THE MAKING OF
How Foundation Imaging creates a 30 minute live-action show, all in 3D, every week.   By Erik Holsinger

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PLASMA BUG TRUCK PULL:
3.6 Mbyte QuickTime 4Movie
Click on the image to this scene from Starship Troopers

Face the face: Here the Foundation animators use a video tape of themselves lip-syncing the lines to get the proper timing on character lip-sync and expressions.

Rogues Gallery: Instead of relying on character sketches, Foundation had Sony take pictures of employees that matched what they had in mind for the characters' facial features. Using these as a starting point, the Foundation animators are able to create a wide variety of characters.

The Process
Scheetz oversees five teams; each team has 10 animators, five Technical Directors, a Director and a project coordinator. Each team works slightly out of sync, so that each group delivers one completed episode every four weeks. The pace can get hectic, even with five teams, but while I was there, it appeared that the morale was really high among the animation crew.

"Even though it's been a [difficult project], Richard [Raynis, the Executive producer of the show for Sony] wants it to be everything that we want to be," said Scheetz. "It's really cool to have someone care enough to do whatever they can to make the show everything it can be. This leaves us free to create the kind of shows that we both want to do."

Creating New Worlds
Clearly "Starship Troopers" is the richest, most film-like of any animated series that has been produced to date (want proof? Check out the video clips included with the article). Creating a show like "Troopers" requires a lot of horsepower. "I believe right now we are running about 300 processors in parallel, with about 1.5 terrabytes of storage allocated to just this project," said Bryant. "Also, it requires a network system that's not going to bog when data starts to pass around."

Even Foundation's network system reflects its off-the-shelf technology philosophy. Instead of using a custom Fibre channel network system, Foundation uses four Ethernet ports on a single card, with all the ports working in parallel on each machine using a switching hub that can recognize this output stream; according to Bryant the actual throughput is pretty close to fibre channel. Ultimately, Foundation takes a very hands-off approach to new technology. "We are extremely conservative when it comes to technology," said Bryant. "We'd rather work with lots of extremely low-cost technology [hardware] than a few pieces of high-performance technology that is extremely delicate."

Adding to the production arsenal are two video edit bays and a sound editing department. Basically all the animations are constructed as animatic reels on an in-sync Speed Razor system. This enables the team to slug in shots as they go, and give quick comps to Sony at all stages of the production.