Film and TV production happens fast. Even a series as blown about by the waves as “Doctor Odyssey” needs to navigate between the Scylla of ocean exteriors and Charybdis of network procedural turnarounds. The visual effects team, led by VFX supervisor Jason Piccioni, has only about a week and a half per episode. So on the midseason two-parter, “Shark Attack,” they needed to be very strategic about when, how, and why we see the titular predators from the deep blue sea.
That specific challenge got the IndieWire Craft team thinking about how lean and mean you could get a VFX setup to create the shark that kamikaze-swims into the Odyssey’s propeller, the orcas that ram its hull, and the menacing fins that circle in the dark waters while our hero medics are (improbably) out in a support boat.
Piccioni told IndieWire that they worked with FuseFX for the show’s ambitious two-parter — indeed, FuseFX has done VFX work for almost all Ryan Murphy shows. For the specific format and constraints of “Doctor Odyssey,” they run an animation pipeline that consists of Maya, Houdini, Arnold, and Nuke. None of these are proprietary programs, but if you were to purchase an annual subscription of each for your own 3D shark building purposes, the cost would run close to $14,000 — and that’s before labor, as animators tend to specialize, be it in bipedal creatures, talking dogs, spaceships, or indeed sharks.
Trevor Carlee, an independent animator behind some Internet-favorite LEGO versions of movies and TV shows, told IndieWire it’s taken him about five years to fine-tune his computer/software setup to where it all operates smoothly. Even though there is a LEGO shark piece that already exists, so it wouldn’t take him that long to make an animated version, the actual work and artistry of integrating a CG creature into the visual world is not nearly as straightforward. How photorealistic the shark is, and how much focus it draws, put more demands on the animators to create something that passes muster for the audience.
“One of my first steps into doing 3D animation professionally was actually a 3D shark animation for a Will Smith show on the Discovery Channel,” Carlee told IndieWire. “Luckily the sharks had to move by the camera quickly so they didn’t have to be too realistic.”
In a similar vein, Gints Zilbalodis — who has praised the free animation software Blender both in his Oscars acceptance speech and on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast episode about his film “Flow” which features its own sea monster — said that a lot of effort went into getting a small Latvian animation team up to speed with how to translate their artistic talent into the programs they were using.
“You have to find someone who’s talented and then we have to bring them to [the] place where we need them,” Zilbalodis said. “I learned [Blender] while making this film. I hadn’t used it before and it’s really quick to learn. Our animators, most of them hadn’t used it and it took them like only a week to learn, so it’s very intuitive. It’s great that it’s free because our budget was fairly modest. It really helped to save some resources.”
Saving resources and putting the focus where it matters was also important to Piccioni and the “Doctor Odyssey” team. During the script breakdown with each director and executive producer Liz Friedman, they run through the usual VFX needs of the show — all boat exteriors, extensions on the leisure deck — and the episode-specific demands. “We have conversations about what’s important to which scene, what we can afford, and get into the finer details of how we might shoot it,” Piccioni said.
Once the episode is shot, all the post processes run in parallel in order to make the fast turnaround happen. “VFX is working on shark animation while the edit is solidifying and sound and music are being worked on. And each one of those things affects the others. So it involves a little bit of trust and a lot of communication,” Piccioni said.
For the sharks themselves, the preparation involved watching a fair amount of National Geographic for reference. But every decision that Piccioni and his team made was informed by some perspective on what was most important to get across about the sharks and orcas: How they affect the main characters.
“If you look at really great monsters, you think you see a lot more than you actually do. And this isn’t just about practical constraints, it’s what helps make it scary. The power of suggestion is your best friend. Let the audience fill in the blanks,” Piccioni said. “It also helps to remember that the monster isn’t the focus. ‘Jaws’ isn’t about the shark. It’s about the guys in the boat.”
So, if you can create a story about some guys (or some hot doctors) in a boat and can get away with doing the whole thing in Blender? Then the first shark is free.
