For Lee Wilson, a VFX stalwart who got his start working with David Cronenberg on Videodrome, The Fly, and Dead Ringers, Showtime’s Masters of Horror series was just about the best gig imaginable. He was so jazzed at the opportunity to work with horror maestro Dario Argento that, even though his wife (and co-partner in his Vancouver firm, Anthem Visual Effects), Lisa Sepp-Wilson, went into labor on the first day of shooting, he actually made it to a 3 a.m. night shoot. We talked to Wilson about getting the most out of time spent at his home office and on set, the importance of buying your own HDCAM SR deck, and what he learned from supervising those seamless “twinning” effects for Jeremy Irons' twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers.

What made it so interesting was he wanted all of the scenes to be shot as if we had two actors. He didn't want to go, 'Hey, look what we can do!' None of the scenes were pre-boarded in any way. We went to the sets, he blocked a scene with two actors, and then he turned to me and said, "Can we do that?" The exciting and nerve-racking thing was I couldn't say, "I think so." I had to say, "Yes," or "Yes, if we change this or take this into consideration." We put together a very sophisticated video-assist package, because split screens and opticals can’t be as fine as what you can do digitally. You might do a blend that eats up a portion of your frame, and because you’re never sure how close you can have them together, it could be weeks or months afterward, when you’re putting it together, that you say, “Oh, shit ‘ we shouldn’t have gotten them that close.” It was like playing chess, on a number of levels — if he's entered the frame and put this [prop] down on the table, it has to be there for the second part of the shoot, too. The great thing was David understood it perfectly — and technically — so there was someone to catch me if I messed up, and vice versa.

I think it gave me a discipline. Once we were doing it all digitally, I was used to shooting elements that had to work the way they were shot, that had to work based on their original framing. I'd like to think that I was delivering elements to the artist that they didn't have to spend hours working on before they could be used in the shot. It's more about storytelling than anything. It sounds corny, but I see my job as helping directors tell their story, not asking, "What kind of cool effect can we do there?"

I couldn't answer the question. I grew up watching horror movies like The Fly, anything like the old Universal horror movies, monster movies and The Day the Earth Stood Still. I got a Super 8 camera and made movies with my friends — none of whom were interested in the process until I got to show them themselves in the movie. It was kind of a lonely process, but it was all I ever wanted to do. I remember filming sequences from War of the Worlds off of my TV set, and incorporating them into my film about Martians attacking. But I learned all the standard things about scratching emulsion and miniatures and things out of necessity to make my movies.

I think part of it is just being able to say, “We did that for 150 bucks. It was a pair of vice grips and a clamp and some smoke and a goldfish bowl. There’s a certain satisfaction in being able to pull it off without it costing a lot of money. Sometimes, in quoting on shows where the producers thought they couldn’t afford a shot, I was told, “The FX don’t have to be that good.” But if my signature goes on it, and Anthem’s name, I have to make sure I don’t want to tell people to look away when it comes on screen.

The pipeline was designed by my partner, Sà©bastien Bergeron. We are an all-Mac house ‘ all of the work is done on dual-core G5s, and the compositing is all done in Shake. Maya is our primary CG package, although we’ll use LightWave or whatever’s necessary for a job. We’re using Xsan for our network and storing all of our data on Xserve RAID drives. For a boutique, the fact that we have an HDCAM SR deck is kind of handy because we’re not beholden to anyone else in town. We have a great database that Sebastien wrote in Filemaker that tracks everything.

Yes. Last year we did The Final Days of Planet Earth with Daryl Hannah, a science-fiction alien-bug praying-mantis movie that was shot and delivered in HD. Masters was shot in 35mm and delivered in HD, and this year everyone is either shooting film and delivering HD or shooting HD – hence the need for our own HD deck.

The make-up face and appliances and mask were all done by KNB. When I read the script originally, the producers said, “There’s nothing in here for you guys but a reflection in a cleaver.” And I said, “No, she’s got these big eyes. We have to explain why people just get sucked into this obsession, and I think her eyes have to be really large.” I had shown Dario some tests using some existing photos. He didn’t want an iris, so they gave her scleral lenses [which cover the white of the eye as well as the iris] to cover her eyes. What I had asked for was an appliance to show, in the wide shots, that she had big eyes, and then when we shot in close-up she’d have the freedom to emote and blink. But there was a bit of confusion about that because, ultimately, we were almost always in a position where we wanted to see what her eyes looked like. We planned on doing four or five VFX shots and ended up doing 20. In the shots where she blinks, the actress didn’t actually blink. Not only did we have to track her eyes through the shot and then digitally enhance them, warp them and enlarge them [in Shake], we had to put eyeblinks in as well. I love when she’s disemboweling the kid in the basement and she’s caught in the flashlight with those big eyes.

The turnaround was five weeks from the time pictures locked until we delivered an episode. In reality, it’s probably been closer to four ‘ and in a lot of cases two weeks or even a week for some. It’s pretty tight. That’s a source of pride – the level of the effects that are being created in a short amount of time.

I can’t say enough about QuickTime 7. The H.264 codec for HD is phenomenal, because the file sizes are so small. I have a 45-minute commute from my office, so whenever possible between shoots I try to work at home – especially with a new baby. Getting HD images instead of scaled-down quarter-res shots is great. The byte count is so small in H.264 that they send me stuff to look at on an Apple Cinema Display, and it looks awesome. I’m giving the artists notes and making judgment calls that, in the past, would have involved sending a disk – and I wouldn’t even trust a DVD On it unless it was a full release-quality version. Some of these files are no more than 20 MB, and when you think that single images are bigger than that, I just love it.

Primarily we’re reinventing the effects that make [the lead character’s] reality change, as they did in the first one. We also have a car accident that puts our lead actress in a believably harrowing position. I’m big on danger enhancement. I love, whenever possible, to do shots that make you go, “Omigosh, that’s the actual actor!” We did one in [Masters of Horror episode] “Fair Haired Child” where a van hits a girl on a bicycle. I brought it up with Bill Malone, the director, and he staged the shot so the actress actually looked at the camera and pedaled off.

Decide what it is you’re interested in doing. Do you want to make full CG films, like The Incredibles? I love those films, but what we want to do is live-action FX. There’s nothing better than going out with your video or still camera and taking a picture, then creating something and making me believe it’s real. That’s how to get a job. That’s how to convince people, even if you don’t have a credit list.