The most-important effect Andrew Orloff and his team at Zoic had to create for the pilot is how lead character Dan Vassar actually "jumps" through time. All Journeyman images courtesy of Zoic Studios.

The depth and breadth of vfx used in contemporary television series is increasing by leaps and bounds every season now, especially with film savvy viewers expecting more and more from their small screen entertainment. It doesn't hurt that sci-fi/fantasy and high concept shows are all the rage nowadays with network execs. This season finds a load of series from Pushing Daisies to Chuck that all have intensive visual effects work embedded into their DNA. VFXWorld talks to the visual effects teams on several of the most buzzed about shows and gets the skinny about how these new broadcast offerings are raising the bar on what viewers can expect from television.

Journeyman -- NBC, Mondays at 10:00 pm The concept: Dan Vassar, a contemporary reporter from San Francisco, discovers that he can jump back in time to correct things in recent history.

Andrew Orloff of Zoic Studios is the visual effects supervisor on Journeyman. Orloff explains that the most-important effect his team needed to create for the pilot is how Dan Vassar [Kevin McKidd] actually "jumps" through time. "The first thing [the producers] wanted to do was a time jump effect that let the audience know what was happening from a story stand-point. They wanted it to be known he was jumping through time but they wanted to stay away from standard visual effects, like a time tunnel. Alex Graves, the exec producer and director of the pilot, had a very, very specific idea for the show. He wanted it to be a seamless vfx show, where they supported the story and didn't get in the way of the story. The idea of the time travel effects came from thinking about how time travel might actually be physically possible like if there was a wormhole and a tear in the space/time continuum, or a singularity that would basically suck him in through the fabric of space/time. The show isn't treating time as time travel, but that he's journeying through time and space simultaneously. We broke it down into components like there's a disturbance in space/time. There's a good visual example that [Stephen] Hawking talks about with the classic example of how space/time and gravity are the same thing, like if you put a bowling ball in the middle of a trampoline and then add a tennis ball, the fabric of the trampoline will bend and roll around, creating a funnel shape in time and space. That's the genesis of the idea of the time ripple effect. There's a rippling disturbance in the fabric and it's becoming malleable.

Vfx tropes established in the first episode often get trimmed. For Journeyman, the effects were created to remain viable through the course of the series life.

"In the first couple episodes, [the jump] was flat to camera and now we've dimensionalized it in some episodes," Orloff continues. "The basic methodology is pretty simple in that we get Dan against a greenscreen and a clean plate of the background, so we can effect the background separately from him, or whomever is time traveling. It's accompanied with the singularity effects, which is a very bright light source ingrained with the camera. It was very important that the flare effect have a character that was away from a CG lens flare. It needed to look more of an optical feel to counteract the CG intensive ripple effect. It's more of a David Fincher-esque, anamorphic lens flare, which gives it more of a feel that it might have been shot on film with a hot lens source. It started in the pilot and now it has evolved and we're building on it every episode. We've seen it from other people's points of view and in multiple shots."

With budgets for episodic television almost always shrinking after the initial pilot, vfx tropes established in the first episode often need to be trimmed as the season progresses. For Journeyman, Orloff says the effects were created to remain viable through the course of the series life. "We built it to play for the series and that was important for us and what Zoic is known for. Alex is a fantastic client and he understands the process. He works with us and gives the right comments at the right point so we were able to mitigate the more typical disasters by his ability to participate in the visual effects process. He guided us to where he and the studio wanted to be, so we got all that done in the pilot and we had a recipe tailored to their production schedule and budgetary needs. By the end of the pilot, we had it all approved and a menu they could choose from and they know how much it costs so they could step it up and put more into it if they needed."