Screen Burn

Mark Spatney is particularly proud of this scene where heals as she walks out of her burning house in Company man.
"Origionally the plan was to have various photo doubles for [Hayden Panettiere] in stages of make-up that they would cut between. On the day of shooting, it became evident that this was not going to work because although the actresses looked like Claire, they didn'y proform like Claire. They didn't have Haydens way of walking. So we created a CG double and exactly matched it to Hayden's proformance and then went betwen the live actress and the CG charactor. Eric Grenaudier had a lot to do with that, as the artist put all the elements together. Our 3D artist had to create a CG version of her and frame by frame match the position of her body, so that he'd bring up a frame, line it up, get the hand, the fingers, the body and the shoulders all correct, and then build the next frame and do it all again"

Mark spatney is the supervising producer at stargate Digital and Eric Grenaudier is the visual effects supervisor for Heroes itself.



All around the World

Whether a far-off location utilizes actual footage or just a matte painting depends on how often we'll see it. Mark Spatney says "In season 2, Mohinder has a mwwting in Cairo and the producers wanted to see Cairo out of the window . We can create this with just a matte. We'll get some photographic elements and put it together."

"If it's a specific location we know were going to be in a lot, we will send a unit out on locatin. For Heroes we have sent camra crew s to New York twice to shoot locations. We can put people in moving footage, or we'll use footage to create enviroments. Sometimes we'll use still frames from video and create New York buildings in the background. We'll shoot locations from every concievable angle, and we'll work with the director and say 'Here's how you need to shoot the scene in order to work with the footage.' We shoot wide angles, we shoot pieces that will be stiched together so that we can create moving camera angles, so that if we want to spin the camera around them or pan off to reveal something, we can do that."