Serenity Found

Living is learning and in living a good life we teach what we learn to others. At a very young age my family exposed me to all kinds of creative arts, from painting and sculpture to opera and Broadway; the good ones had a lasting message. Some person somewhere had something important to teach, something so compelling they produced a work of art, which concisely or otherwise served up a big idea for others to enjoy, interpret, love, or hate. With great art, it is impossible not to feel something, and whatever that feeling might be, it means that-for a moment, at least, as you watched or read or admired-you felt a part of an experience you had no part in. The phenomenon is an awesome one. To experience it is to live, however temporarily, a “false life,” one that charges and inspires you to do things in your real one.

Growing up in a small town in Massachusetts, I imagined I might become a writer and a director for motion pictures. The journey to becoming is long and different than we expect; today, I am a visual effects supervisor, and I have been Joss Whedon’s “mildly insane” visual effects guy for ten years. I discovered Joss Whedon while working for Digital Magic, a post-production and visual effects company in Santa Monica. There, while making labels for videocassettes, I watched the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I was an instant fan.

After a good deal of fan nudging I convinced David Solomon, an executive producer on the show (who would later be the director of “Out of Gas”), to give Digital Magic the opportunity to pitch a new “dusting” effect. The original “dusting” was a quick transition from an actor to a series of computer-generated dust explosions. The effect wasn’t bad, but in my opinion it lacked a story and therefore felt flat in its execution. So somewhere after midnight one evening, in a half sleep, I gave it one. When a vampire turns to dust, I theorized, it begins with a chemical reaction in the heart. The wood and the organ react violently, causing all of the moisture in the body to evaporate from the soft tissue out, leaving only dust behind.

Thus my enrollment in Whedon University began. My major was storytelling; Buffy and Angel were my undergraduate focus, Firefly would become my master’s thesis, and Serenity my doctorate project. All through, Joss emphasized clarity in narrative. We were writing visually: turning vampires to dust, transforming humans into vampires, creating big bad guys, casting spells. All of which played a part in a bigger picture, a bigger story.

Like most series, the development of the final show begins with the script. Once written, the department heads get together with the writer and the director and decide what part they will play in realizing it. Joss constantly called the script the instructions and reminded everyone how important it was to follow them. He didn’t mind change in the script, but if there was change, he wanted there to be a reason for it.

In visual effects, Joss was interested in enhancing the drama. The demons we were building often represented an idea central in the theme of the script. For example, the Gentlemen in “Hush” (BtVS 4-10) stole the voice of the town and by design they needed to be quiet; therefore the Gentlemen floated through space. Their motion was fluid and quiet. Our job in visual effects was to make sure the gentlemen came across as visually quiet.

When we found out the mayor was a snake, it felt as if we had known it all along. Joss wrote him as a slippery character, a liar. He wasn’t a dragon or an ogre, he was a snake. Eventually the snake in him got so big he had to shed the human skin and become the monster he really was. His true purpose revealed itself, finally out in the open. Once the snake was revealed, Buffy stepped up and took care of it, blowing up the high school because inside it was the biggest snake you have ever seen, one that had corrupted the whole infrastructure. The only thing to do was to blow the school up with him in it and start over. It’s a metaphor that was repeated in the series finale when the Hellmouth fell in and literally took all of Sunnydale with it, leaving a gaping hole. Once again writing visually, Joss had Buffy’s (and Buffy’s) whole world collapse beneath her. When we were storyboarding this sequence, Joss meticulously placed Buffy on the edge throughout. She saved the day, but her world had collapsed on an epic scale, a direct reflection of the epic end of her world on the inside, and also, in a way, the world of those of us making the show.

Angel’s ending was slightly different. It was left unfinished: Angel stood before an army with his sword drawn, ready to fight. Joss called me into his office late in the afternoon during production and showed me the end of the last episode. The army wasn’t big enough. Joss needed to be sure the audience understood that Angel was left in the fight against insurmountable odds, and that he was going to keep on fighting even after the show was canceled. As homage to both Buffy and Angel, we threw in every major creature from both shows; they were what we left Angel to defeat. Joss wanted to be sure the viewer knew Angel was going to continue to fight on past the credits, and that had to be represented by the army we saw in that final rainy shot.

