Avid Smallville fans have followed a young Clark Kent —faster than a speeding raindrop — grow into his Superman powers. Entity FX has grown too. All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television.

When Smallville begins its sixth season on the CW Network this fall, the action/sci-fi series will have a large legacy to follow. For the past five seasons, avid fans have followed a young Clark Kent (played by Tom Welling) as he grows into his Superman powers. They’ve watched Clark exhibit his X-ray eyesight, his heat vision abilities (which can melt a speeding bullet) and the personal velocity to chase — and catch — an intercontinental ballistic missile. Then there’s the perennial effect of “Clark time,” in which the character seems to move at normal speed while everything else appears paused around him. Added to those visual effects are environments such as Metropolis, Smallville, Kansas (meteor capitol of the world), and exotic locales such as Zod — which is why the digital pipeline at Entity FX has kept humming along.

Entity FX has had a core of about 30 people working on Smallville during the past four seasons, and the team is led by president and vfx supervisor Mat Beck, vfx producer Trent Smith, on-set supervisor John Wash and exec vfx producer Kymber Lim. Entity FX has received a Visual Effects Society Nomination for its work in Smallville, and won a 2004 VES Award for one episode’s “frozen rain” effects sequence.

Beck, who was an Emmy nominee for the effects in HBO’s Band of Brothers, also worked for several years on the landmark sci-fi series, X-Files. He has a host of movie credits as well, including Spider-Man 2, The Aviator, The Nutty Professor, Galaxy Quest and Michael Mann’s feature version of Miami Vice. Beck spoke to VFXWorld from Entity’s studio in Santa Monica, California.

Ellen Wolff: Last year’s season opener of Smallville reportedly had 100 effects shots in that episode alone. Will the sixth season opener match or exceed that?

Mat Beck: I don’t know for sure. Until airtime, the exact shot count is subject to huge variations. For example, in a scene where Clark is in a kind of “limbo” state, it might have been filmed in a way that production wound up not liking how it looked. So they’ll ask, “Can you take these 22 shots and help us out?” And we will. When it comes to the season opener, of course, we make a huge effort to start off with a bang, and hopefully bangs will ensue!

EW: Since you work on several episodes at a time, can you look ahead to advise production on how many effects shots are reasonable to attempt for a given episode?

MB: We do. But the shot lists are continuously modified as the scripts evolve. Usually, the shot lists start small, then grow enormously and then get cut back in response to budget concerns. We go into production with a list of shots we will do, and then when we come out of production into post-production we find out what we’re really going to do.

EW: What is your typical give-and-take with production?

MB: The plates get shot in Vancouver. (The downtown buildings of that British Columbia city often stand in for the skyscrapers of Metropolis.) The film is shot, developed and scanned up there. As a way of recording information, film has a very high bandwidth that’s still pretty good. [Director] James Marshall and [exec producer] Ken Horton do an amazing job shooting this stuff and putting it together.

The scanned footage is sent electronically to editorial right away. Relatively soon after that, HD Cam tapes are sent to us. For certain effects shots, we ask for HD Cam SR to get the extra bandwidth. It’s not exactly Fed-Ex, but that’s how the stuff arrives. We’re exploring the idea of a network link between Vancouver and Entity, conceivably during this season.