Do you liaise with Visual Effects?

In this world where anything can be created digitally it all really has to start with something physical. Whether we actually build something real, that our visual effects supervisor will take and then shoot on a green screen and then manipulate, or whatever, he usually starts with our department.

Sometimes he�ll build a 3-D rendering or he�ll make something out of elements that he can beg, borrow or steal from other productions or he creates himself, but they all have to fit in with what we�ve created on set. What we usually do on the very first day of pre production of each episode is we�ll talk about what each of us can contribute to that script and how it�s going to work scene by scene.

For instance, we did an episode entitled Untouched where a woman was using the hotel as a safe harbour. She was staying up in an attic room and at a certain point her father comes to visit her. She has had a traumatic past with her father and through telekinetic power she makes all the windows in the upstairs of the hotel explode.

Well, we didn�t have an upstairs to the hotel, nor could we afford to make all the windows blow up on location. What we did was build a set we were able to fake the outside of the hotel on, give the visual effects designer one or two windows that he could explode and he then took those and through the magic of digital medium created a whole wall of the hotel exploding. He could tile that effect down, so we could create 5, 10, 100 storeys if we really wanted to.