In "Warrior...Princess... Tramp" and "Warrior...Priestess... Tramp" Lucy Lawless was called upon to fill three distinct roles. In both shows she played Xena and Meg, a Grecian floozy. In "Princess" she also played Diana, and her third role in "Priestess" was Leah a Hestian virgin priestess. O'Neill and company were called upon to convincingly show the actress in two or three roles simultaneously.

"It's a pretty standard trick," O'Neill explained, "they've been doing all the way back to the days of Georges Melies and such. On Lucy Lawless' part it required a costume change for each role which they, of course, had to do very quickly and turn around because (a) they had to make their day, and (b) because they couldn't break the camera setup for the visual effect of the split screen without screwing up the background. Typically on those simple shots we'd lock the camera down and have Lucy portray her part on the left side, in the middle after a costume change and then a third costume change on the right side as if there were three Lucys in one shot. For the tricky shots, sometimes we'd actually have the camera move into position with one of the characters and do what is called a soft lock off. Then we'd have Lucy finish her performance as character A, do a costume change, finish her performance as character B, and then do a second costume change and do her third character, if there were three of her characters in the frame. A couple of times, in order to facilitate the day and because we wanted to do a slightly trickier visual effects shot, we might have one character hand off something to another while they are both being played by Lucy. We'd have her portray one character in the background plate and then, later on in the schedule, have her in front of a blue screen, then comp into the background plate later in post production. Those are the kind of tricks that involve visual effects. I know that the director in at least one of the episodes, Josh Becker, studied a lot of older movies like THE BLACK ROOM, a [1935] picture where there were a lot of what they call camera hook ups. That's where a character would walk behind a big column as one character and then you'd lock a camera down and have her do a costume change and then do the rest of the move again in the second character. That's an old trick in the business where you'd have foreground objects act as soft wipes for changes of character while the camera is supposedly continuously moving. So there's a little bit of everything in each of those episodes."

While XENA is not heavy with 3D animation creatures, Flat Earth uses its bag of tricks to produce an array of visuals. One episode called for a distant volcano. The shot of Xena, with the volcano in the background and 3D cloud elements was composited by Phil Carbonaro. In one show Xena is dragged into an arena by two guards. The shot was another composite, this time using a Phil Carbonaro matte painting. "The first tier from the ground up is a set," explained Kevin O'Neill, "and everything above her and some of the parts behind her and the two guys is a matte painting. We replicated a whole series of people. We built the architecture that they're sitting in which we had to match to the set."

The effects-heavy "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" not only called for a gang of flying skeletons called Dryads, but a disembodied head. Xena and Gabrielle are up against the god Bacchus who has stolen the body of a minstrel named Orpheus whose music has a calming effect on the rough god. "On the set we had Lucy holding a bag that had a rubber head inside it," said O'Neill. "That was a life cast of Matthew Chamberlain, the actor who played the disembodied head. We set up the scene so that the camera made a half moon dolly track around Lucy as she picked up the bag and began to pull the rubber head out of the bag itself. That was a background platte. We then went and shot a blue screen element of Chamberlain doing his performance. We locked him down so that his body didn't move, we put a tracking mark on his throat and shot the performance of him opening his eyes looking at Lucy and screaming. Those two elements were sent to Kevin Kutchaver who then composited the blue screen head on top of the rubber head. Actually, the motion-tracked the head out of the bag, rotoed the bag over the head so it looked like it came out of the bag itself and also blended the real actor's hair into the clump of hair that Lucy was holding on the rubber head so it really looked like she was holding his head. If you look real close the head actually swings like it was on a fulcrum from the hair so she's sort of swinging it back and forth as he screams. Everything below the real actor's neck was rotoed out so it was just the head."

The battle with the Dryads required several rehearsals for the moving camera tracking shots. "We were actually on the set," said O'Neill, "as Lucy and Ted Raimi and Gabrielle all swung at the air to eye lines that we predetermined in a couple of rehearsals. We also had a couple of fans off the set where we blew a lot of dirt and dust and debris. That was a background plate that went back to 3D where Doug Beswick and Everett Burrell and the animators set up the scene and had the Dryads flying in and out of frame swiping at Lucy and Gabrielle as the action dictated in the storyboards. That animation was rendered out and composited by the 2D department.

