Original subtitles

We dug deep into the bag of tricks on every episode.

We're the dreaded visual-effects guys.

We were little mad scientists on that show.

The trick is figuring out what's a practical effect

and which is a visual effect.

Once that decision is made, and that's made by the second day,

it's up to the various teams to come up with a solution on how to do it all.

Every show had its own problems, and we had to overcome them.

But right from the very beginning,

we were looking at featurous type of effects to do,

and then trying to figure out a way to do them

in a TV budget, in a TV manner.

So right from the very first script, it was tough.

For me, the joy of Charmed was getting a new script

and seeing what the writers would come up with.

Because, you know, as each episode would go by,

as we rose to the challenge,

it would inspire the writers to raise the bar a little bit more.

We'd get a script and, you know, two weeks later we were shooting it.

When you were about to finish the episode,

then you knew, "Okay, now we have to do the special-effects stuff."

So there was that anticipation.

As you walked from the dressing room

to go to one of the sets where you were shooting,

you would see people would be there working

and building the special-effects set,

and setting stuff up, and you would say,

"Okay, we're getting closer. We're getting closer."

You knew that that was going to be the conclusion of every episode,

was they were going to do whatever special effects they hadn't--

The bulk of them that they hadn't been able to get to,

and so it just became one big, exciting thing to do

that started from the first day you got there and just built, built, built.

Till finally you could:

It would be so sad

if your sisters weren't here to help you through all this.

Billy played a really cool demon, and the writers wanted him to catch on fire.

So Billy looked at me and said, “Are we gonna do this visually?"

| said, "Well, what do you think, Billy?

Let's butter up your arm here, and we'll start with a little patch."

Next thing | knew, we were buttering up his whole arm, lighting him on fire,

and there's Billy Drago, you know, no stunt guy and he's fully ablaze.

And pulled it off just fine. | mean, he's really a great guy.

The biggest challenges were

we were doing visual effects in those first couple episodes

that | don't think had been done yet on television.

There was a freezing episode in the kitchen in episode two

that took us a while to figure out how to do, but we did it.

And | think those were the biggest challenges,

were selling the effects so that people would think:

"Yes, these are witches and this is happening" and we were able to do it,

and to do it in a way that stuff didn't look cheesy and it was believable.

All these gags had been done before, up until Charmed,

and then we were mixing mediums, you know, we were mixing

practical effects with visual effects.

And | think that's a reason why Charmed was so successful.

We had my practical effects on one end,

we had the magic of Steve Lebed,

and when you blend the two, like we did on Charmed, as well as we did,

we were able to get some really neat footage and some really neat gags.

As soon as | was told we're gonna have a dragon in the episode,

| just wanted to do it. To be able to do a dragon

was just like, "Oh, my God, this is great."

How many chances will you have to do that?

The director was John Kretchmer. He understood visual effects

and he understood what it took to

incorporate a dragon into the shots that he wanted to do.

And he's very creative about how he wants to play the dragon in these shots.

One of the initial appearances of the dragon is outside of...

When Wyatt's in the playpen.

And we had to somehow sell the fact that he conjured this dragon

from a television show he was watching.

And it was a huge challenge for Lebed and his team, because they...

There is nothing harder for a CGI person to do than to animate

a creature from scratch. Especially in television, on a television schedule.

- It's almost impossible. - And so we'd storyboard

all the specific shots, all the specific actions for the dragon,

and then | spent the next couple of weeks

doing designs, drawing sketches.

Then it was a process of going through

and building that model in the computer

and texturing it and painting it, eventually rigging it for animation.

That was a really good mix between special effects and visual effects

in that episode because at one point, we were on location in Griffith Park...

| had a car coming through the tunnel with a bomb in the trunk.

So the stunt driver in the car was to set the bomb off at the right time,

and as the car came through the tunnel,

the trunk of the car blows off, the car catches on fire and pitches sideways.

At the same time, I've got two huge propane cannons

going off to represent the flames of this dragon, supposed to be going off.

It was huge. The fireball was huge.

| think she's talking about that.