I had learned from Joss that good visual effects were about story, but working on Firefly was our first real opportunity to apply this not just to demons and monsters, but to entire scenes. From the beginning, everyone involved knew we were doing something special, and we were excited and determined to do something that had never been done in science fiction: not simply use a spaceship as our primary set, but have space travel play a significant role in what the cast was doing and how they were doing it. Visual Effects played a significant role in this. We generated scenes in the computer, from scenes in Joss’s script, which were important to understanding the whole narrative. In our own small way we were a part of the story generation, and we had to be close with those people, Joss and Tim specifically, who were telling the tale. Our department debated the origins of everything we designed; we scrutinized, fought about, and relished our part in the story. And we argued over every choice we made as if it might throw the viewers out of the story if we didn’t. We did this to the point of driving Joss and Tim nuts.

Serenity is a home to the characters that live inside her, a character in the story herself. Serenity is a place of quiet, a center where one can focus, where one might find peace or love. Serenity is a Firefly-class spaceship, a transport ship with room for crew and passengers. She has a large modular cargo bay, which was used, prior to Mal’s purchase of the ship, for carrying things. As Carey Meyer planned the ship’s interior layout, we worked on a logic for the external one. We wanted people to believe the ship worked in every way.

Many of the crew on the visual effects team are Star Wars fans, myself included. I personally own a few books, technical guides created for fans that explain how things work. I loved the fact that there was a logic, realistic or otherwise; it made the universe feel authentic. We wanted our audience to have the same feeling. We wanted them to be able to “kick the tires” of Serenity and feel what Mal feels about her, to love her. We invented a false logic for the ship’s functions and made sure everything worked according to its rules-everything. (I will explain some of these below.) As we did this we debated the purpose of every detail. Those debates made the design even richer.

One of my favorite debates about the ship had to do with the functionality of the cargo bay. We pitched to Joss and Carey Meyer that the cargo bay should detach and be changeable, just as shipping containers can be swapped out between trains and cargo ships and eighteen-wheelers. Joss felt the concept was too akin to the detaching disk in Star Trek; we just wanted this class of ship to be able to pick up and detach large shipments with ease. In the end, Joss didn’t feel it was necessary, and the ship’s cargo bay remained a permanent part of Serenity. However, if you look closely, you can see that some of the engineering for this changeability still remains. Tucked under the side engines on either side of the ship, you’ll find a large locking device, which wraps snuggly around the cargo bay and snaps into place to hold it. If the ship were to drop the cargo bay, these metal holders would be left behind. We were hoping there would be a place for this in the future.

The two atmospheric engines can rotate a full 360 degrees. They carry Serenity as modern day VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) engines do the Harrier jet or the even more modern Joint Strike Fighters. These engines are fueled jet turbines; they function like today’s engines, only with a bit more power and on a larger scale. Their rotation in flight is what allows Serenity to fly like a plane at high speeds and like a helicopter when she needs to slip into a tight spot in the woods. These engines also tuck in. We set them up to do so to allow better access for maintenance and maneuverability while parked (it also allows free access for the shuttles), but I don’t know if we ever showed this function on screen. If we did, it was just something happening while we were looking at something else. The design of these engines often affected the way the writers scripted stories. The “Crazy Ivan” (the term comes from a submarine move where a sub turns 180 degrees underwater instantly) Wash did during the pilot was a good example; the engines’ ability to rotate is what made it possible for Wash to turn on the Reavers and then go to full burn, leaving them in the nuclear blast left behind and propelling our crew to safety.

The “Firefly” engine on the back is a bit of a contained bomb. In development, we talked about a military project called “Icarus,” where NASA looked at the detonation of a nuclear weapon as a potential form of thrust in space. The “Firefly” effect is something like this. The engine lets out a big radioactive blast, which propels the ship at high speed in a direct course. During this propulsion she has limited maneuverability.

In the pilot, when they set off the engine so close to the planet’s surface, they were essentially detonating a nuke in atmosphere. That is why the blast has such a significant visual effect; the big bright burst behind her is basically an oil slick. The Alliance commented on this class of ship being a dirty burner in the pilot, a reference to the color display left in her wake. It’s beautiful, but it is waste. The glow on the panels is part of the cooling process for the engine. After full burn it takes some time for the coils to cool off, and the result is the firefly glow.

