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| "Heroes" Takes Flight: Post on the NBC Series |
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By Cristina Clapp, December 29, 2006
What if you woke up one day and discovered you could fly? Or stop time? Or predict the future? This is what happens to the characters in NBC's Heroes. Over the course of this first season, the people who inhabit the world of Heroes-a flying politician, an indestructible cheerleader, a cop who can read minds, a stripper with a mysterious doppelganger and a drug-addicted artist who can paint the future among them-will discover their powers while coming together from disparate parts of the globe to try to prevent an impending disaster. Heroes was created by Tim Kring, who also created Crossing Jordan.
The task of posting such a show presents the three-editor team of Donn Aron, Scott Boyd and Michael Murphy an unusual set of creative challenges and opportunities. Kring and the other producers envision the characters as having these extraordinary super powers, but they still want the world of the show to feel somewhat real. The drama is not supposed to feel like something out of a comic book, so everyone involved must walk a fine line, creating a world that feels real while allowing some of its inhabitants to do some pretty unreal things.
Aron, Boyd and Murphy need not feel bound by convention as they figure out how to cut the show. "You come in in the morning for a meeting with the directors and producers and the conversation is about what it looks like when you freeze time," says Murphy. "Well, logic sort of goes out the window at that point and you can feel free to try anything."
When the character Hiro Nakamura (Masa Oki) performs his time-freezing feat, Murphy explains, "we jump-cut around the room and freeze on a smoke ring or a ball in the air or some falling confetti to show that everything has stopped. Then we use sound effects to indicate that Hiro is actually moving around the room. It all works because we're not showing the audience something they've experienced in real life. We're freezing time."
"The tone of the show allows us so much room for creativity," Aron adds. He points to a scene with police officer Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg), who has the power to read minds. "He's in a liquor store at one point," says Aron of the character, "and he 'hears' somebody contemplating an armed robbery. Matt scans the room and sees the most likely candidate standing near the counter. He goes over to quietly talk him out of it. He succeeds and the guy puts down the gun he was hiding; Matt picks it up, but everyone sees this and thinks Matt is robbing the store. So now what he's hearing is everybody's panicky thoughts. We wanted to give this scene a very frenetic style. We wanted to get inside Matt's mind and suggest this tremendous headache he's feeling as the thoughts and fears of everyone inside the store come flooding in. I knew this was a moment I could exaggerate in the editing."
The show is shot in 3-perf 35mm format in the Los Angeles area, principally at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood. Once processed, the film is transferred at Complete Post, now called TCS Hollywood. (TCS also handles online editing, color correction and titling and provides duplication, including delivery dubs, for Heroes.) Footage is telecined to D5 HD 24p and DVCAM.
The DVCAM dailies are delivered to the editors, who cut alternating episodes. The editing rooms, located underneath Stage Twelve at Sunset Gower Studios, feature several Avid Media Composer Adrenaline (v1.8.5) systems running on dual processor (2.7GHz) Apple Power Mac G5 workstations. Avid's Fiber Manager and Unity server are used to store and retrieve media. The editors have access to one another's episodes, and they frequently discuss scripts and plotlines to ensure a consistency and smoothness from episode to episode. Editors on any series would generally want to have an idea of the content of the previous and following episode as they make their creative choices, but on a series with continuing storylines, and so many storylines at that, communication is absolutely essential.
The editors create a number of the show's visual effects-especially the invisible effects, such as reframing a shot and simple compositing-at their workstations knowing that when the HD online is performed using the Avid DS Nitris and output for delivery on D5 tape, much of the effects work they've created will be applied to the final version automatically as part of the nonlinear online process.
Says Aron, "In the old days, you had to rebuild every offline effect-fades, dissolves, flops or any kind of motion effects-during the online, and it could take a long time to get it right. Just writing up an optical list for the lab seemed like it required a strong knowledge of advanced algebra, and it took an enormous amount of time and manual labor. Today, [the Nitris] automatically imports just about any effect we can create, and then Nitris just sees it as a project from another Avid."