And at the end we had to take all that footage and incorporate our dragon

into that footage so it looks like it's emerging out of the flames and smoke.

It was one of the most fun episodes | had to work on.

We did this one episode, "Saving Private Leo"

in a parking lot in Canoga Park where you could look over and see the mall

where people were shopping.

And we're doing fireballs, you know, 40-foot fireballs in the air,

blowing up boats, and machine-gun fire.

While all this is going on, I'm just wondering,

"Wow, | wonder what those shoppers think.

They're looking at this parking lot over here, and all this mayhem is going on."

Robin Royce, our set decorator,

he actually got this 1947 Chris-Craft boat. It was huge.

We dropped it in the parking lot, painted it grey, put numbers on it.

I took water pipe and then welded film cans,

because we couldn't afford antiaircraft weapons,

mounted it on this boat, dumped in tons of sand, put in palm trees,

and in four hours, we shot Guadalcanal.

With the magic of Stephen Lebed and his visual-effects crew,

we had Zeros flying over, you know, he put in all the background.

It was just amazing that we were able to pull that off.

On a weekly basis, we were pulling the rabbit out of a hat.

There wasn't anything that we got from Brad Kern's office that--

We never sat down and said, "Jeez, | don't think we can do that."

I think they were deliberately trying to write things

that they think that we couldn't do,

and I'd say, "Well, you know what, | think we can do that one"

and people look at you like, "You're out of your mind"

and I'd say, "No, no, no, we can do this."

The biggest effect Randy did was

we blew up the second floor of the house on-stage,

and it was a huge explosion.

| mean, there was cork and wood and glass just flying through the air.

It was a very dangerous effect, and it was spectacular.

- That was amazing. - As time went on,

we got increasingly better about knowing

what Production could and couldn't handle.

So as we were crafting stories in the writers' room, we'd be aware of,

you know, what they could shoot and what they couldn't shoot,

and, you know, we'd push them to their limits, | think,

and they would probably say that we pushed them beyond their limits.

The wildest script was "| Dream of Phoebe.”

It involved a magic carpet and a genie.

Thank you for responding to my letter.

In that script, there was one line toward the end that basically said:

I wish to resurrect the lost city of Zanbar.

| just had to reread that line over and over again because

| couldn't believe they actually wrote a line in the script that said

that this city was supposed to rise from the sands.

There's only so many ways you can accomplish something like that.

We designed a city. We did drawings of what the city would look like,

with buildings and different structures,

and created a small city map.

We went ahead and built three models,

and basically tried to animate a city rising up from the sand.

Doing the wirework, for me, was actually a lot of fun.

It was time-consuming, but the effect is always so great.

When you see people flying through the air,

rather than CGI creatures flying through the air,

people are flying through the air.

Wirework at the time was kind of new for television, you know.

It had come from Hong Kong, so it was a learning curve for everyone involved.

Randy Cabral and his guys were responsible for coming up with

all the ways of making Prue's powers work.

Any time you can do it for real, it's always gonna be better.

So they would rig different props on wires,

or we'd figure out ways of shooting things in reverse.

And if there was wires involved, things like that, and we saw those wires,

then we would paint out the wires

and do whatever it took to sustain the illusion.

You can take some of the stuff that we do

and mix it with Stephen's visual effects

and morph some of that image, it really creates some really cool stuff.

And from a visual-effects standpoint, it got harder.

Or, let me say more complex. Much more complex.

| look at the number of effects we had in the first episode, which were, | think,

maybe 25 or so. And then | look at "Bare Witch" which had, | think,

over 90 effects in it.

As the seasons progressed, certain effects became easier and easier.

Orbing became very easy.

How did | get here?

We found things that we didn't need to focus on. It became more important

to come up with more efficient ways to kill these guys.

Finally, by the last season, we were doing some really radical stuff.

We were doing some stuff that was just above feature work.

Every day was a special day on Charmed.

Every episode had its own, you know, demons or gremlins

that you had to deal with on a daily basis.

And then just putting it all together with stunts and effects.

Which was fantastic.

Have a nice day.