In the season two premiere of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, an evil urinal morphs. The technically impressive shot sets the stage for a reboot of the show's tone. All images © Warner Bros. Television; Courtesy of Entity FX.

When the first season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles got cut back to a mere nine episodes due to the 100-day WGA writers strike, showrunner Josh Friedman knew that he'd have to raise the vfx bar for the second season of his fledgling series, despite Zoic Studio's Emmy-nominated work on the pilot and first season (particularly the T-888 model). Not only did he have to woo fickle audiences back to his show but Friedman also had to make sure his corner of the mythology stayed comparable to the new big screen sequel (Terminator Salvation) coming in May 2009.

For the new season, Jim Lima remains the on-site isual effects supervisor on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but the vendor creating the shots is now Entity FX in Santa Monica, CA.

Mat Beck, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor at Entity FX, says that an important reference was the groundbreaking work that James Cameron pioneered for T2: Judgment Day.

"Jim came to us needing a lot of cool effects," Beck explains. "Obviously, it's an effects driven show and TV being TV, a lot of cool effects in a short period of time. So we're building on the good work that has been done on the series, and we're continuing to customize our procedures to the production 'as we move through the episodes. There's a certain amount of building the train while it's going down the track."

And that's understandable once you see the first episode of the season, "Samson & Delilah", which ends with the stunning reveal of character Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson) as a liquid metal T-1000 (à la Robert Patrick's Terminator in T2). In a cheeky scene, two businessmen chat cattily in a bathroom about Weaver, who then proceeds to morph from the urinal into her murderous mechanical self. It's an impressive shot not only technically, but also because it sets the stage in rebooting the intentions and tone of the show's second season.

"We thought the urinal shot turned out well, considering we were in the toilet the whole time," Beck laughs sheepishly. "It's interesting because part of it is that you think of the physics of how she would have disguised herself in the environment but then taking some liberties about what would look cool. Transforming a urinal into a female Terminator... we actually tried various paths which looked more or less believable, or even comic, It took some experimentation to adjust the details of when and where her head appears. There were some earlier configurations that we could not do! The trick was to have it look like a scary transformation/ not like someone getting born." he laughs. "Plus the fact that no guy who worked on it will never stand at a urinal the same way again."

A moving chrome surface is like a CG exercise. Entity FX spent a lot of time looking at how the Terminator rose off the floor in T2. With today's tools, however, shots can get done quicker.

The sequence also allowed the Entity team to really take the look and technology of T2 (1991) and update it for the new millennium. "Ironically, one of the geniuses of Jim Cameron was that he designed effects and created characters that represented the leading edge of the technology at the time," Beck explains. "A moving chrome surface was once the ultimate CG demonstration piece. That's not true anymore, but you still want to honor it in a certain way. We spent a lot of time looking at how the [Terminator] character rose off the checkerboard tiled floor in T2. If you look closely, you can even see some cheats done back then. The tools are more powerful now, but the shots aren't easier because we have to do more in a much shorter time. Ironically, because you don't have the time to do a lot of little tweaks or paint fixes to make the shots go together, the underlying solution has to be right. That said, we're not above tweaking the 360-degree environment to make the reflections cooler, since that's how these surfaces play. The challenge is always, within the environment, to make the thing look really cool and tell a story with an emotional and visual impact."

The success of the sequence was immediate with critics and fans buzzing the day after the premiere about the reveal. And despite TV budgets, the T-1000 transformation is going to become a regular fixture as the season progresses. "We are doing some more interesting transformation stuff," Beck teases. "A recent shot involves a woman kissing a guy in an alley. She transforms into half woman half chrome terminator, then into another woman, pausing in mid transformation to kill the guy by shoving a probe down his throat. All while the camera is moving through space. That's a lot of complicated choreography, so the challenges of animation and match-moving go up. That's an adventure when the final version of the shot has to be finished literally within days."

Entity also has a laundry list of other effects they are producing for the series, including the post-apocalyptic sequences that define the context of the future lives of characters like Cameron (Summer Glau) and Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green). "There are a lot of apocalyptic environments with matte paintings," Beck details. "They start out as concept art which turn into paintings which then are given 3D geometry and lit. There's a scene that takes place on a derelict aircraft carrier in the ruined harbor of Los Angeles, all of which is completely synthetic, including a modeled aircraft carrier."