But the pièce de résistance and the favorite of Campbell and Matte Painter Jeremy Hoy was the New York City blast scene. Based on simple 3D, Hoy painted the mattes for both the before and after destruction. The sequences occur in the Upper West Side, with Hoy first creating the ‘before’ scene and using that design on which to base the annihilation. “Obviously it’s easier to know what you are destroying before you destroy it. I got most of the buildings in terms of their overall outlines, shapes, and scale. Before I got that to completion, I used it to base the destroyed NY scene, which was then used by Comp to blend in the destruction shots.”

The attack was mostly done through clever compositing techniques. Though they created some CG elements of falling debris, Hoy didn’t need to break apart and animate entire buildings, and luckily only had one camera angle to deal with. “From a rendering point of view it wasn’t too painful I mean it was painful for me, but not for the facility as a whole.” Still, it took a couple hundred rendering tests to get it to the point where they were happy with the results.

For the attack on New York, Straczynski envisioned huge beams obliterating entire city blocks at once, defining a shocking and inescapable devastation. Karr experimented with several smaller laser-type versions, but in the end it went back to the original plan of four massive cylinders, with the end results managed mostly in comp.

"There's a tendency to go with the familiar, and traditionally beams from ships are shown as being maybe a few feet to a few meters across, and when they did the first pass at the NYC attack, even though I'd been very specific in saying it was like the footsteps of god, beams of solid coherent light a mile across coming straight down, the first pass still used the conventional small beams coming down from various angles, as in a ship-to-ship fight. I really had to hold firm on this concept to get it through as envisioned."

The beams were worked out over the matte painting as simple 3D cylinders with animated textures. “I think the way it started out, we had a couple people that wound up working on the animation of the beams,” McClymont said. “I believe there were more of the beams at the beginning and Straczynski kept asking for the beams to be bigger. He kept having to reiterate how big these were in real space, and how he only wanted to see three or four of them.”

McClymont set up a rough animatic. Straczynski approved the timing and position, and McClymont fit it to real space so the beams were all the same size and the proper distance from the camera. Because the beams were just cylinders, he was able to make the changes pretty quickly, going straight to final.

Comp Supervisor Brenda Campbell drew on her six years in the field to create the imagery needed for the obliteration of New York, though her biggest challenge was still the timeline, and “getting all those shots through and look as photo real as possible. We had about a month and a half to do the whole show, and we did it in sections, so we would deliver 50 shots here, 50 shots there.

But once you get down to the end you have some really big shots, like the NY sequence which was quite involved, all due in a shorter period of time. It was a lot of hours, but we were quite happy with the way it turned out.” Campbell and Tom Archer, one of Atmosphere’s owners, turned over the NY scene in under two weeks.

Campbell started with working out the initial look, figuring out how the buildings were going to react. “We had all the cowboy shots with the actors and Sheridan. We had a couple of plates, but everything else was created with the matte painting and CG cars and a couple CG buildings.”

She did a flat comp and cut them into sequence to balance the color from shot to shot, handling the color suppression to get rid of the green from the greenscreen shoot.

Campbell also took great care to make sure the scale was correct. “These beams are supposed to be about a mile wide, so that’s a wide area to cover with the camera angle we had. Once we figured out the position of the beams, we were able to work in shock waves and camera rumble and some interactive lighting.”

As the beams strike, there is a flare and the buildings almost melt as the hot edge peels over and disintegrates. Using particle techniques, parts of the buildings are sucked up into the beam, all created in comp. Using the 3D beam elements, she cut out the buildings and animated mattes to reveal hot edges cutting out sections of the building.

Using Digital Fusion, she imported the sections into Fusion’s particle system, added turbulence, and after working out the timing, sucked the particles up into the beams. “In the very last shot you can see that in the foreground quite well, and it looks pretty cool.”

One final addition was a heat haze, small in the distance and growing larger as it approaches the camera. “I really like the NY sequence I’m very proud of how that turned out. I thought it had a lot of impact and it turned out quite well, especially considering our time frame we had to do it in.”

The deadline was right around the corner but the team at Atmosphere was determined to get Lost Tales out the door on time. McClymont was doing some consistently long days “and I had a couple of ridiculous ones. I did one 36 hour day.” Kerr told me, “the compositors put in a lot of time as well, especially Brenda, who, like Alec, put in a lot of all nighters.

We gave her a lot of the CG right up till the end. Other than Alec, Daniel, and Brenda putting in a lot of their own time to play catch-up, and calling in some freelancers to help with the modeling, it went pretty smoothly. The time constraints didn’t give Straczynski a lot of time for changes, and the ones he did do obviously put us in a kind of crunch, but the big thing on our side was to put as much detail as possible so we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

The last shot was delivered on the first of March, right down to the wire, and Atmosphere wound up making two drives to the output. One had all of the shots that they had already transferred, but one hadn’t yet finished transferring from the server to the drive. McClymont explained, “because that was going to take too long, we actually wound up taking the first drive to the output session so we would make the appointment on time, and then taking the second drive in the middle of the session to get the last couple of shots on.”

And will there be any more Babylon 5 shows in the future? “Any further B5 DVDs will depend on the sales, and on Warner Brothers giving us sufficient money to take the step of making any subsequent DVDs bigger than this one,” says Straczynski. “This was kind of a test of the concept of making what is essentially a series on DVD, which hasn't really been done before. But it was a test, with a very modest budget. If we do more, they have to be done with a larger budget so we can involve more of our cast members, do bigger FX and locations and the like. If we can't keep making them better, then they shouldn't be done.”

Since the sale of his script ‘The Changeling’ to Ron Howard, Straczynski has leapt from his title of Creator of Babylon 5 to one of Hollywood’s A-List writers. I asked him what it was like revisiting Babylon 5 after all these years, and with all his new opportunities and demands. “It's certainly been a case of creative whiplash. It was a fascinating study in contrasts, to be working on B5 during the day, then in the evening working on screenplays for major motion pictures. I live a very weird life.”