Below is an edited version of a 1996 SFX article to highlight quotes and comments from and about Mark Zarate.

SFX Magazine - April 1996

BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN


SPECIAL EFFECTS OBVIOUSLY PLAY AN IMPORTANT role in a show like this - though not a crucial one. After all, as Brad Buckner points out, "We can't compete with features in terms of spectacle, so we put the emphasis on relationships instead."

Still, useless effects could ruin the suspension of disbelief essential to Superman, and after some criticism of the sfx that appeared in early episodes, a new team was brought on board to sort things out. Arriving around episode five of the first season, the new team was headed up by Philip J. Sgriccia, Chris Long and Jim Michaels.

All three new producers come from technical backgrounds - Phil was an editor on shows like Max Headroom, Jim started life as visual effects supervisor for Weird Science, Airwolf and Knight Rider, while Twickenham-native Chris had worked on Midnight Caller. They quickly brought Mark Zarate in to join them.

We wanted something that looked better for the sort of money we were spending," Jim explains. "Some of the early effects were cheesy.
Superman's X-Rav vision was represented by a globby thing that opened up the wall. so Mark insisted that we should go out and shoot some lasers, so we could have blue beams coming out of his eyes too. In the end we spent two days of shooting lasers at different angles, so now we can composite them into the shot when needed."

'Stylised' is a key word I use when talking about our effects," Mark explains. "which in this case means making them look like a a comic book. 'We pick bright, wild colours all the time. Originally we had quite a realistic look for the superbreath, for instance, but it looked sort of grey and uninteresting, so we added a blue cast to beef it up a bit.

Mark - whose background in in TV commercials, rock videos, big concert tours and movies, including Wes Craven's Shocker, Total Recall and Basic Instinct - heads a team of about a dozen effects people. co- ordinating all the different departments necessary for some of the show's most complex sequences. It's a busy schedule - "Sometimes the writers come up with ideas that we really can't do on the show, and I say" 'Well, hell that's great, but let's save it until we do Lois & Clark: The Movie, eh? "' - but that doesn't mean there isn't time for fun...

"On the Warners backlot, just round the corner from where we have the Metropolis street set with The Daily Planet, is the road where they have a false front for the hospital from ER," Jim Michaels explains. "They've got some train tracks out front to make it look like Chicago, but they don't work or anything. Just recently we had to use the hospital frontage for a scene in our show, but instead of doing it just like they do in ER, we actually shot a train here in LA and composited it into the shot, so it looked like a real train was running on those fake tracks. The ER guys saw it and couldn't believe their eyes!"

BECAUSE THE SHOW'S GOT MORE OF A ROMANTIC BIAS THIS SEASON, IS IT possible the special effects might be taking a backseat these days, to make room for the burgeoning relationship between Lois and Clark?

"You'd think that," Jim Mchaels says, "but it doesn't seem to be the case. In the second season we'd tend to have a big, bad villain with some sort of devious plan, and we'd build the entire show around a single effect he'd create. Like, in one episode we had this big tidal wave heading towards the city, and we had to spend all our efforts on that alone. This year we still have bad people, but there isn't always one giant sfx sequence in act four that dominates the show."

So what are the hardest effects to do?

"These days we tend to avoid things that are a bit of a waste of money. We don't have him fly in and out of shot much anymore, because we figure everyone's seen him do that hundreds of times already. What we do instead is something we call a 'cape out,' where Dean basically just jumps in or out of frame. It saves messing about.

"We do a lot less green screen work than we used to too, partially because we've built a massive library of that material up over two and a half vears, and partially because it's such a struggle wrestling Dean away from the first unit to shoot that stuff!"

But you do seem to be using more CGI...

"Oh, lots more. We just used CGI in a scene where Lex Luthor is testing out a new weapon he's going to use on Superman, for instance. He zaps a garbage can, and it explodes into a million pieces."

One of the most asked questions on the Lois & Clark Internet newsgroups is, "Just where is Metropolis meant to be anyway? "As far as we can tell, you never make it look like anywhere in particular - it's just a load of cobbled together bits from lots of American cities...

"Right," Jim agrees. "The flying sequences go through Dallas, New York, Chicago an awful lot... Wherever we can get good helicopter footage. Back in our first year we experimented with the look of the city a bit - we built our own skyline, with a giant Lex tower and everything but these days we've kind of given up on it. Partly it's time, but partly it's because we don't want the effects to drive the show."

"If we had more money it would probably allow us to have more and bigger sfx," Grant Rosenberg admits, "but doing that would change the emphasis of the series. What I'd rather do is actually spend the extra money on bigger name guest stars instead.

"As it is, Mark tries to be smart about how he spends our budget. He's always saying things like, 'Instead of doing five effects that only look okay, why don't we do three that look great?"'

***************

Hollywood Reporter Obituary

MARK ZARATE, an Emmy-winning visual effects creative director, died September 18 in Los Angeles of complications following appendicitis surgery. He was 39.

Co-founder of the Ring of Fire visual effects house in West Hollywood, Zarate won an Emmy nomination in 1998 for transporting Brooke Shields into classic films for the NBC "Suddenly Susan" episode, "I Love You, I Think." He was visual effects director for ABC's "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" and worked on scores of commercials.

Zarate co-founded the post-production house Two Headed Monster in 1992, where he won a reputation for bringing feature film quality to broadcast productions. In 1994, he formed Oso Visual Effects, where he devised the comic book-like creations for "Lois and Clark."

Home | | Lois and Clark | | Comics || Lois Lane

When SuperMen Collide | | Superman in all media

Acknowledgments | | Disclaimer | | Report site problems