By Jon Silberg, November 19, 2007
"What if Sydney Bristow of Alias or Jack Bauer from 24 suddenly walked into the world of The Office?" Chuck co-creator Chris Fedak ponders. "It would be terrifying. You'd know someone is going to get tortured or blown up."
It was on this premise that Fedak and co-creator Josh Schwartz built the popular action/comedy/drama series about Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi from Less Than Perfect), a computer nerd who suddenly becomes an indispensable secret agent after some bizarre technology places the sum of the government's secret intelligence into his brain before he knows what's happening. "It's really a mash-up of genres."
Executive producer McG set the tone with the co-creators during production of the pilot. "Look at his films," says Fedak of McG (Charlie's Angels, We Are Marshall) "and it's obvious he knows how to shoot that world and action, but he also has a deft touch when it comes to the comedy and the family stuff that's more dramatic. I love the action, but some of my favorite stuff in pilot is about his family, friends and his life at the [megastore] Buy More Electronics."
Norman Buckley, who has worked as an editor with Schwartz and McG on The O.C. and as a director on both The O.C. and Schwartz's Gossip Girl, helped set the tone for Chuck by editing that series' pilot. "We were still figuring out how far to push the comedy," he recalls, noting that his inspiration for those sections came from the film The 40-Year-Old Virgin and the series The Office, while The Bourne Identity and Heat served as the ideal feel for the show's action sequences. "A few extra frames could be the difference between something seeming funny or ridiculous, though sometimes the converse was true. If you played things too straight, then the whole concept of a computer being inside a guy's head became too suspect. It's a fine line to maintain the suspense of the show while also trying to make people laugh."
Chuck is shot on the Warner Bros. lot in Super 16mm format. The pilot was shot on 35mm, but with all the action and visual effects, the producers didn't feel 35mm would be affordable for the series. They looked at 24p HD, says co-producer Ben Kunde, "but we go out three out of eight days per episode, and with so much daytime [shooting] and action, we thought film would be the better medium. The cinematographer would not have to control light quite so much. If you want a shot of Chuck getting into a car and hitting the accelerator, the umbilical cord [of a video camera] would be a problem."
The visual effects plates and effects elements are shot on 35mm, however, to provide a bit more resolution and avoid the weaving that can occur during telecine. (The weaving is more apparent coming off a 16mm negative than it is from 35.) Such registration issues are naturally of extra importance when trying to composite several shots together.
The film is processed at FotoKem and transferred at Modern VideoFilm in 24p to the HDCAM format. HDCAM tapes are then dubbed to DVCAM for the editorial team--currently Matt Barber, Jeff Granzow and Kevin Mock--on the Warner Bros. lot to work on their episodes.
Meanwhile, the HDCAM version of effects material is sent to Zoic Studios in Culver City, where shots are imported as Targa file sequences so the show's many visual effects can be built as the picture editors are cutting.
The approach to effects on Chuck is something of a pleasant departure at Zoic. "We come from doing Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel," says Visual Effects Supervisor Michael Leone
. "We do a lot of shows with supernatural elements, and we do CSI: Miami, and all those shows are really over the top with super slow motion and bullet chases and really holding the moment to show the visual effect or add some flash. Chuck is not that kind of show. It has elements of spy stuff and elements of humor, but it's not going to glorify a bullet flying through the air. When we had a microwave bounce off someone's head, our job wasn't to glorify the moment. We just did it as an effects shot because it was easier to do that than to really shoot a microwave bouncing off someone's head."
Invisible Effects
Zoic, which employs 60-80 compositors, animators and artists during the TV season (a branch in Vancouver of about 40 people works on shows done up north), is primarily a Windows XP house. Artists use Autodesk Maya and NewTek LightWave. Boujou 3 is used for tracking. Compositors generally use After Effects and Combustion. The company's render farm, containing about 200 processors, is based on the Rush render queue management system.
Leone notes that Zoic's work on Chuck is designed primarily to remain unnoticed by the audience. In one episode, he says, the character Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski), a secret agent, throws a dinner plate at one of the many new enemies Chuck has acquired with his top-secret knowledge. Later, Chuck repeats what he saw Sarah do. "You could try to shoot it for real," Leone admits. "You could have the plate on a wire and try to guide it that way, but it would still probably only work after 50 takes--and that's a lot of time and effort to waste on the set. Instead, the shot was done as one take with a stunt person pretending to take the hit. Then, in post, we could create a 3D plate out of the real prop they used on set. Then we could have the 3D model shatter into pieces on cue. We could show the producers what it would look like breaking into four pieces or 12 pieces. At the end of the day, you're just looking at a shot of person being hit by a plate, not examining how amazing the shot is in slow motion."
In another effects shot designed to be invisible, Chuck jumps from one level of a multistory building down to the next level, slides down another level, jumps onto the ground and runs as he's being shot it. "It looks like he scales a building himself in five seconds," Leone says, "but the shot is made up of five different pieces with five different stunt people and five different cameras." Zoic pasted Chuck's face on the different stunt men and reoriented the doubles' positions to make it seem like a continuous take. "We don't linger on the stunt. Chuck isn't that show. When you watch something like that, you shouldn't be thinking that it's a cool effect."
Chuck's so-called "mind flashes" involve a recurring effect built by the editors. When Chuck has one of these episodes, the audience sees what he sees: a very quick burst of images that briefly overpowers what's happening to him at the moment. Buckley recalls that as early as the pilot, people were scrambling to actually come up with the images that make up the content of these flashes.
"Ben Kunde and Rick Hubert, our associate producer, spent hours and hours looking for stock footage and photos to build these sequences," Buckley recalls. "They are scripted in such a way as to be very open to interpretation. Because we wanted to save money, we asked everyone on the crew to bring in their own photos--and many of them are in the pilot and first episode. If you were to look at the pilot and first episode frame by frame, you could see pictures of my trip to Paris last year. My cat also made the cut."
.
|