The Smoke Monster featured prominently in season 5 of Lost. All images © ABC.

Lost has just concluded its fifth season, which was marked by making fantastical situations look photoreal with vfx -- only more so. The work not only included creating plane crashes, adding more detail to the Island and revisiting moments from previous seasons, but also bringing the Smoke Monster into new environments and situations.

"There was a lot more steady work this season," admits Mitch Suskin, vfx supervisor. "Not as many ups and downs. Damon and Carl are ramping up the pace." That would be show runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who exec produce and who did a lot of the writing this season.

This breakdown shows the crash of the Ajira airline, which brought the Oceanic 6 back to the island.

One of the most complex scenes of Season 5 definitely was the crash landing of the 737-100, familiar to viewers of the show, on a dirt airstrip in Episode 9. Featuring 43 shots, mostly from the point of view of the cockpit, the scene contained 50 billion polygons -- a huge number compared to the average—with each frame taking five hours to render. "It's an example of having feature-quality aspirations on a television schedule," says Suskin. "It was a challenge to get it out in time and make it as reasonable as possible." Eden FX utilized a new LightWave 3D plug-in that allowed it to manage the vast amounts of data. "That scene would not have been possible without that plug-in."

The scene also required more back-and-forth than normal between the editor and the vfx crew. The editor, using a greenscreen, had a hard time visualizing how the scene would play. Suskin and his crew put together an animatic of the airplane's flight path and the views from the window. The editor then created temporary comps to show the vfx crew the sped-up pacing and other changes. "It was a dialogue in pictures back and forth between us and the editor," Suskin explains.

Season 5 also featured some advances to the recurring character of the Smoke Monster. "We're actually getting more comfortable with Smokey," Suskin comments. "We have a lot of different tools at our disposal now and a lot of ways of approaching it." Innovations this season have included seeing the Monster in daylight and having him interact more with people. A sequence featuring Smokey dragging a character through the jungle involved mattes and animation for the grabbing and dragging, plus digital elements and rotoing to achieve the layers of depth needed to realistically put the Monster behind bushes and blades of grass. In the latter case, the crew used stills for the background instead of plates.

Smokey drags a poor Frenchmen through the jungle.

Suskin credits the matte painters and roto team for the success of this scene. "Having him go behind a tree is one thing, but it's different with hundreds of blades of grass," says Suskin. "It's about paying enough attention to detail to sell the fact that he's there. There's really no magic or high-tech to solve this problem." Suskin notes that, although the process is digital now, it is essentially the same as was used in the 1920s.