The “Firefly” effect, much like the dusting on Buffy, evolved every time we used it. We always wanted it to be prettier, more magical. It represented the journey the crew was on, the mission they had to fulfill, and we really wanted it to be a passionate effect, full of emotion. If we were still flying, we’d probably still be working on making it better. Joss was always asking why it kept changing; we just kind of avoided giving him a direct answer. Why did we avoid it? Because he liked it as it was, and we wanted it to be better. It was the most spectacular thing Serenity could do, and for us it was just never good enough. In a way, it became a constant pitch, a way of proving ourselves over and over again.

In addition to the big engines, Serenity has her RCS thrusters. These work the same way as they do on our real world space shuttles: they emit small amounts of compressed gas, which meticulously alter the ship’s direction. Originally we wanted these guys to play a big part in the rules that defined for the animators how Serenity could move. In space, a ship does not bank or sweep. It drifts until its motion is corrected. RCS thrusters correct their ship’s directional drift. But these rules didn’t stand the test of time. Serenity needed to move well, and moving with RCS doesn’t look that cool-it often looks angular and frankly unimpressive. We always had them running, even in the big battle with the Reavers and the Alliance at the end of the film Serenity; we just stretched their capability to allow for some sexier motion.

Serenity has two shuttles, which are used to get around when there isn’t anywhere to park a Firefly. These are utility vehicles. Like Serenity, they are VTOL craft, but unlike Serenity, they have fold-up wings for more nimble flight. They also tuck neatly halfway inside the ship when docked. During take-off they are pushed out by two small arms, allowing them to press straight up off of Serenity’s wings.

When Mal picked Serenity out of the sand, he raised her up and put her back together piece by piece. Patched and welded the steel into a solid machine to travel in. Joss wanted to feel that she had been kept together through hard work and maintenance. When Carey Meyer drew her up and we built her, we built this care into the design. There are many varieties of steel that make up the body of the ship. They stopped making Firefly-class ships years ago and every repair is custom, built and scrapped together with parts from other ships. She is never quite sound; ships as old as Serenity are always in need of repair.

When we put her together for the first time she looked abstract and unfit for flight. Carey Meyer pieced her together out of cardboard and painted her blue. She was a Lebbeus Woods sculpture. When we put her together in the computer we dragged her more toward a Klingon “Bird of Prey.” We wanted her to be space-worthy and cool. Joss wanted her somewhere in-between. Joss wanted her to be unique, singular, and beautiful, a ship created just for her crew, a ship for Mal to find and feel safe in, a ship that could take him and his family where they needed to go. In the end the pushing and pulling we all did made her what she is. Which is what she is, a sculpture of voices all heading in the same direction with a whole lot of heart. She evolved a bit too over the years, just like the effect that drove her. She didn’t evolve because she needed to, but rather because we wanted her to be real, to work in every way. So we kept adding pipes and pistons, heating coils and fly panels, all in the hope that her fans would see them, see her, and love her as much as we did.

For the film, Joss was asked if he wanted to change the ship. He said, “I didn’t change the cast, why would I change the ship?” The only changes we made to her were in the details. We took our fine paint-brushes out and made sure she didn’t have any bald spots or stray hairs for that wonderful opening shot where we got to show her off, from the painted name on her side to the flapping panels that slow her down enough that she won’t burn when she skips into atmosphere.

Let’s digress a bit here, because this shot by design tells you much of what you need to know about the ship. The shot opens with a smash cut to the logo, which also happens to be the name of the ship, and the name of the movie; it’s quiet at first, which adds to the mystery. Slowly we change the light a bit and bump the camera, which is now pulling back. As it pulls back even further we begin to see the silhouette of the ship. We see her long neck, her body against the clear deep black of space. The panels begin to close on her Firefly cooling coils as she prepares to enter the atmosphere. We look at her against the big black and know she is a spaceship. As we come around her rear the camera bumps some more and we reveal her from the top. She is heading down to a planet below. Now she is backlit by the planet. She is a planetary traveler. She starts to buck and bump and the camera plummets to her side as the twin jet engines fire, breaking her fall into the heat of the Terran atmosphere. It’s rocky but she’s got it together. We pull all the way back around to her neck and approach the cockpit where we see her captain and the pilot. She doesn’t fly by herself. She is guided on her journeys. A piece of her nose breaks off as we approach the cockpit. She is fragile. Now on the inside we meet the family that lives inside her, the family that brings her to life. This is probably my favorite shot we ever made in either the series or the movie. It’s gorgeous and singular. One shot to tell us all about this piece of metal which does so much for the people who call her home. It was the last shot we delivered to the movie, as it included titles. It may be the last shot we ever work on with Serenity. If there has to be one, I am glad this was it. She sure is pretty.

