The Fox medical drama House is known for unusual storylines and far-out visual effects, and the show's sixth season is no exception—offering some of the most ambitious situations to date. The third episode of the season, "Epic Fail," which aired Sept. 28, follows a video game developer who loses touch with reality and seems to inhabit the dangerous and gruesome world of an immersive game called Savage Scape.

Encore Hollywood created the visual effects for the episode, displaying a level of sophistication and fine detail rarely seen to this extent on series television. In three separate scenes, "Epic Fail" immerses viewers inside an all-CG world—a world set in a bizarre laboratory, out of an alternate dystopian future, populated by strange mutations.

House visual effects supervisor Elan Soltes approached Encore Hollywood as soon as he learned about the game concept, just four months before the airdate, to discuss how to create what would become six minutes of pure CGI for the fictional game Savage Scape.

The visual effects team at Encore collaborated with House writers, producers and the episode's director, Greg Yaitanes, to develop elaborate, multi-layered looks for a video game that doesn't really exist. "I knew that if we were going to be constructing a video game for the show, we'd have to get started right away," Soltes recalls. "In the real world of gaming, the development process can take three or four years."

"Epic Fail" was an unprecedented challenge for Encore Hollywood, which has provided visual effects over the course of House's six-season run, creating visceral images of patients' internal organs that no real camera could capture and adding other visual elements that keep viewers surprised.

The massive undertaking involved motion capture as well as more than 15 artists working in Autodesk packages 3ds Max and Inferno, as well as eyeon Fusion, among other tools, to build the multi-layered environment required to bring the world of Savage and its chimera-style mutant characters to life.

"These Savage sequences presented us with a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate what our visual effects team at Encore can do, and we were excited to tackle this amazing challenge," says Tom Kendall, Encore Hollywood executive producer for visual effects.

Concept Artist Christian Scheurer worked with Soltes and Kendall's team on concept art to get to the point where everyone was involved on the same visual page. "Christian has done a lot of work with video games," says Soltes. "In fact, he went on to work for George Lucas on the [upcoming] Star Wars game. But we didn't go looking for people who worked in the gaming industry. Those people are used to taking years to do this stuff and I needed artists who were used to turning around high-quality work on an extremely tight television schedule."

That is what Kendall and the staff at Encore Hollywood—including 3D supervisor Rodrigo Washington and 2D lead compositor Dave Neuberger—were able to accomplish. "A lot of shows in today's economic environment try to plan without many visual effects," Kendall explains. "They might do a set extension or some driving comps, which we do plenty of. But it's a testament to the producers of House that they're willing to go all out and do something so elaborate for their audience. And Encore Hollywood is proud to be part of that."