"The audience has seen all the other shows with werewolves, and we have to be somewhat different. We are working in TV, not feature film, but we want to make an impact. Having said that, everyone has an opinion of how he should look, how he should act, how he should move. It's a big team. We're delivering all the wolf shots and we're all satisfied -- so far, so good.

"The fun part for me is shooting the scenes with the wolf and trying to make everybody else in the scene see what I see in my head: where the wolf is going to be, what he is doing and where the camera is and what motion tracking will have to do, the lighting of the wolf and where the shadows will be cast. It's very hard for everybody to imagine that wolf when we shoot the scene, so it's my job to make sure that everybody sees it."

Meanwhile, the vampire vfx are straightforward: basically eyes turning black when they get upset or the growing of their teeth. When the vampires die, they turn to dust. That will be in the final episode, so they are just starting those vfx. It's a combination of particles and well-planned rotoscoping and some layering in which the outside layer will disintegrate while the inside layer will be dust. But some of them will be a bit more interesting in what we call the "raisin effect." Before they disintegrate, their skin will instantly dry up.

The ghost appears and disappears with a flickering in or out. "So we try to make the disappearance effect relate to her mental state at that moment," Rachiele continues. "If she just had a fight with somebody and she disappears, she won't disappear the same way if she's running from something. Each disappearance is different but the effect is a standard particle generation. But, again, it's a very subdued effect. Ghosts are also supposed to relive their deaths, so in one episode, a ghost died from drowning, and once a day he drowns again. How do you visualize somebody drowning in a house? Again, we did some concepts and we ended up shooting the actor in a water tank over a greenscreen and we basically designed a way for him to drown using CG water in two or three places in the show.

"Most of the big effects will be in the later episodes," Rachiele suggests. "But there's a nice morph in the first episode of Josh when he becomes a wolf, but you don't see the end of his transformation. We zoom in on his face where his nose is very obvious and hair grows into a near werewolf. We cut just before the final stage.

"Another interesting shot is where he's in the woods on all fours and we see his rear and human legs becoming wolf-like. But it's in the middle of the transformation. We built a complete snout in 3D and we motion tracked the actor's face and added our CG on it. Episode 10 will have lots of animation with a wolf fight."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.