Propeller Anchor Commentary

Alexia: While Ryan Budke was on the set of "The Office" I visited a post-production facility called Encore Hollywood where all of the special effects for "House, MD" on Fox are created.

In the video, the host, Elan Soltes - Visual Effects Supervisor at Encore - mentions the phrase "CG." This stands for "Computer Generated," or "Computer Graphics." At Encore, Elan oversees a team of CG artists who create eye-tricking images on the computer, using special software, that, when viewed in their final form on TV, look like the hyper-detailed world of the inside of the human body. In the case of this video, the CG effects mimic the inside of someone's head.

Elan also told me that his team usually has about three weeks to create one CG effect, no matter how complicated it is. That's from script to air, folks. As a simple video editor for Netscape who knows only very little about CG creation, I can tell you that that is a breakneck pace.

Many thanks to Kent Feeler - Lead Compositor, Encore Visual Effects - for running the computer behind Elan in this video so we could all see clearly what Elan was describing when he talks about how one effect gets made.

2006-11-02 13:39:08