BEHIND-THE-SCENES: [#143 FURY]

VISUAL EFFECTS

John Bruno, director, and Ronald B. Moore, visual effects supervisor

Ron Moore: One of the first things that comes to mind with [Fury] was the director was John Bruno. And John Bruno and I go back quite a long ways to 'Ghostbusters', which is where I think I worked with him first. So it was kind of a reunion.

Ron Moore: And we got in and started doing the show, and it was effects-heavy because we had the two Keses. It can be difficult when you've got a make-up change because, for example, when Kes got old, it could take three or four hours to make a make-up change, so you try to get as much as you can done on each side and get four shots done on one make-up, and then have her change and come back and shoot the second half of those four shots, it's efficient.

temporary shots employed in the sequence where Older Kes transforms

Ron Moore: And as we got into the show, we had a girl, Amy-Kate was her name, as a stand-in. She came out there, she knew all the lines, she just worked really really hard. You know, if you've got an actress who's that heavily in make-up to be old, for example, it's not comfortable. It helps so much, we found out with Amy, that she could get up and really set this up, let us set everything up without having to have Jennifer come up and have all this make-up and have to run; you know, all of the timing to get everything ready, and she was so good at it. And Amy and Jennifer would have a talk about it, then the shot would just go quick and easy, it just made it so much easier for Jennifer.

Amy-Kate and film crew; she is standing with her back to the green screen; later the green will be removed in post-production and replaced by other footage

[Fury] deals with Kes' return to Voyager in a misguided search for vengeance. The last time we saw her was in [#70 The Gift] when she evolved onto a new level, and in [Fury] she used her new psychokinetic powers several times. The script stipulated that when Kes arrived on Voyager and walked along a corridor, the bulkheads would explode behind her.

David Lombardi, of Digital Muse: Ron (Moore) knew we had to do something digitally, because you couldn't have the hallway exploding that close to an actor or a stunt person, and you can't blow up the real hallway because it's a solid set. So, he knew he had to have some amount of CG enhancement, but when he realised the shot called for the entire hallway to be just ripping apart around her, in every possible area, he knew it had to be a digital environment. It was something very new. We hadn't done a fully realistic environment that was supposed to be wrapped around the characters, especially something that is literally cut back to back with other shots, so you can compare how the hallway looks. If it doesn't look real, it's really going to stand out. Bruce (Banit of Digital Muse) and I took a lot of photographic reference of the set to try to get close-ups of some things: the texture, the surface materials, that sort of thing. I used a photomodelling program to build the hallway, so you have full environments that are mapped with actually photography to get it as real as possible. Even then, I actually went back and did a lot of painting and at that point we matched that in with the lighting for the characters.

David Lombardi: Now we can have a hallway that goes on forever. That was something that Dan Curry ([Star Trek Voyager] visual effects producer) brought up. He saw the hallway and he thought one of the shots was actually a CG extension of the set. The ship is a quarter of a mile long, maybe, and there's no hallway that's longer than 30 feet. Now we can modify that.

Ron Moore: One of the scenes, for example, was to get Jennifer (Lien) on a treadmill and just get her working really fast, and there was some stuff blowing up behind her was all on green screen and stuff. We wanted to give that illusion she was walking down the hall. And to make it look real I wanted her on a treadmill. And that way she can work and actually be walking, and yet we keep her in the frame at a constant size, and you get the feel with the CG hall moving backwards she's really moving.

Jennifer Lien walks on a treadmill against a green screen	finished sequence, [Fury]
later the green will be removed in post-production and replaced by footage of the Voyager corridor

Next pages: Bryan Fuller speaks / Jennifer Lien speaks