Angel becomes human in the crossover episode, 'I Will Remember You'
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Loni Peristere is one of the sweetest guys you will ever talk to! Young, talented, forth sighted with an amazing enthusiasm that it’s contagious. He is the Special Effects Supervisor for Angel and is responsible for bringing about all those awesome FX you see each week on ‘Angel’ and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’. Before we crack into the wizardry let’s first get aquatinted with Digital Magic and Pacific Ocean Post, their Digital Visual Effects Facility. Loni’s been with the company since 1996 and they are owned by Four Media Company who has a huge reputation in ws wtelevision and film industry with such credits as ‘Armageddon’, Batman Forever’ and ‘Titanic’. Digital Magic was once an ‘effects boutique’ created solely for ‘Star Trek, the Next Generation’. The boutique did all the visual effects for the show and a group of people working there created Digital Magic, because of the ‘Star Trek’ franchise. Loni offers his insight to the company, "Digital Magic is a company that owns visual effects equipment and is a facility where very talented visual effects artists have worked. In other words, Digital Magic would be a company which has an Inferno, a Henry, 3D machines and SGI machines that we use. They facilitate the work but their involvement in the actual production process is minimal. It’s almost like a shop. But because of their reputation for having a well run shop, they hire good artists and they produce the work that they promise with the best machines that the industry makes."
Because Digital Magic is so well established in the film industry does that put more pressure on you to maintain a higher look with the work you do on TV shows? "No, actually I think the high quality comes from David Greenwalt and Joss Whedon and the relationship we have together on the show where we won’t take anything less. We treat it like a feature every week and we kind of budget and delegate our time appropriately based on what the show calls for. So sometimes if we’re in the script writing process we might have a rather large sequence, whether it be visual effects or make-up or set design that we may choose to invest in or depending on how it effects the story." Loni continues, "The story is always number one on both Buffy and Angel and often times the way we decide how things are going to be done is based on how important it is to the story. Like in ‘Shanshu’, in the last episode, it was pretty important for David Greenwalt to show the rebirth of Darla. So from the get go we knew we were going to design this feature quality visual effects scene and we got to work on it early and assigned money to it early on. It’s not like
"I’ve been a film
geek ever since
I was young...
‘Star Wars’,
‘Jaws’, ‘2001’,
were all big
influences on
me..."
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we’ve standards to live up to it’s just the way we do things on the show and we try not to compromise. It’s a really nice method, actually; it’s very unique. I don’t think many television shows have that and I think that’s why we’re so successful."
So how did this gifted young man from Boston find his way to the sunny shores of California? Would you believe it if I told you the ‘Super-8’ story again? "I’ve been a film geek ever since I was young. Obviously the ‘Star Wars’ films and the ‘Indiana Jones’ Trilogy and ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Jaws’, ‘2001’, were all big influences on me wanting to be a filmmaker in general. I started making movies, like Speilberg, when I was 10 years old. I had a best friend and we had a Super-8 camera and started cutting things and we always did the visual effects in-camera with little explosives and mattes. I was just interested in that in general but oddly enough I came to visual effects, as a profession, because of some work that I had done on an independent short that I directed at a company through a friend who helped me get my film done at this company which was Digital Magic." And then, just like Angel, he met a girl... "and the whole Buffy thing happened."
Loni added his FX talents to the movie 'Volcano' as well.
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Loni continues how he got his start, "I came out here and I looked for jobs like crazy. I happened to know people in this facility because that’s where I’d done my film. They got me an interview and they were very kind to me and there was a few jobs that were open and one of the jobs that was open was an assistant to the visual effects supervisor. And if there was anything I didn’t know anything about it was visual effects. I mean, I really just had an ILM Magic Lantern book view of everything. Everything of effects, I just read about it and never had any hands-on. So I took this job as his assistant and he was an extremely over-run special effects supervisor and not to blame fault or anything but he needed help." Loni worked on movies the movies ‘Volcano’ and ‘Powder’ and Rogers & Hammerstein's ‘Cinderella’ visual effects for the television movie. "Buffy had just come to Digital Magic from Area 51 and in their second season they weren’t quite the massive hit they became. It was kind of a show that people were tepid about, like, ‘oh is it going to be successful, do you want to do it?’ and I was like, ‘yeah, I’d love to do Buffy! I’d love to dust vampires.’ So I was given the opportunity to come up with the way that vampires turn to dust and that was my challenge. ‘Well, see if you can figure out a way to turn a vampire to dust.’"
Now there’s a challenge you don’t get every day! Explaining his first encounters with Joss he tells us how the initial process was created. "I got together with Joss and David Solomon who works at Buffy and we talked about how he would like it to be a throw back to the New York Annex stop motion days from like the original ‘Dracula’ where you see a figure crumble to dust. But obviously we don’t have the time or the money to do
"It was a 12 hour
night because I
had to deliver the
next morning
otherwise I was
gonna lose the
show."
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that. So how do we do that without having it not look too CG (computer generated)? I shot two days worth of elements and I did a whole bunch of R&D and 3D and came up with about 6 different solutions and none of them worked. And Joss was like, ‘ah no we’re not getting anywhere, it’s not what I’m looking for.’ And one particular night I came up with this color correction saturation process on the figure which created the illusion of the flesh becoming dirt. It was a 12 hour night because I had to deliver the next morning otherwise I was gonna lose the show. (laugh) So it was like one of those things because you had to start the season, So we worked all night and it was in the middle of the night that came up with this process which was a combination of color correcting the actual plate, the live action photography to a tone which was dust in color. I came up with this saturation process, this sharpening process, that gave the flesh this crunchy, earthen look and I came up with a way to reveal that using actually some elements of flashlights on tin foil believe it or not that I shot under the camera stand." He adds, "because I thought that the crumpled texture of tin foil combined with moving lights if used as a displacement matte. The lighter points actually warp and bend the image in such a way that it gives it kind of cracked texture. But use that element as an articulated wipe, which reduces the saturation in the flesh and then the figure. My idea was, obviously you start loosing all the moisture in your body from ‘stake point’ so I just designed it to work that way. And they use that in combination with a number of 3D dust particles and that’s what created vamps to dust."
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