It’s important that Entity has effects that “sell” the jeopardy or the environment that the characters are in. 

EW: What tool do you use for that?

MB: We use Maya. If you’re a director who’s just trying to do some rough previs, you can use software that’s easier to use. But from our point of view, when we use Maya the results are dimensionally accurate. We can say: “This is what we need to build. And here’s where the camera goes, and it has a 17mm lens and it’s two feet off the ground.” Also, in certain cases previs gives us a heads-up for building a CG environment.

I’ve been doing more directing on this show, and it won’t come as a surprise that some of the sequences I’ve directed have been heavily prevised!

EW: So you don’t shoot anything that you won’t need.

MB: That’s kind of what happens. We have a scene where Clark has to catch a missile that’s being launched. He runs and jumps up and just barely catches it and climbs onto it. All that was shot in one day, because we just shot what we needed and no more.

On the other hand, to the extent that the effects are completely under control, they risk being boring. You need enough room on set — having gotten what you needed — to try things that produce happy accidents. My cliché is that you need to have a really good plan worked out so you have something to throw out the window if you need to!

We’re always looking for ingenious ways to push the envelope and not break the bank. It really doesn’t matter if it’s a TV show or a film. What makes TV especially challenging is the time factor. Usually time is a greater limiting factor than money.

EW: Since you’ve done so many episodes of Smallville, do you benefit from any economies of scale?

MB: We do benefit from previous work in a number of ways. One is the re-use of elements, like pieces of models. But it isn’t “alright, we’re going to do all the Fortress of Solitude shots for this show as well as for the episode two shows from now on.” Because that would be actually a false economy. We really need to be working within the rhythm of the show that’s rounding into completion.

EW: How have improvements in CG affected your production process?

MB: Every year we get more processors, and those processors get more powerful. The software also gets more powerful so we can do more with it.

EW: What is your primary operating environment?

MB: Right now, it’s mostly Maya on Linux. Our technical people like Linux, but we believe in giving an artist the environment in which he or she can flourish. So we do have some Windows machines.

For compositing we use 3ds Max. We also use Inferno and Flame, and After Effects. We’re going to be trying out Digital Fusion and perhaps some other packages as well. Every program we run goes out to a render farm, so that we can maximize the power of an artist.

EW: Do you do multi-pass renders?

MB: Yes, we’re fans of multi-pass rendering, and the new versions of Maya are better at that. Some of the powers of those extra passes are that you can do quasi-3D. We do a lot of 2-1/2D.

For example, in a scene I directed where Clark catches up to a jet plane, we had reflection passes and motion vector passes so that we could do our motion blur in 2D rather than in 3D. It’s a lot less expensive, so we do that all the time.