Dr. Walter Bishop (John Noble, L) and his son Peter Bishop (Joshua Jackson, R) work with the FBI on cases that are "preposterous, out there, far-fetched." All images © FOX.

When creative wunderkind J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost) brings a new pilot to television, audiences now expect big-screen quality in their living rooms. Luckily, Abrams doesn't disappoint, as he's always breaking new ground, especially when it comes to the integration of visual effects in his TV projects (despite lesser budgets and tighter production turnaround). Abrams' latest series, Fringe, premiering tonight on FOX, 8/7c, created with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, concerns an FBI agent (Anna Torv) investigating bizarre scientific "patterns" with a mad-scientist (John Noble) and his more stable but equally brilliant son (Joshua Jackson) in tow.

Already called a more outrageous X-Files for the new millennium, Abrams said in a conference call with VFXWorld last week that, "with Fringe, we very consciously did what is in many ways a preposterous, out there, far-fetched, story point in order to say to the audience this is what you are going to be getting on the show. Some [episodes] will deal with science very much as it exists, but, for the most part, the fun for me in TV shows and films is to push the envelope further than you might otherwise."

And it shows in Fringe's two-hour premiere (which cost upwards of $10 million), which could easily hang with its big boy cousins in the theaters considering the pilots impressive cinematography, production design and detailed, gory visual effects. Zoic Studios handled the bulk of the labor on the pilot and is now in charge of the vfx on the continuing episodes. Andrew Orloff is the visual effects supervisor for episodic at Zoic and considers Fringe one of his favorite projects this TV season.

L-R: Olivia (Anna Torv), Peter, Broyles (Lance Reddick) and Walter investigate the crash site of a mysterious bus accident, with Zoic as the lead vfx vendor for the pilot and series.

Asked to come on board in 2007, Orloff explains, "We came to the show through Kevin Blank (Lost, Cloverfield), who was the visual effects supervisor on the production side. He came to us and we hadn't worked together before, but we quickly got a relationship together. We spoke mostly about what we called our 'invisi-John' shots, which was the character (Homeland Security Agent John Scott) who gets poisoned and slowly turns into a translucent/jellyfish version of himself. There was a lot of technical discussion right away about whether that should be prosthetics or CG. We did a lot of R&D in conjunction with the prosthetic company, who did X-Men and X2. They did some 3D tattoos, where they take the 3D model and print out some decals that they can put on the human body. It looks like you could see through the skin onto the muscle tissue. It worked well as a base and then we tracked a virtual person over it. We had a skin model scan of the actor that we tracked frame by frame on top of him doing his breathing and performance. Then we had a medically accurate human anatomy model by Zygote. It was the same model used by the prosthetic company to print out their tattoos. It's a super detailed data set of the human anatomy with all the different systems and organs and skeleton. We conformed that model to fit inside the actor's scan. We rendered out each element piece by piece so our lead compositor, Johnny Banta, was able to put it together. We have the heart beating and blood coursing through the veins. It was very labor intensive but we started out very early doing Photoshop comps based on reference photos from the makeup tests so we could send those to Kevin and J.J. to get a lot of the look development figured out."