Eden FX Produces 75 FX Shots for Premiere Episode of NBC TV's "The Cape"

Eden FX designed, produced and delivered 75 VFX shots for the January 9th premiere episode of the new NBC TV series "The Cape," it was announced by John Gross, Creative Director, Eden FX. The new series depicts the adventures of a superhero named "The Cape," who in real life -- as an honest cop framed for murder --decides to transform himself into a larger than life character based on a popular comic book. Eden's work on the show included numerous digital "cape" effects, smoke/fluid dynamics, wire/rig removals, and compositing. For the majority of the show's action sequences, the hero's cape was actually a digital element. In this series, the cape, itself, is essentially depicted as its own "character," capable of being dispersed over long distances, ensnaring villains and throwing things around.

For many of these shots, Eden's Lead VFX Artist Stefan Bredereck developed a pipeline using Newtek's Lightwave3D to roto-animate a digital human character over the real-life actor's motion, and importing this character's animation into Autodesk's Softimage XSI for cloth animation. These digital cape shots were then brought back into Lightwave for rendering, through Eden's in-house render controller, using HDRI photography. This HDRI photography was captured on set by Eden VFX Artist Christian Bloch, to integrate the cloth into the live-action scenes.

For another recurring gag featured in the premiere episode of "The Cape," Eden FX artists utilized 3D Studio Max and FumeFX to generate the effect of a magician who literally "vanishes in a puff of smoke."

Regarding work on "The Cape," Steve Pugh, a Visual Effects Producer with Eden FX, said, "This show made use of our entire tool set, and was definitely a prime example of an FX house using the right tool for each step along the way. One of the show's biggest challenges was its tight delivery schedule, which meant we had to ramp up to a crew of about twenty 3D artists and compositors. While that's part and parcel of the television pilot season, I'd be curious to see how Red Bull's sales spiked last April and May."