether it's Poseidon rising from the sea, a group of centaurs going into battle, or a veritable army of angels and demons, each episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess brings its own unique set of challenges.
Flat Earth is the brainchild of Kevin O'Neill, Doug Beswick and Kevin Kutchaver, who formed the company in March 1995. Originally created as a ‘garage band’ of visual FX artists working out of their studios and houses, the company has now become one of the fastest growing post-production houses in Los Angeles. In addition to their work on Hercules and Xena, the company is now involved in all manner of projects, from the recent all-CGI animated Starship Troopers series to the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons feature film.
According to Kevin O'Neill, the company is on a continual learning curve, which means that they've yet to reach their ultimate benchmark of quality. “Conceptually, the potential is unlimited, because hopefully, whatever ideas we’re able to come up with will always be more interesting and more aesthetically pleasing,” he explains. “From a technical point of view, we’re always going to follow in the footsteps of the bigger movies, such as Dragonheart.
“We did a talking dragon episode of Hercules,” continues O’Neill, citing an example from the season three episode The Lady and the Dragon, “and to accomplish that within our time and budget is a technical challenge beyond a lot of people’s capabilities. On a feature, they’re always doing something that no one has ever done before, but once they’ve done it, our job is to study what they’ve done, tear it apart and try to find a way of doing it as efficiently as we can in terms of time and cost. If we do a dragon, it may only be 30 or 40 shots, but hopefully it will be a character that everyone believes in when they see it.”
One of the hallmarks of Flat Earth’s work on both Hercules and Xena is a strong desire to keep pushing the mythological envelope. “Each season,” says O'Neill, “we’d say, ‘We’d like to do this kind of sequence, or this particular creature.’ So we’d get to put our two cents’ worth in. For example, Pyro, the fire creature [in the season two Hercules episode The Fire Down Below] was definitely one of our requests, and when they were doing The Wedding of Alcamene, we wanted to do a fight between two giant sea creatures, so we had a lot of input into that.”
The company’s work has also extended into other areas that most viewers probably wouldn’t even notice, such as digitally extending a set, or making a small crowd of extras into an army. “It's all about improving the production values of a scene,” explains Kevin Kutchaver, whose compositing wizardry is virtually invisible to the untrained eye. “If they only have the money for 20 guys to come running out, then it's our job to try and make it 60, or even 100. Our goal in the early seasons of Hercules was to show the producers as many things we could do as possible so that they could see what we were able to pull off.”
As an example of early digital magic, Kutchaver points to a night-time scene in the first season Hercules episode The Vanishing Dead in which a handful of extras were magically transformed into a torch-carrying mob. “They only had one group of extras,” he recalls, “so it was basically a matter of replicating them to make it look like a much bigger shot. The other thing that happened in that scene was we actually changed the landscape. The soldiers were running into the river as Hercules and lolaus tried to stop them, and there was a mountain on the left-hand side that ran very closely behind them. I added at least two or three miles to that scene just by going in and repainting the background to make it look bigger, and that opens the scene right up.”
Quite often, the Flat Earth crew would create a computer-generated monster for an episode only to see that creation take on a life of its own. One of the early Hercules movies, for instance, included a centaur character. While this was the first time such a creature had been created successfully for television, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Later episodes of Hercules and Xena featured entire herds of centaurs, even a centaur baby. And after doing skeletons and harpies, the Xena episode Girls Just Wanna Have Fun featured a group of dryads, a frightening harpy/skeleton hybrid.
“Everybody loved the centaurs,” remembers O'Neill. “I think we used to average three episodes a season that had centaurs in them, and we kept doing more and more. We managed to get it down to an assembly line process, but the trick was really to get our hands on the episode early enough to do all the clean-up work. There’s a ton of clean-up work that you just can’t plan for, because the weather plays such a big part in dealing with these creatures. If the background is moving in one shot because the wind is blowing, that can cause a problem, and you often don't know what has to be done until the last minute. In most cases, we really became our own worst enemies with those pesky centaurs, because we always ended up saying, ‘Sure, we’ll do it!’”