"We add push-ins a lot," says Boyd, "or we'll Dutch the shot a little or rotate it slightly
. It's great to be able to do that and know that the parameters are built into the effects. That's really a significant technological advance. In the past, you needed to redo these things during the online, which always involved some compromise. That's just not something we have to worry about anymore."
Stopping Time
There are still a significant number of effects shots in Heroes that require a more specialized level of technical sophistication, and this is where Pasadena-based Stargate Digital and Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Kolpack come in. "There's a lot that goes into the technical execution of an effect like stopping time," says Kolpack. "I like to make every visual effect immersive, not something that happens in the background."
In order to prove his powers to his friend Ando and save the life of a little girl, the character Hiro Nakamura freezes time in episode three ("One Giant Leap"). Hiro is following the plot of a comic book he obtained in the future that says he will save a girl dressed in a school uniform from an out-of-control truck. In the scene, Hiro freezes a Tokyo street full of pedestrians and traffic. The girl is frozen in the midst of jumping rope. The camera appears to move around her in 3D space as a nearby truck is also frozen just after hitting a vendor's table full of toys.
Since the producers of Heroes don't have the budget to duplicate the production kit and postproduction effects work of a feature film (such as The Matrix, which also featured stopped time), they improvised. According to producer/director Greg Beeman, "Our technique was to have a whole bunch of extras hold really still...and to build a series of special props and greenscreen rigs to hold them in awkward positions that would sell time stopping. One thing I learned on Smallville was that things-defying-gravity is what sells frozen time. Water spilling, birds stopped in mid-flight, etc. On this one, my key ideas were: (a) a little girl jumping rope, frozen in mid-air, (b) the girl in danger falling backward, frozen off balance, and (c) the truck that's about to hit her in mid-collision, halfway crashed through a table of toy robots that are all frozen in mid-air. Hiro is the only thing moving in the shot. The world is frozen around him. He squints hard. Opens his eyes. Turns in amazement at the world and then runs to the girl, ducking under the toy robots, which are frozen in mid-air from the crash, and pushes the frozen girl out of the way."
Special Effects Coordinator Gary D'Amico placed the girl in a harnessed rig in front of a greenscreen so that the camera could move around her as she holds herself still, seemingly suspended above the ground. The shots of the girl were captured at 150fps. It's always easier, Kolpack explains, to remove frames and add motion blur if the camera was over-cranked too much than to add frames or try to remove motion blur, so he always prefers to shoot this type of plate at a very high frame rate. Subsequently, Stargate digitally removed the rig and composited the shot into a background plate to create the illusion.
The artists at Stargate Digital use CGI tools such as Autodesk Maya, NewTek LightWave, Massive artificial intelligence software and Adobe After Effects to create elements such as the small toys that the speeding truck is supposed to have sent flying through the air. "We did some interesting things with that sequence," Kolpack says. "We had these [CGI] toys suspended in the air. When Hiro bumps some of the little toys and boxes as he moves past them, we had them rotate. Little things like that can help make the effect that much more believable."
The editors use their Avid's eight audio channels to present as fleshed out a version to directors and producers as possible. They'll cut in a lot of temp sound effects and music. Heroes is scored by Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman, known formerly as Prince's Revolution. The three editors lay in cues from previous episodes and library cuts as they work, then Melvoin and Coleman create the episode's final score after the show is essentially locked otherwise.
The editors can get early versions of sound and picture effects uploaded to their FTP site, which they then import into Adrenaline. "That saves a lot of time and shipping back and forth to the visual effects house and the music editor," says Murphy, who started his career cutting film shows for Aaron Spelling and was an early adopter of long-defunct nonlinear machines such as the 17-Beta-deck Montage system and the CMX 2000. The toolset he and his colleagues have to work with has addressed many of the thorny issues he's encountered in his career. "In recent years there have been huge leaps that have helped editors and producers. Now we're limited only by our imagination."
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