Entity is always looking for ingenious ways to push the envelope and not break the bank. Usually time is a greater limiting factor than money.

EW: Have all these off-the-shelf tools reduced Entity’s need for a sizable technical staff?

MB: Yes and no. I have more technical people working for me than I would have thought. We’ve got a 2D render farm and 3D render farm and a Flame render farm. We’ve got fast servers and ways to link them. It takes a lot to keep all these things talking to each other, and shoot around data at the rate that’s needed.

EW: As the speed of CG production improves, do you find that TV clients expect more interactivity? Many of them come from a video post tradition where they’re used to sitting in a bay, exploring different iterations. Do faster digital effects provide any “comfort factor” for them?

MB: I think so. The systems are getting more and more powerful, but there’s still an interesting mix of two cultures. Film definitely benefits from getting a little bit of that “let’s look at it quickly” attitude from TV, and TV benefits from the exactitude that film requires.

EW: You were once quoted as saying that TV effects assignments aren’t epic poems — they’re sonnets.

Entity president and vfx supervisor Mat Beck believes that TV effects assignments aren’t epic poems — they’re sonnets.

MB: Yeah. Wasn’t it Abraham Lincoln who said, “If I’d had more time, I could have written you a shorter letter.” Brevity is the soul of wit and also the soul of drama in some cases. It’s not the shortness of the process — because two TV episodes can be longer than some movies. So under that kind of compression you sometimes get work that’s better because there’s not time for overcooking.

EW: Do you think about fans’ expectations that Clark Kent will have even greater superpowers this season? Will you need to do more — and more difficult — visual effects?

MB: Judging by past performance, the answer is yes. We started out doing a super-speed effect where Clark runs from here to there. Or an X-ray effect or a heat-vision effect — those were relatively straightforward things. But now we’ve reached the point of doing CG versions of Clark, and CG natural phenomena and CG environments — sometimes entire planets.

But it’s not just a matter of creating more sophisticated effects. There’s a cliché that everybody utters but it really is true — we’re here to help tell a story, and put characters in situations where you care what happens to them. So it’s important that we have effects that “sell” the jeopardy or the environment that the characters are in.

EW: As it was when you worked on X-Files, Smallville has attracted a devoted fan base.

Beck: Yes, I’ve met some of them. It’s both gratifying and a little scary to know how many people are watching, and how closely they’re watching! My motto is: “The fans are out there.”

Ellen Wolff is a southern California-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as Daily Variety, Millimeter, Animation Magazine, Video Systems and the website CreativePlanet.com. Her areas of special interest are computer animation and digital visual effects.