Home is a relative term, used to describe a place where we live, where we eat, where we return, where we invite our friends, where we feel safe. When we began to work on Firefly Joss gave us a number of books and films to look toward for tone. The Killer Angels in particular meant a great deal to me, as it deals with great loss and the search for hope and a home when you are cast away by a moral society. It calls into question what morality means in the face of war and what you do with yourself when what you have been taught as moral is turned against you, when faith fails and you are cast out of your house. Malcolm Reynolds was cast out on the battlefield in Serenity Valley. On his ship Serenity Mal finds home again, he finds his family, and he finds hope. We knew Serenity was all of these things when we made her, when we lit her, when we flew her, and when we photographed her. We cared for her, as if we were caring for someone’s home.

Beyond creating the ship herself, our role was to create pictures in support of the stories. When we read “EXT. SPACE” in a script, it meant we had a part of the story to tell. Whether we were flying through a ring of death made out of spare parts or bringing Jayne in for a surprise rescue during a witch-hunt, our scenes moved the story forward and often toward climax. How did we do this without real cameras or physical sets, and with limited actor involvement? We pretended we did have them. We pretended in the same way you pretend when you use your imagination, only we pretended with computers that created pretty recordings of our play sessions. We pretended with the stakes of the words in the script driving us, knowing that, dramatically, we were responsible for story beats.

Being the good geeks we are, we pretended with toys first. Carey Meyer made Joss a miniature of Serenity to use in our meetings. It was small enough to fly around and we used it. At the office we used stand-ins, matchbox cars and such; these objects became our ships. We used the toys to show the animators how we wanted the ships to fly and where we wanted the camera to photograph them.

From the start Joss insisted that this play be different and singular: he always wanted the viewer to be in the room, to be present in the way he told the story visually. This verite approach persisted whether we were creating close-ups or wide matte paintings. The camera was looking for the story, following the emotion. In CG this meant setting up rules which were new to the field-camera rules that seem to be everywhere now. We put documentary photographic language into the animation we created. We used zoom lenses, soft focus, lens flares, and faulty cameramen. We wanted human imperfection to be a part of our work in finding the story, the way it was on the set. Our animators were told to set up the action, and then find what was interesting within it without discovering it right away; and upon discovery, they were told, they were to only “look” at it until the viewer understood what they needed to.

In the pilot we used this technique as punctuation. The crew knew the Reavers were on their tail. We put a camera there, on Serenity’s tail, and the Reavers were nowhere to be found. In deep background, there was a tiny line of black against the blue sky. The camera focused on this line, zoomed in, and refocused, revealing the very formidable ship gaining on them. As the camera adjusted focus, so did we, the viewers. We were focusing on this very dangerous and very ugly thing chasing after us.

In “Objects in Space,” Jubal Early snuck up on Serenity from behind. He put his ship in pace with ours. He got out and snuck onboard. He wreaked havoc on the ship. Mal and River confronted him in space. Jubal was left floating in space for all time. There was a lot more to the story on the inside, but these scenes were significant and important. Jubal was an invader and River is an empath. How did we introduce Jubal to the ship? He crept in through her pipes and air ducts like a thief in the night, startling the vulnerable young River from her sound sleep. The shot design told the story of invasion and danger. As we found River, the camera shifted focus from the vents we had been slinking our way through to the sleeping girl. She opened her eyes. She felt our intrusion. We knew, by design, that Jubal had penetrated the ship.

Every computer-generated shot in the series had meaning, like these did. As we worked with the computer-and working with a computer takes time-we took the time to be meticulous. Perhaps the greatest proof of the influence of shots like these in the field is that other folks took on their aesthetic as a new standard. Battlestar Galactica uses these rules, the Star Wars prequels picked them up, and now John Favereau promises the motion picture Iron Man will as well. It’s a storytelling aesthetic that focuses on story over spectacle.

