Cinesite Creates Effects for The Drew Carey Show

LOS ANGELES --(Mar. 06, 2001)-- Cinesite recently brought cutting-edge visual effects technology to an unusual arena: television situation comedy. The effects house worked on 134 shots for two important February sweeps episodes of the popular ABC comedy series The Drew Carey Show.

Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff Okun and Cinesite Producer Mike Sullo oversaw the project for the comedy series creators' Drew Carey and Bruce Helford. The shots were composites of a variety of elements including 35 mm film and videotape.

"We had very little time to pull off some sophisticated tricks," says Okun, "but I knew they could impart a sense of wonder to the material. Anybody can knock out shots, but you need that sense of wonder to make it work." The first episode that incorporated Cinesite visual effects aired Wednesday, February 7, and featured Drew Carey in a coma.

In the opening of the show, he dreams he's flying over the city of Cleveland. Later, in his own imaginary version of heaven, he steps through a door into a famous football game and breaks up a John Elway pass that sends his beloved Cleveland Browns to the Super Bowl. Back in his heavenly living room, a giant needle begins chasing him around the set. It is reflecting what is happening in reality, where a doctor is injecting him to rouse him from the coma. Carey's imaginary heaven is "peeled" off the screen in chunks and he finds himself in a star field with comedian Ben Stein. There he must decide whether to live, or die and go to heaven. These sequences required green screen work on the set at Warner Bros., and a trip to Cleveland for background plates. When the elements arrived at Cinesite, they were in a variety of formats.

The film material was scanned into digital files using the Philips Spirit DataCine. When necessary, video elements were converted to 24 frames per second for digital compositing.

"The Spirit was crucial because we needed depth and resolution in order to manipulate colors and contrast for matching the elements," says Sullo. "For the shots of Drew that were composited with the football footage, we had to take the resolution down a little to match the archival video footage." The "reality tearing away" sequence required some design work to determine a visual approach that worked within the scene. Ken Sjogren and Renee Chamblin were the digital artists rendering images with Flame software on this and other sequences. Tom Zils was the composite supervisor.

The February 14 episode of The Drew Carey Show also included Cinesite's state-of-the-art effects. In this episode, Carey and other heaven-bound humans rise up in recliner-like clouds, while a stream of new babies head down towards earth in the other half of the frame. These shots feature as many as 10 layers and the backgrounds required a good deal of tweaking to get the right depth and motion. At 24 frames per second, the sequences ended up being about 6,000 frames. All the sequences were converted back to 30 frames per second in digital video format for editing and eventual broadcast.

"We were working at much lower resolution than usual," says Sullo, "and that allowed us to render images much faster, which was important because we were working on a very tight television schedule." "There is a level of chaos in the television realm," says Okun, who is noted for feature film effects.

"They're editing right up to the last minute with 60 or 70 shots per episode and these shows must have set some kind of record for effects shots in a half-hour sitcom. But, we were able to maintain fluidity and roll with the changes and that was crucial to the success of this project." Produced by Mohawk Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television,

The Drew Carey Show airs Wednesday's 9-9:30pm PT/ET and is executive produced by Bruce Helford, Drew Carey, Robert Borden (episodes 1-13), Holly Hester (episodes 14-26) and Deborah Oppenheimer, and created by Drew Carey & Bruce Helford. Cinesite is a Kodak subsidiary and part of the company's Entertainment Imaging division. With facilities in Hollywood and London, Cinesite provides a wide range of visual and physical effects, digital film mastering, digital film restoration and preservation services. For more information, visit the Cinesite website at www.cinesite.com .

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