Knight Rider 2008: VFX in High Gear
With the success of the contemporized reboot of NBC's Knight Rider as a two-hour movie event last spring, Michael Knight (Justin Bruening) and KITT are now back for weekly adventures starting Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. on NBC.
Gone is the 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am KITT of old. Instead KITT (voiced by Val Kilmer) has been upgraded to a 2008 Ford Mustang GT500KR that's fully loaded with artificial intelligence, biometrics, and morphing capabilities.
In the TV movie, KITT actually used nanotechnology to change colors and temporarily morph into other cars. But a lot has changed in only a few months as Knight Rider has developed into a series. New showrunner and executive producer Gary Scott Thompson (Las Vegas) says it's his goal to push the envelope of television visual effects in order to meet the expectations of today's savvy audience.
"Here's the thing about features," Thompson explains. "Once they do [something] for the first time in the feature world, even if it costs $100 million, the price then comes down [everywhere] because it's digital and CG. So if I see something, I immediately turn to our guys and ask how it was done and how we can replicate it or do our version of it. It's all moving so quickly what with Xbox and PS3 in gaming and then Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in movies. And I think the bigger thing is what's being seen by audiences. They are too sophisticated now and if we don't do at least what those other mediums are doing and take it to the next level, I don't think we will make it. So that was the idea with us using nanotechnology as KITT transforms and morphs into other cars. We are finding ways to afford to do it and make it work because we aren't limitless with the visual effects."
The visual effects house charged with creating these visual miracles every week is Stargate Digital of Pasadena, CA. Sam Nicholson, CEO and founder of Stargate Digital, is visual effects supervisor on Knight Rider and he says they've followed Gary's mandate by adding transforming abilities (à la the Transformers movie) to the already loaded super car.
"Gary is a very strong executive producer so we in general follow his lead in all things from depth of field to complexity of graphics," Nicholson details. "And we are fortunate to have NBC as a studio on this because they are very supportive of the changes we wanted to make to the car from the pilot to the series. Naturally, we bring whatever skill sets we can to the table, particularly with the greenscreen and compositing.
"We've gone much more towards a 'Transformer' look in the series," Nicholson says of the changes to KITT. "We tried to somewhat modularize it to say that we could have the car transform from regular KITT to attack KITT. We can then model that, animate it so then we will be able to reuse the animation and relight it in different sequences."
Nicholson admits it's a pretty sophisticated visual effect to use on the small screen every week, but there are long-term benefits too. "The car is going through a series of predictable moves when it goes into attack mode. Generally speaking, there is a certain amount of amortization you can do in any successful, long-running television series. KITT, being the central focus, allowed us to keep coming back to the same high-end model. It's not like it's a different creature every week, so it becomes somewhat predictable and therefore more affordable.
"And it transforms all the time," he continues. "Gary really likes to have a rich visual palate. The mandate from the very beginning was that we were going to take this thing over the top. KITT is a central focus in how to do that, including all the heads-up displays, the transforming car and then the turbo-boosting. Gary brought that all into play."
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