Pushing the edge of comedy is something that Seth MacFarlane has become renowned for, whether it be American Dad!, Family Guy or Ted — with the latter transitioning from its theatrical feature film incarnations to the small screen as a prequel Peacock miniseries that explores the relationship between a foul-mouthed, delinquent teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane) and his owner, John Bennet (Max Burkholder), as high school students.
What is less well known is that MacFarlane has spearheaded technological advancements through Fuzzy Door Tech, the recently launched technology division of his production company. One such innovation is ViewScreen Studio, which allows for computer animated characters to act in-camera alongside their physical counterparts in real-time. This proved be an indispensable tool for Ted, given that the main protagonist only exists in the digital realm. The technology was first developed for The Orville: New Horizons to properly location scout and frame for spaceship landings, a tool now known as ViewScreen Scout.
There are other software programs that place proxy images into the camera viewfinder. “Technology like Ncam is only sending positional data and we needed to composite a full character, set extension and vehicle across multiple cameras simultaneously synchronized in timecode, so we could shoot four cameras at once and have everything land on the exact same frame. We ended up putting this whole thing together in such a way that we could take it on a location scout, straight into production and film it,” he elaborates. “We coined the term ‘proviz,’ or production visualization. You have previz beforehand, postviz when you’re in editorial, and have proviz while you’re filming. Making this a live performance tool was great because we’re not tethered to pre-canned animation.“
The seven episodes for the Ted event series required 3,000 visual effects shots, whereas The Orville: New Horizons (the show’s third season, which launched in 2022) had 7,000 across 10 episodes. “We learned by fire on The Orville how to take these tools and make them work on a television schedule,” says Fayette. “[What[ we added on Ted was; everything that we’re doing gets exported to editorial — so that you can cut with this digital character that night and the finals go to visual effects so they can get the lighting, scan data and animation. Visual effects already have all the shots ready to go so they can bid properly or use it as a first pass reference for animation. Once we had the Studio part working in-camera, it became a mix of Scout and Studio developing at the same time and they play into each other. For example, the user interface that runs Scout also runs Studio. You don’t have to learn two programs.”
A year and a half of development was spent on the user interface. “I can hand this to a DP and there is a virtual director’s finder so they can frame shots with it. We have taken what would be a bunch of complicated words, terminology and button presses and made it as easy as something that just works. Even the facial animation system is as simple as me moving and capturing Ted’s bits. No crazy buttons. Just look and he talks. We had to make this as seamless as possible so that people would use it,” the CPO adds.
ViewScreen Studio enabled the miniseries to break new ground in comparison to what the movie franchise was able to achieve. “Since Ted was a digital cast member and we could see him run live, we could react to him as if he was there,” explains Fayette. “The camera operators could frame Ted up properly to make sure that he has the proper head and foot room. We could do live markerless cutouts to make sure that the person was in front or behind him, or do over the shoulder or more complex shots because we knew where he was in the space. We had moments where Ted would walk through a crowded hallway when the school bell rang, and I would put an iPad into the hands of ADs so that they could block that background around him, because they could see Ted from their point of view while the camera was filming.”
Often times actors like to adlib, but, Fayette points out, “You can’t do that with a digital bear if you’re not capturing the performance live, because you have to put it in later. However, we were getting this was a live performance from Seth so we could actually get adlibbed scenes and shots as if he was an actual character there. We didn’t have to deal with situations where the camera operator is trying to follow Ted running off of a couch into the living room and move the camera too fast and all of a sudden, we have to reshoot the shot later or do visual effects retiming work to rebuild the plate at a different speed. We’re getting it instantly. There are no issues of having to reconstruct the shot due to missing the action. Those are a few examples of how we used it and that sped up the process considerably.”
After supervising the visual effects for Ted and Ted 2, Blair Clark returned for the miniseries. “For Blair Clark, it was easy for him to jump into this because he no longer had to worry about dealing with what the camera operators were seeing to make sure that they were capturing Ted,” remarks Fayette. “Blair could concentrate on the performance of Ted and work with Seth on the shot in the moment. It was a lot less babysitting for Blair because Ted was virtually there.”
The technology behind ViewScreen was a collaboration between Fayette, MacFarlane and Gene Reddick, CTO & Co-Founder of Fuzzy Door Tech. “The first version I built myself, and Gene is one who took ViewScreen to what it is now,” says Fayette. “The beginning was hard because he wasn’t a Hollywood guy so you had to translate the artistic side like what is a film back and why does that matter into the programmer side and understand optics and how cameras work and why we need a performance of a blink synchronized across three cameras. Gene was good in picking that up and translating that into programmer language for the rest of the engineers. Now we all speak set and code!”
The toughest task for visual effects is getting people to understand the invisible thing that is being shot. “To be able to say, ‘Trust me. The bear is going to be there.’ That is always hard because camera operators will cutoff the head naturally because they forget about the ears sticking up. Seth brought [American science documentary television series] Cosmos back and is very much about technology and the future, and how we can do things to make them easier; he saw this as an opportunity to make filmmaking quicker and more efficient for him, and it let the technology get out of the way.”
Ted is now streaming on NBCUniversal’s Peacock.
