Remember the guys who were creating top notch CGI special effects for Buffy and Angel? Well they're back at creator Joss Whedon’s side to help bring some big budget effects to his latest hit show in the waiting, Firefly.

Whedon has once again teamed up CGI maestro Loni Peristere, who has broken off with a group of colleagues to create Zoic, a new company which is working on computer effects for shows such as Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Smallville to name but a few. Taking with him people who have worked on shows such as Star Trek in the past, he has created a full Firefly team of 12, and an overall staff number of 40.

The show is very different from Whedon’s previous forays into TV sci-fi, taking a step away from things that go bump in the night, and instead setting the story in deep space, 400 years in the future and in the wake of a universal civil war – giving it an oddly ‘western’ feel. “There is a nice juxtaposition between horses and spacecraft,” said Loni Peristere, the show’s visual effects supervisor.  “The pictures together make a striking soup.  The barren planetary locations allow the CG camera to get dirty.  Westerns always have a little film on the lens, the focus gets jammed, it's hot and the camera operators are tired.  So the movement isn't always as quick.  This kind of art direction in CG produces really fresh and realistic images, which hide within the story and enhance the drama.”

When asked about the philosophy behind the shows look, Pereistere explained: “Whdeon has established a planetary frontier, where the societies and cultures develop based on the materials the founding father brought with them during their settlement.  The further away from the core planets, the further away the technology and development, much like the difference between California and New York in the mid 19th century.  The frontier planets have only developed with the technology, art, and culture they settled with.  Which leaves the philosophy open, as the most high tech settlement ship, may have had a copy of a Jane Austen novel, creating an Austen-like settlement with high tech gadgets.”

The team’s goal is to provide visual effects for the show which are of feature film proportions, and they seem to be doing fine so far. “Its enormous – it's like a movie every week!” said Peristere. Already in the pipeline are people jumping from spacecrafts, large ground battles including flying spacecraft, cameras zooming outwards in space to find bigger and bigger craft filling the screen, racing trains, the list is endless.

As for showing the latest in CGI technology, digital doubles play a big part on Firefly. The special effects team use digital version of characters so they can make them do more dangerous things, or things that a human just couldn’t do. Peristere has worked with digital doubles in the past, especially in Angel, where he started to use a lot more 'virtual actors' towards the end of series three. “We built these models and archived them,” said Peristere. “We’ve set up certain animation cycles, walk cycles, run cycles, jump cycles, so that we can throw them into live action very quickly. “ Series three of Angel started to really bring them into their own, as they allow Angel to be seen doing more daredevil leaping from buildings, and also allowing viewers to see effects and stunts that would just be impossible to do with a living - or living dead - person; such as Connor jumping onto the roof of a moving bus – that’s no stunt man people, that’s a digital double.  

One example of the use of digital doubles in Firefly is in the first episode, when crew member Jayne, classed as ‘The Mercenary’ (played by Adam Baldwin), gets into a fight with a burly bad man, and kicks him into the Serenity’s engine. “When a character gets killed we can make it look much more elaborate, and I guess more gross than just using a live plate,” said Emile Smith, Firefly’s CG supervisor. “Instead of running it, tweaking it and making it look like he gets killed, we can actually have him get sucked into an engine, and we can make it look much heavier and more realistic.”

In addition to the high tech effects, a lot of time and effort was put into the design of this futuristic world, such as the main ship, Serenity. “ Serenity is a 200 year old transport ship,” said Peristere. “It has a large detachable cargo bay, which can be swapped for a new load. It is built to move cargo from port to port quickly.  The "Firefly" effect is a result of a cooling process run by the ship to counter the explosive launch from space quadrant to quadrant.  The cooling process takes several days, which gives the ships rear a firefly like glow.”

With Whedon’s guidance, the Firefly team has been able to approach CGI in a different way - the camera shots conceived in CGI don’t necessarily have to be perfect. “Because we’re creating shots entirely in the computer, we can fake scenarios,” said Peristere. “So we’re faking out of focus, faking zooms, we’re faking bad camera operation which in turn looks natural alongside the rest of the series which is also shot in a documentary style a la Homicide or NYPD Blue.”

"It’s a sort of very functional image that reminds us of the way we see things photographed from real life. So, for example, we looked at a lot of Nascar footage, how they film that etc. That’s where we took the lead in our tone, which makes our show drastically different, and I hope it’s going to be a wake-up call for the CG industry.”

The first episode the team worked on was a full-out CGI challenge. ‘The Train Job’ as the episode is titled, involved some major effects work to create a magnetic hovering train being attacked by a spaceship while racing 200mph across a CG canyon. “One of the things that is really ground-breaking in that episode is that we are creating an entire sequence photo realistically. It showcases a train going through a canyon, with a ship that comes down, and a guy jumps out of the ship and lands on the train,” said Peristere. Everything in that sequence, apart from Serenity’s bomb bay, which was added using blue screen technology, was all conceived using CGI. The team spent a day out in Arizona, taking full camera shots 360o around a canyon to create the background, and the train, ship and all the action in-between was created in Zoic’s California office. “When they see ‘The Train Job’, I honestly think that the audience is going to be like ‘whoa, I didn’t know that was possible!’” said Peristere excitedly.

The pilot episode, which has been pulled back and is now rescheduled to be aired as two separate episodes later in the series, also takes CGI to its limit, with roughly 120 visual effects used throughout it. One scene, showing a full-blown battle, is in the style of Saving Private Ryan. Combined with live ‘on the ground’ footage, including 30 explosions and 60 stuntmen, the camera view stays right with the soldiers on the ground, flitting left and right to show you soldiers being gunned down, CGI skiff’s strafing the ground with bullets, with the camera craning up to see a skiff dive for another fly-by, and then diving for cover with the soldiers.

Firefly is the experimental board for Zoic to push the envelope of TV CGI a little further. Whereas Buffy and Angel have between five and 30 effects per instalment, each episode of Firefly is likely to contain somewhere between 10 and 35 effects. “Literally, it's like every episode is going to have something new in visual effects. The pilot has this huge battle, the first episode has the train job and digital doubles, the third episode has this huge ‘Gone with the Wind’ style dance which we’re creating this magnificent European dome for,” enthused Peristere.

It’s just like big boys with their toys. Take for example the work Peristere was doing when we spoke to him. “I’ve got this script here in front of me that has a space posse – that’s what’s so cool about this show, spaceships and horses – right?” he said with glee. “Imagine we’re flying over a field of wild horses, and they get spooked by a spaceship!”

It doesn’t end here however, as the guys have a lot more up their sleeve than they are willing to share right now. “I'd like the show to feel like big production, and you will start to see a lot of big cities, old and new space and land vehicles. We are going to elaborate on the history and fill out the universe your seeing in the first three shows.  That is all I can say for now, but there is much, much more to come,” Peristere said.  Now we’ve just got to patiently wait for it to hit UK screens.