Interview with Emile Edwin Smith of Zoic, about Serenity
by Wes Beckwith
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We were very fortunate to catch up with Emile Edwin Smith, CG Supervisor for Universal Pictures' Serenity. You might remember a miniseries called Firefly by Joss Whedon; well, unless you have been living under a rock for the last year, you know Firefly has been turned into a feature film called Serenity, due to be released September 30th.
Emile Edwin Smith is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Zoic Studios who led the teams on such recent projects as Serenity, Century City, Battlestar Galactica, and Firefly. Emile and team members at Zoic won the Emmy and VES award for Firefly in 2003 and were nominated for a second Emmy and won a VES award for their work on Battlestar Galactica in 2004. Prior to Zoic, Emile worked as a Visual Effects Supervisor, Director, and Artist with such companies as Foundation Imaging, Radium, Neo Pictures, and Flash Film Works on various projects and feature films, including Mimic 2 and The Jackal, as well as numerous commercials and music videos. Smith also supervised the well-received NFL “Space Raiders” spots, was the VFX Supervisor for the TV movie Extreme Team for Touchstone Television, the Visual Effects Supervisor for Providence and served as Digital Effects Supervisor on the TV movie Superfire. He has enjoyed contributing his visual effects experience to such shows as Miracles, The Twilight Zone, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space 9. Also listed among his accomplishments, Emile directed several episodes of Starship Troopers: The Roughneck Chronicles.
About Serenity
Serenity centers around Captain Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic crew who are the closest thing he has left to family – squabbling, insubordinate and undyingly loyal.
When Mal takes on two new passengers a young doctor and his unstable, telepathic sister he gets much more than he bargained for. The pair are fugitives from the coalition dominating the universe, who will stop at nothing to reclaim the girl. The crew that was once used to skimming the outskirts of the galaxy unnoticed find themselves caught between the unstoppable military force of the Universal Alliance and the horrific, cannibalistic fury of the Reavers, savages who roam the very edge of space. Hunted by vastly different enemies, they begin to discover that the greatest danger to them may be on board Serenity herself.
An Award-winning Creative Collaboration Continues…
In 2002, Joss Whedon joined forces with Loni Peristere and the folks at Zoic Studios to create an innovative visual style for the special effects for Whedon’s new series, Firefly. The series picked up an enthusiastic audience during its run, as well as critical acclaim for its well-turned characters, stories and dialog, and both the VES and Emmy awards for special visual effects. The DVD has had strong sales, and last year Universal Pictures and Whedon’s production company, Mutant Enemy, went into production on a big-screen adaptation, Serenity. Emile Edwin Smith, a Visual Effects Supervisor at Zoic Studios, helped oversee Zoic’s work on the production of the visual effects for both projects.
We caught up with Mr. Smith and he was gracious enough to answer a few questions about the film.
How did your team first become involved with Firefly/Serenity? How did your participation in the motion picture version then come about?
I first became involved with the property when it was called Firefly and the pilot for the initial TV show was about to start. I had read about the show and sent my portfolio to Joss Whedon’s company. He in turn forwarded my info to the VFX supervisor on the show, Loni Peristere and one Emmy and one VES award later we had a great partnership. Loni and I had continued to work on other projects both together and separately at his company since Firefly ended; we had been hearing that Joss wanted to do a movie for a while and I was itching to be involved. Joss wanted to have a lot of the same creative team that were involved in the television series involved in the movie since it was such a collaborative effort. We had to convince the head of visual effects at Universal, John Swallow, that we could do the job, and we did; we were ready to jump in and do some serious work!
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Can you tell us about the team that worked on Serenity? Was it the same team as for Firefly?
The team I initially put together for Firefly was largely a group of people I had been working with at another VFX facility. That company was closing down and there was an incredible talent resource available that I had all the confidence in the world in. I brought those people down to work on the TV show and they largely made up the crew, with the addition of several people Loni brought on to help us. Most of us then stayed together and came back onto the movie. It was great to have the same base team and everyone was psyched to work on it. We additionally brought on Randy Goux who was the digital effects supervisor on Matrix Revolutions as our internal VFX supervisor to setup the pipeline and make sure everything worked between CG and Comp. We brought down several modelers from ESC to help us out and also used several people out of house for the majority of the modeling involved. Patti Gannon led the compositing team for us and worked with Randy to devise the pipeline for that aspect of the show.