Another classic example of a CG character returning in a big way was a certain god of the sea, which was created just for a single shot, but captured the imagination of viewers and eventually made an even bigger, well, splash. “The Poseidon character created for the initial promotion of Xena was originally just a throwaway effect, something we just whipped out real quick,” explains 3-D supervisor Everett Burrell. “We didn’t know it was going to be featured in the opening credits sequence like that, so later on, we got to perfect it. That was fun. We got to do a really nice version of the character in a couple of the later episodes, so we were able to perfect the water splashes and stuff like that. With water, using the real thing is probably the best option.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, the work of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen was a major influence on the artists at Flat Earth. Nowhere is that more evident than in the season two Hercules episode Once a Hero, in which Hercules and the former Argonauts battle a group of skeletons, an obvious tip of the hat to Harryhausen’s famous sequence in Jason and the Argonauts. “We actually sent that episode over to him,” says O’Neill, “and he sent a letter back saying, 'I'm glad to see that Jason and the Argonauts played such an important role.’ That letter obviously hangs on all of our walls!
“It's truly exciting to see humans fighting skeletons, so I think it was inevitable for us to do it. We wanted Hercules to at least fight a giant skeleton creature at one point, but Rob Tapert being the producer, he picked up the gauntlet and came up with the whole Argonauts storyline. I think it turned out okay, but maybe I’m a little too critical. There was a point when we really wanted to take another pass at some of the stuff, but because of the schedule, we just didn't have the time available.”
Once again, the skeleton scenes from Once a Hero were just the beginning. This season's Xena episode Them Bones, Them Bones features a much more elaborate skeleton battle as Xena confronts the dead shamaness, Alti. “That was quite a bit of work,” remembers Burrell. “They had shot actors in suits for reference and we basically had to rotoscope the puppets on top of those plates. So that was a lot of work. There was also a lot of interactive light on them, and the skeletons had to look like the props they built in New Zealand, so there was quite a lot of work.”
Although the skeleton fight in Them Bones was probably more technically successful than the one in Hercules, Burrell prefers the more classic sequence from Once a Hero. “That was probably more fun because it was more of a Harryhausen type of thing, whereas this was very fast-paced with a lot of Hong Kong, John Woo-type action. It was a little more edgy, which I kind of liked, but I also like the more traditional Harryhausen kind of look that we did on the other episode. It was fun to do, but it was also a lot of work and they wanted us to match what the stunt people were doing exactly with our CG puppets. It was basically, ‘Follow this’, so the animators didn't have a real fun time, whereas the first time, we had a lot more freedom.”
The two worlds of FX technology finally came together recently when the Flat Earth team got to meet their legendary role model, and it was interesting to see how times had changed since the classic stop-motion films of the Sixties. “I remember talking to Ray about it,” says Burrell, “because whenever I mention the stuff we’re doing, he feels that it’s too violent. I said, ‘Come on Ray, you had people dying left and right in your movies!’ I don’t think we’re any more violent than the stuff he did.
“It’s neat to talk to him now, because the stuff that’s being done at the moment is so amazingly advanced that he’s very nostalgic. He wonders why monsters have to be so angry and violent, but his creatures ate and killed people all the time! I guess he forgets that. They’re monsters; what do you want them to do?”
As is the case with any group of perfectionists, there’s always been the temptation to keep tweaking a shot until it’s a work of art, but the trick is knowing when to let things go. “We always have to be aware of the schedule,” insists Kutchaver. “We had a couple of instances on some of the early Hercules episodes where we were still fine-tuning some of the centaur shots literally a week before the show was going to air, which is way too close, and that gets pretty scary.
“So yes, the temptation is always there to tweak a shot until it’s perfect, but once I get that shot to a certain point and think, ‘That looks pretty cool’, I’d rather move on to another shot. This is an experiment in quality, so the envelope we’re pushing is in terms of how much we can get into an episode with the amount of time and money available. To be honest, I'm still amazed that any of this stuff works. Sometimes I look at what we’re doing and think, ‘What other show is doing this?’”
Looking ahead, the team at Flat Earth will be getting even more attention in the months ahead. In addition to their current slate of film and television work, the company is also making plans to produce its own feature projects, and has just launched the Flat Earth Entertainment division to develop them. Not bad for a former garage band of FX artists who thought it would be cool to work together.
“I really can’t complain,” reflects Kevin O'Neill. “It’s funny, but I still remember going down to New Zealand to do the first Hercules movie and sitting there talking to Kevin Sorbo. I said to him, ‘This is a great vacation, we would never have gotten to this place if we hadn’t worked on Hercules!’
“That was all it was going to be, and now, years later, here we are.”