Fremont, CA – May 21, 2015 – Blackmagic Design today announced that Flash Film Works uses Fusion Studio on TNT’s new hit show “The Librarians,” including dozens of extensive VFX shots for each of the television show’s weekly episodes.

Founded in 1993 by Emmy and Visual Effects Society (VES) award winning VFX Supervisor and Academy Award technical achievement recipient William Mesa, Flash Film Works has won a number of Emmy Awards and has provided VFX work for studios such as 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Disney, HBO, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros.

“The Librarians” is centered around an ancient organization that sets off on a variety of adventures in an effort to solve impossible mysteries, fight supernatural threats and recover powerful artifacts, including the Ark of the Covenant, the Spear of Destiny and Excalibur. To capture the action, the show requires a large number of effects each week, which Flash Film Works’ Jeremy Nelson, a VES award winner, and his team create using Fusion Studio.

Jeremy and his team use the full range of Fusion Studio’s powerful VFX features, which allows them to quickly and efficiently build and finalize a huge number of complicated shots, such as creating damage on a car, a magical teleporting membrane and an evil minotaur chasing the librarians and punching through a heavy metal door.

“Using Fusion, we did an object track of the minotaur’s face and created his glowing evil demon eyes by projecting them on Fusion spheres,” Jeremy said. “The team set up the original spheres in 3D and then finished them using the glow nodes and color correction, all in Fusion. At this point, 3D guys can comp their own stuff in Fusion. That’s been my catch phrase: ‘I think I can just do that in Fusion, so you don’t need to.’

“For the membrane scene, the characters walk through a door and pass through the membrane, which pops, and they go through another dimension,” continued Jeremy. “In Fusion, I set up the shot to do a 3D roto, rendered the roto a frame or two and then projected my roto onto the geometry, and it was done. Quick and simple.”

Another interesting shot completed in Fusion was a crash scene with damage to the front of a car. “I did this completely in Fusion working on a 3D track. I love Fusion’s 3D system,” Jeremy said. “I set up a projection, and we created the damage to the front end of the car using the displace 3D node. We took a frame of the car, displaced it with a displace node and lit it to get the shadows. We then projected it onto geometry, which is the image of the car on that displaced geometry that’s been 3D tracked on the car.

“Before Fusion developed its capture node, I would have to render it out and import it back into Fusion. Without that extra step, and now being able to roto what you are projecting or do a quick paint on something, it is amazing,” he concluded. “Fusion gives me a lot first hand, which lets me give a better version one. For the car shot, we did it in a few versions, but it was almost complete at the first go. Fusion gave us the technical result quickly, and the rest of the notes were just artistic changes, not technical errors.”