'Sharknado' Fever: VFX Supervisor Dishes on Those Unforgettable Effects

“Crazy, no way.” That's what visual effects supervisor Emile Smith thought when he first read the script for Sharknado, Asylum’s campy 90-minute movie about a shark-infested tornado that wreaks havoc on Los Angeles and took social media by storm when it debuted Thursday night on Syfy channel.

STORY: 'Sharknado' Director on Secrets, Sequels and Success of the Social Media Sensation

When he started to discuss the production with director Anthony Ferrante, the brief was to make it over-the-top. “They didn’t want to make fun of themselves in the script, but they wanted it to be absurd when you watched it,” Smith said, describing the sort of balance they were seeking for in the production, which was lensed using a Red One camera on location in L.A.

In approaching the visual effects, Smith said he wanted a look that was “stylized and over-the-top and ludicrous all at the same time while keeping a hint of photorealism. … We knew we weren’t going to be able to do 100 percent photoreal sharks flying at people, and even if we did, it would still look ridiculous. We went with a stylized, photoreal look.”

With plenty of CG water, sharks and a tornado, it turned out to be a challenging visual-effects project as the 10-person VFX team at Asylum completed roughly 350 VFX shots using off-the-shelf software in one month. “A normal movie would have months and twice as many people,” said Smith, a VFX veteran whose credits include TV series such as Battlestar Galactica and movies such as Rango.

STORY: 'Sharknado': What Hollywood Is Saying About Syfy's Movie

With the limited time and resources, “There wasn’t going to be ground-breaking [effects] ... [The work was about] how we could tell the story and make it a fun story."

They also drew inspiration from Asylum-created shark movies including Shark Week and MegaShark as well as classics like Jaws. “For certain types of scenes, we wanted to amp up the ridiculous factor by 100,” said Smith.

The toughest part was the CG water and interaction with the water, which is challenging even in high-end feature production. The team used Realflow 2012 and Maya for the water, with Maxwell Render.

To make the tornado, Smith said, “We used Realflow to create a dynamic particle mass and exported that out and used it to render about 30 layers of particles that we took into comp and blurred.”

The CG sharks were created in Lightwave, and After Effects and Fusion were used for compositing.

STORY: 'Sharknado' Draws More Tweets Than 'Game of Thrones' Wedding Episode

There were also some fun outtakes from the production. Smith recalled: “There’s a shot where a shark flies through the [Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel] sign, and because of time we had to cut a couple shots before it. [In these shots] the shark is thrown out of the tornado, hits a palm tree and then slingshots off the palm tree [before flying] through that sign.

“Everyone had a good attitude and a whole lot of fun,” he said of the production, recalling that the day that they created a key chainsaw shot, the VFX team was “jumping up and down and screaming. … The director loved it.”

Smith’s additional Asylum credits include Battledogs.

Review: Get those precious Facebook moments backed up sharpish with PhotoGrabber

Making backups of everything you put online is always a sound policy. You never know when a site is going to get hacked, shutter their virtual doors, or just decide to shut down your account for whatever reason. One site that makes data backups a really good idea is Facebook.

PhotoGrabber's list of Facebook friends and pages puts you first.
Although they are not likely to shut down their site anytime soon, Facebook has been known to shut down user accounts without warning for some perceived infraction of the rules. In instances like this, a free open-source app called Photograbber would be a good thing to have in your back pocket.

I prefer similar program fbDownloader because it feels easier to use and is a little more flexible as to what you can download. But PhotoGrabber still has its pros and is definitely worth looking at, especially if you have a soft spot for open source software.

Unlike fbDownloader, PhotoGrabber does not ask you to type in your password, and instead relies on an authentication token issued by Facebook's API. This means that you can revoke PhotoGrabber's access at any time by going to the list of approved apps in your Facebook account and deleting it. This is PhotoGrabber's first big plus, as I am always leery of entering my Facebook password anywhere but the official site.

PhotoGrabber then generates another "login token" which you must enter into the app for it to work. Unfortunately, you need a new login token for every download you want to do. If you want to download from several friends for example, then it shuts down each time and you have to restart it and enter a new login token again. It's rather annoying.

When you enter the login token, you will see a list of all your Facebook friends, Facebook Pages you have subscribed to, and you will be at the top of that list if you want to download your own stuff. FbDownloader doesn't include Pages, so this is a point in PhotoGrabber's favor. Simply choose the person or page you want to download from, specify what you want to download and off you go.

Every time you want to use the app, the developer's site generates an authentication token, which you must put into the app for it to work.
This is where I have to make one rather large caveat. Even though some of the photos may be publicly viewable, you may not be able to download them using PhotoGrabber because a user has the ability to block apps, including PhotoGrabber, from viewing their data. So PhotoGrabber can only "grab" what it is allowed to. So if you see 300 photos on the page, but PhotoGrabber only gives you 200, then that's why.

The major reason I prefer fbDownloader over this app is because PhotoGrabber is rather restrictive when it comes to you specifying what you want to download. For example, it's either download "all the albums" or nothing. In fbDownloader, you could choose which albums you wanted. Here, you get the whole lot.

But the biggest plus for PhotoGrabber is that you can pull in all the comments and tags. If you choose this option, then PhotoGrabber generates an HTML page so you can view this information alongside the photos. This in theory means that you could back these pages up to your own personal domain as another online backup.

PhotoGrabber is under active development. If you make backing up something of a religion, then PhotoGrabber is a tool you should use on a continual basis, as well as keeping an eye on the project page over on Google Code.