The movie Serenity again would provide another pinnacle: the space battle. We have all dreamed of fighting heroically in an epic war for good, using laser beams and photons. We have all dreamed of saving the day and destroying the Death Star in order to defeat an evil empire, but Joss took this dream and rewrote it for value and point. In less capable hands the battle scene in Serenity would have been an effects extravaganza without meaning, but instead it was handled with the uttermost care and design. And again Joss used his singular invented documentary camera aesthetic to do it. He used his camera and action to build his Shakespearean tragic finale.

It plays out in an operatic ballet, as Wash flies Serenity for a final time “like a leaf on the wind” through the giant space battle. The camera fights the mayhem around it just to stay with our heroic ship and her pilot. As it all unfolds, we never leave Serenity. Keeping up with her and Wash is harrowing, as all hell unfolds around us. The crew, and their message, is at the center. The battle itself is almost an afterthought. In design we had many more epic scenes laid out, but they were dropped on the cutting room floor in exchange for a focus on Wash and his mission to get us through. Joss designed each shot to build an atonal drama. The scene plays against our instincts, spending very little time in the pinch of pursuit by the Reavers and assault by the Alliance, and by doing so he makes Wash a bigger hero than ever before. Wash almost floats through this Trojan encounter. Joss builds his hero up as the very best pilot our Serenity family could ever have, knowing full well that all of us would be patting him on the back agreeing with him as he congratulated himself on being “a leaf on the wind” . . . and then takes him from us. He builds our emotion and our courage, flying through the battle above, and then rips it away. And here again we must rise up.

Making Firefly in partnership was thrilling and revolutionary. The passion to be unique and yet absolutely familiar is paramount. We wanted characters, places, and things we all knew, in extraordinary places doing extraordinary things. We did this week after week and we did it well. Perhaps it was the ever-looming threat of network cancellation that pushed us, but I’d like to think that it was just one of those singular situations where all of the right people are doing all of the rights things, creating a perfect space to be creative. We all fought hard all the time to be the best.

The movie was much different. The movie was Joss’s entirely. Making a movie is a personal battle. When it is over you are wounded and tired. Joss was exacting and focused, and he led us tirelessly. Great movies are great battles won by heroes in art. That thing you feel when you leave great art, that thing that stays with you, that makes you think, that inspires and thrills, is what happens when you win a battle in art. We won the battle of Serenity because we went into the battle with a solid plan. Our script, our story, our plan is what you see in the finished film. It was our directions. It was our plan and Joss fought tirelessly to make sure we followed through.

In the beginning of this essay I called making the movie Serenity earning my doctorate at Whedon University. This is why. When Joss managed to bring Serenity back from the dead and to the big screen we were given a gift, an opportunity to continue with something that meant so much to so many, to give more, to say more, of what Joss wanted to say. I knew that every story beat I would be involved in needed to resolve to Malcolm Reynolds’s final speech on the bridge to River. That was what I focused on throughout the process. The final shot became the summation of everything. It was meticulously fashioned to underline the word love: Serenity’s turn, her punch through the clouds, her breach against the sun, and her burst into space came from love. And what made the shot even better was Joss’s end to it, the panel that breaks and falls right into camera. That broken panel sums up the final lesson: love is frail, and frailty makes us mighty because we must overcome it. Joss gave me a great deal over the last ten years but his most important gifts were the very same gifts we have all been given. His stories, populated with emotional hills and valleys, which never end. Sisyphus pushes the stone up the mountain and it rolls back down and he must push it up again. Joss helped me understand that there is greatness in every part of Sisyphus’s task, and knowing this I will always look for greatness in all things. I can laugh and expect that the rock will always fall down when I reach the top of the hill, just as Serenity breaks after giving the world truth. And this makes us mighty.

LONI PERISTERE was born in Natick, Massachusetts. He graduated from UMASS Boston then went to work for Joss Whedon as Visual Effects Supervisor on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and Serenity. Loni co-founded the multi-award winning visual effects company Zoic Studios. He has won an Emmy, two VES awards, a Clio, a London International Advertising Award, and a Gold Pencil. Loni recently turned his focus back to writing and is currently developing several projects.