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Customer Highlight: Chris Zapara, Eden FX
(Nov. 10, 2003 )
Chris Zapara is currently a supervising visual effects artist at
Eden FX.
Zapara received two Emmy awards for his work on the "Dune" miniseries titles
for the Sci-Fi Channel -- "Dune" and "Children of Dune." He also received an
Emmy nomination for the finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and has worked
on Emmy-winning episodes of "Star Trek Voyager" and "Star Trek: Enterprise." For the
big screen, Chris has contributed visual effects for "Hart's War," "Mimic
II," "A Painted House," and "The Flamingo Rising." For the really big
screen, Chris and his partner Judith have produced planetarium and museum
shows in the IMAX format.
Eden FX, located in Hollywood,
was formed in 2000 by visual effects and
post-production notables John Gross and Mark Miller. The facility offers its
clients the creation and production of original imagery for projects in all
media, including television, film, music video, commercials, and the
Internet. The company specializes in visual effects work in the areas of 3D
animation, character animation, 3D tracking, compositing, direction, on-set
supervision, and conceptual design and consultation. In the area of design,
the company provides services in the areas of titles, broadcast design,
motion graphics, print, and web design.
Q: What are some of the current projects Eden FX has been working on?
Eden FX continues its role as the primary provider of CG effects for the
syndicated Paramount Television series, "Star Trek: Enterprise," which recently
launched its third season on UPN. For new episodes of that show, Eden FX
continues to provide more of their Emmy-Award winning visual effects,
including two new, entirely-computer generated creatures. Other recent
projects include creating unique visual effects for the network series
"NAVY: NCIS" and "Homeland Security," and for the TNT cable telefilm,
"Wilder Days."
Q: How is particleIllusion being used in the production of "Star Trek: Enterprise", and
what sorts of challenges does it help you overcome?
Working on a weekly effects-laden show like Enterprise requires us to
provide a wide range of complicated effects quickly. At any given moment, we
may be called upon to create smoke, fire, collisions, explosions, bubbles,
or exotic energy, and we may have to change the look of any of these on a
moment's notice. particleIllusion has helped us in creating alien underwater
environments, crash landing shuttlecraft, and even in destroying Florida!
particleIllusion's vast collection of emitter libraries gives us a good
starting point for almost any effect we need. The real time parameter
adjustment means we can quickly design the look for a given effect, and then
quickly change that effect if the client needs something different.
One sequence required us to create a giant 'death-ray' that cuts across the
Florida Peninsula. The angle of the shots made using stock elements
problematic, and the time demands ruled out a completely 3D effect. With
particleIllusion, we were able to provide several layers of dust, steam, and
with the new super-emitters, pyro, that we could modify in real time.
ParticleIllusion's scaling ability gave us the dimensionality that ruled out
stock elements and the immediate rendering took the heat off of our 3D
pipeline.
Another sequence involved crashing a shuttlecraft onto a dusty asteroid.
particleIllusion allowed us to use the shuttle's path tracked in After
Effects to generate a realistic trail of dust when the shuttle lands. We
could play the sequence over and over in particleIllusion, changing the look
and behavior of the dust as we went. We generated several passes of dust in
a fraction of the time it would have taken to generate the dust in 3D or to
shoot high speed elements and line them up.
Where our effects arsenal used to include only limited stock elements and
expensive 3D renders, it now also includes fast, accurate, custom elements
from particleIllusion. Because we can now quickly match the motions of our
onscreen elements with particleIllusion, we are free to design more daring
shots that involve the more esoteric effects common on Enterprise.
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