"Clark is a special guy." "Many of the things that separate him are things that have to do with visual effects because he has super powers." "So it's like any visual effect, you're always in an area between what's absolutely real and pushing the envelope of reality because if it were easy to do in reality, you'd just turn on the camera." "So in some case, we're always creating reality and expanding on it." "It's pretty impressive what they're able to do thanks to computers and film technology today." "Stuff that would have taken us days and weeks to do in the '70s they can now do on a weekly TV show." "So it gives it a lot more production value and inventiveness than I thought I was gonna see when I first heard about the series." "The visual effects were very important to us in the series." "We fought for a rather sizeable visual-effects budget because in a post-Matrix world, where you can see Clark moving faster than a speeding bullet, we wanted to do that." "When the last exposure you'd had to Superman it was 1978, where that was state-of-the-art." "I mean, the tagline was, you know, "You will believe a man can fly."" "And you did." "But, you know, we wanted x-ray vision to be x-ray vision and not see-through vision." " You've never seen that before." "You've actually never seen x-ray vision." "You always see holes through a wall." "It's not x-ray at all." "That's see-through." "In season two, we introduced heat vision." "We didn't want beams coming out of the eyes." "We wanted it to be more like shimmering heat." "And the fact that you have all these great tools and the ability to now incorporate them into a weekly television show." "It's still a big challenge to get those done in time." "We are always under the gun with visual effects, and the guys do a fantastic job." " They work all night." " Sometimes we don't see it till it airs." " They're dropping shots in the day of." " Yeah, the day of." "It really is amazing what they can do in a matter of days." "Definitely some of the more challenging episodes or sequences we try to get a head start on and do RD, research and development to figure out ways to pull off a shot, to make a shot work." "And to raise the bar a little bit for what visual effects is doing for television." "We try to in every show..." ""Wow, that'd be cool." "If he could do that, that would be cool."" "And then the challenge becomes, "Can we do it?"" "I'm present up in Vancouver while the material is being shot and my job when I'm there is to make sure that everything is done in the most efficient way possible." "That we get the film elements that we need to produce the effects efficiently." "Then, the other part of my job is just to creatively set up the shots with the director." "Maybe I can suggest a camera angle that will either save time and money or a camera angle that will enhance the resulting effects." "When a show is put together and we're happy with the show, Mat and his guys come over and we will go through each of the CGI sequences." "We have a budget in front of us." "We know what was budgeted." "And my job is to communicate to them, A, what's missing from the sequence and B, what I desperately want to be in the sequence." "It's my job to articulate it and their job to understand it and be able to make it come to fruition." "That's harder than you might think." "In this sequence here, there's a lot of storytelling we have to do." "You try to break it up so that you start out with concept, the ideas then you move on to the animatics stage, the timings." "And then from there, you're building, like, rough models, rough textures." "And you're doing rough compositing of Clark to see what he looks like." "So it really just goes through stages, and a stage might be two days to a week per stage depending on how fast and how complex the material is." "First, we show The Daily Planet, and there is no Daily Planet building so we had to computer-generate the top of The Daily Planet building walking on the roof of the building." "Now he'll jump across the building." "Here's some original elements that were shot:" "Clark on green screen, all the rigging had to be removed and we composite him over the background." "There's a matte and some of the 3-D elements being built to show traffic, volumetrics pieces of buildings." " So we generated the entire city using a combination of computer-generated buildings and photographs of real buildings and running photography of real streets." "And it's all assembled together." "But by building the entire city it means we can fly the camera around anyplace we want which is what we need to do." "Clark!" "No!" "We do have this tornado, which is, like, imperiling our characters and forcing Clark to reveal some of his powers in an effort to save Lana." "We had to get them in some serious jeopardy." "One of the things we do to move along this process is to pre-visualize the shots." "We really said this is about the story and about how we make this read as a very violent storm." "So we pre-visualized a truck spinning around, and when we got a move that we liked that drove the process of shooting the elements on-stage." "The elements on-stage got shot." "They were slightly different because they always are." "Then it comes back and John has to track on to the actual element as opposed to the pre-visualized element and rebuild the computer-generated truck around the chassis that they were lying in." "Then, in the storm we pull the pieces apart, and there they are in the howling wind." "Here you can see what was actually shot." "They had this small part of the cab and there's Lana and Clark, and they're against a green screen." "This green square here is the actual footage that they shot and everything around it is the 3-D truck that we built around it." "Again, it's tying the fantastic to the real." "And it's both the real you see and the real on the stage we can get done." "Clark, couldn't the boneyard visit have waited till after the rain stopped?" "A shot we always wanted to do that we did in "Accelerate" which is you wanted to see super-speed." "Usually you see the blur, but if you were in super-speed how would the rest of the world look?" "I think we wrote that into four or five scripts..." "And finally got to do it." "It was always too expensive." "We designed the whole episode with this one sequence around the idea the rain would freeze and Clark could super-speed through the rain." "It was cool." "Where'd she go...?" "One of the things is, we manipulate time a lot." "We slow it down, we speed it up, and when we slow down time because it's raining, all of a sudden the rainstorm stops." "It doesn't completely stop." "If you look carefully, the raindrops continue to fall." "The challenge in this kind of shot is, when it's shot, there's no rain and the camera's moving around through three-dimensional space." "And there's no real tracking information either." "We come back, take that shot into the computer and the first thing we do is track the movement of the camera so we can reproduce the three-dimensional world they were in." "Tracker marks help us to locate distances in Z so that we can place rain way in a background or rain hitting certain tombstones or the foreground rain because they'll be in different parallax to the camera." "So when Eli says, "tracking them in Z," he means distance from the camera." "It's like in high-school geometry." "You have an X for horizontal and Y for vertical." "The Z is depth away from camera." "That gives it interesting texture because the foreground moves quickly and stuff farther away moves slowly." "You feel like you're in the space." "And then, within that world, we start generating raindrops." "First we put in artificial rain so we can stop it." "So even the rain that's falling normally isn't real." "We put that in." "And then we stop it, and we're looking at each individual drop." "The challenge there, which is really fun is that each one of these raindrops is like a lens that shows the background refracted through it." "It's a mirror that reflects the background behind the camera." "So it's a lens, it's an object, and it's a mirror." "We have to have all three of those accounted for." "I thought the rain sequence was spectacular." "I thought that was sort of the visual highlight, I thought, of year two." "And it worked dead into the story." "All the special effects in the world can fall extremely flat if you don't believe in the characters themselves." "And so the best times that, when we use them is when we're rooting for Clark, or Clark's in jeopardy or someone that we know and we love is in jeopardy so that we have an emotional context for the effect." "A lot of them have to do with simply:" "Is this effect going to be seen by someone who then knows Clark's secret?" "Hopefully, our viewers are watching a television show and at the end, turn it off and go, "Wow, I've never seen that before."" "We're always looking for something that might take it to another level of reality or another level of audience involvement another level of interest for the viewers." "The whole thrust of the show is that Clark is coming of age." "So there's always something new coming along in terms of a new power." "In addition, the stuff that we've been doing for a while, we expand on that." "It's a balance thing." "We wanna try and add something new." "Either a new way of showing it or a new wrinkle on how it manifests itself." "But we have to honor what was done before so there's a certain continuity."