Threshold is one of a handful of new shows that focuses on the supernatural. © 2005 Paramount Pictures Corp. All rights reserved.

Pretend you’re the vfx supervisor of a new TV show about supernatural beings. You have to make sure the audience can tell the real beings apart from the non-real beings, and you have to set the “mood” and style of the show, such as the traditional “dark and spooky with lots of fog and ghostly-light outlines.”

Doesn’t seem too hard, right? But what if there were half a dozen other supernatural shows also premiering your first week? How do you distinguish your spooks from theirs?

That’s the challenge that a number of vfx producers faced this year. In an apparent reaction to the glut of “reality” shows available on TV, a whole slate of “un-reality” shows came into demand, partly due to the enthusiastic viewer response to shows such as Medium and Lost. Here are some of the new entries, and how they are “effected.”

Mat Beck, vfx supervisor and president of Entity FX, believes vfx should tickle the viewer’s imagination instead of overwhelming with effects. Entity FX is credited with vfx in the Night Stalker pilot and series.

Night Stalker is an ABC TV remake of the classic television series about Carl Kolchak, who chased a new type of evil monster each week, including vampires, werewolves, Native American spirits, robots, reptiles and space aliens. The first show fell victim to constant tampering by network executives, who apparently could not live with unhappy story outcomes, and lasted only one season, but long enough to build a cult following, and several spin-offs by the people that had worked on the show, including The X-Files. The new show appears to be cast in the cheeky spirit of the classic, with much left in the murky unknown, and features Stuart Townsend as a reporter fated to be confronted with eerie phenomena. “The show has a dark look to it, with hints of what is lurking in the darkness,” said Mat Beck, vfx supervisor and president of Entity FX, which did all of the visual effects for both the pilot and the series. “We believe your imagination should work for you — there should be just enough present to tickle the imagination. People’s brains make great render machines. The effects could be compared to an animated fan dance.”

The show uses both puppets and computer-generated creatures. “One of the challenges is to make the transition between practical and CG elements absolutely seamless,” Beck noted. When asked what tools his team uses, he laughed: “It’s almost easier to list the tools we don’t use,” he said. “We believe in letting artists use whatever tools they really need. We primarily use Maya, running on PCs and Macs, but also use some Houdini and LightWave, and render in Maya, mental ray or RenderMan, which ever works best for the particular scene. The team also uses Flame, Inferno, After Effects, Shake and Combustion. Rendering is done in-house on PCs running Linux.” Here, as elsewhere, the much-talked-about option of outsourcing rendering is not in evidence. “We have to make sure everything matches perfectly,” Beck said. “All of our machines are optimized and tweaked and running the same images. When you’re combining different kinds of footage, you have to be right on the mark. If you look closely, you’ll see Darren McGavin and elements from the original series — we used old film images, as was done in Forrest Gump.”