Last season's surprise was the "Bitter Suite" episode. "Rob has so much going on I couldn't visualize what he wanted to have happen in the episode," said Kutchaver. "[Producer] Rob [Tapert] has been liv
with this thing for maybe six months as an idea that keeps getting more and more involved. During the first meeting we had with him I sat there and thought that either I was hallucinating because the room started spinning or Rob had gone insane. Really the ideas he was throwing out were wild. There are going to be singing animals. It's going to be a musical. Then we're going to have this guy floating and everyone blows up. It sounded nuts." Tapert was originally going to direct the episode, but finally Oley Sassone took the helm for the musical extravaganza. The first problem was to have Tapert, who knew exactly what he wanted, communicate his vision to the effects people. Since the producer wasn't an artist, Kutchaver and O'Neill brought in a storyboard artist to work with Tapert to define his visions.

"The musical episode is an anomaly," said Kutchaver, "a blip when you consider the other 22 episodes. Our biggest creative involvement in the musical Xena were the tarot cards. The artist who worked with him blocked out all the visual stuff that Rob wanted to see happen in the episode. He wanted it to be very strange. He wanted it to be a big fantasy, almost a surreal show."

When Tapert approached O'Neill about the effects for XENA he explained that their budget didn't allow for 3D creatures. The show was being sold as an action series not dependent on special effects. Tapert, however, needed something to grab the audience and attract them to the spin-off and a classic case of the cart before the horse was born. What he wanted was one shot of Neptune, King of the Sea rising out of the water. "We actually did a visual effect for the title sequence," explained Kutchaver. "A 3D character of Neptune all made out of water in a humanoid form rising out and threatening Lucy as Xena who is standing there on a precipice. So our first visual effects shot wasn't even for an episode but a title sequence.

"Once the show became a hit, fans started writing letters and going on the internet asking what episode that shot was from. Is this a lost episode? So in true television history style they felt they had to pony up the dough in terms of what they had already promised so we did an episode, actually three episodes, with Poseidon so far. In the second season we did two. Last season we did another one. So that's the legend of the first 3D creature we did."

Giants have been used in several episodes including the premiere show "Sins of the Past" and "Giant Killer," the David and Goliath story, Xena style. "The giants are created by the age old technique of forced perspective," said O'Neill. "We line up the camera so that the actors, such as Xena and Gabrielle who are human size are placed in a position that represents a certain scale with buildings and such that is normal. Then we build a platform between those actors and the camera and dress up the platform where the ground would be to match the ground that Xena would be standing on. Then an actor walks on that platform and using a combination of specific wide angle lenses based on the size of the frame and the distance to the regular actors in the distance the scale of what the giant should be, we take that lens information and futz with it so that the focus is sharp between our giant and the background where we have our real people. The actual composite happens in the camera."

The vicious Harpies that guard the entrance to Hades palace in "Mortal Beloved," a first season episode of XENA, were the first 3D creatures specifically created for the show. "Lucy ends up at the end of an episode in a haunted deserted castle that was guarded by a pair of Harpies, female winged creatures, that attacked her," said Kutchaver. "The interesting thing about that was that there was so little time to design a set beyond the courtyard of the castle that they were going to have to create for the walk and talk photography. We came back to them and suggested that they surround the set with blue screen. Then we'd set up the whole fight sequence up on a bridge or wall that surrounds the courtyard and we'll create the entire background behind the creatures as well as the creatures in 3D. So that whole fight sequence at the end which I think is the last seven or eight minutes of the episode was an entire CGI 3D animation 2D composite environment with the exception of the courtyard."

Impressed with the Harpies, the producers wanted to use them again, but with a different slant. They were preparing a Halloween episode at the time called "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," directed by T.J. Scott. The god Bacchus turns a group of his maiden minions into Bacchae, flying vampire creatures and Xena and Gabrielle are out to stop them. "We had just done an episode where we did a little homage to JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS with the skeleton fight sequence," said Kutchaver. "So we combined the two ideas and we came up with skeleton harpies called Dryads. So we took the harpies and we made a version that flew around and attacked Lucy in a graveyard when they were looking for Harpy bones to kill Bacchus who was the villain of the week."

The 3D creature effects on XENA have been light over the last few seasons. Instead, Flat Earth has been called upon to deliver environmental 3D shots. "In ULYSSES," said Kutchaver, "which had another appearance of Neptune, we had to create a giant whirlpool and the folks who went into the whirlpool. The whole thing had to be created out of a computer because there was no way that they were going to shoot it live."

When O'Neill and Kutchaver approach the producers about including more interesting creature effects in an episode they're basically told that Xena isn't about effects. It's about her and her friend. "It all depends on what the writers come up with. They feel that the effects might get in the way of their story telling. It falls into a formula."

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