Zoic Studios' visual effects help drive this new action series from FOX. All images courtesy of Zoic Studios. © FOX Broadcasting Co. 

How do you re-invent the wheel, or in the case of FOX's new road-race drama Drive, how do you re-invent the steering wheel? For decades, the Hollywood way to show drama inside a vehicle has always been the industry standard of mounting hood or side mount cameras on a car or truck to get a peep behind the wheel. But with the constant advances in CG and visual effects technology, even that old, industry standard is getting a face-lift. Drive is action-drama that follows the varied participants of a cross-country, underground road race as they jockey for pole position to win an eventual prize of $32 million. It's high stakes, life-changing stuff and the merciless driving by the racers reflects that in every episode. While the action may be impressive, the real heart of the series comes from the characters that are putting the pedal-to-the-metal and you need immediacy to tell their stories. The problem is that the characters spend the majority of their time inside their cars actually racing, so how do you make those boring constraints dynamic?

Enter Zoic Studios and visual effects supervisor for Drive, Loni Peristere. Based in Los Angeles, Zoic has made a name for itself turning the impossible into impressive results on the small (Firefly, Battlestar Galactica) and big screen (Serenity, Pathfinder). Having worked with Drive co-creator Tim Minear previously on Firefly, Peristere says this series was a challenge from the get-go. "Right after Ben Queen pitched Tim Minear the show, Tim shot me an e-mail and he said he was considering pitching a show about a cross-country road race from Florida to Alaska. He was interested, but he wanted to do something different with it. He asked me how do we make this interesting? I thought about it and our e-mails went quiet for a little while I was doing other things and then he shot me another e-mail. He asked if I had seen War of the Worlds yet and I had. He asked about the sequence with Tom Cruise and his family in traffic where the camera is flying around their minivan going in and out, and in and out. I explained it was a combination of live-action photography in the background and greenscreen composited together. He asked, "Can we do that on TV?" I said, "Of course." Then he asked, "Can we do that from car to car and travel up the highway and move around with this omniscient point of view?" I said, "Well, I don't know? I don't think it's ever been done before and we'll have to figure out how to do that."

"I got together with Chris Jones (Zoic creative director), Andrew Orloff (Zoic vfx supervisor) and we brought in some of our key compositors and asked how do we invent this new thing?" Peristere continues. "Zoic has become known for reinventing the CG camera, and coming up with new rules that are basically grounded in reality. If you are shooting CG, add zooms, lens flares and bad focus and it will make it more organic. We won the Emmy and the VES for that work. On Drive, it's exactly the opposite. It's almost taking what you see in videogames, with omniscient cameras that fly around your CG characters and never cut, as it just follows the race. For the show, we invented a photo-realistic camera that moves from car-to-car, driver-to-driver, within the context of a race, without cutting. It's really amazing! I'm so incredibly proud because this is what you aspire to do in a vfx company."

Cool as the camera may be, it's created an amazingly complicated vfx pipeline for a television series, one with a learning curve that Peristere and Zoic are still wrestling into submission six episodes into production. "It's a Rubick's Cube!" he laughs. "It's a thing of many parts and when you see it onscreen, that's only one part of thousands. When people watch the show, they will have no idea there are looking at vfx except for the fact that the camera can't possibly be doing what its doing."

In the pilot, Peristere says their new camera process introduces the ensemble cast. "We had a notion that we would have a third person omniscient camera that will introduce all our characters. The camera will find each car in the race, find the racer, then move out, and find the next car and driver over seven vehicles. That's epic in the middle of a race on the highway going 75 mph! We drew up the storyboards of what Chris Jones and I visualized how it should be and we presented them to a really, talented previz artist, Robin Roestroff. He's known industry-wide as "super previz guy." He has a bunch of tools in his kit which allow him to put in camera rigs, limitations and whatnot, so what you previz has some level of attainability in the real world. So basically we had this vision of what we wanted on paper and then presented it to Tim Minear and Greg Yaitanes (director & exec producer). They approved the concept and we then went to technical execution."