BEEPS are an Australian full-service visual effects facility specializing in digital compositing, Editing and 3D Animation. BEEPS has been producing visual effects for the past 10 years and boasts an extensive list of credits across many market sectors including TVC's, TV Series and Broadcast Design. BEEPS recently used Nothing Real's Shake software to complete more than 120 effects shots for the new BBC series "SPACE'.

According to BEEPS Managing Director Steve Cooper, the facility's work on the series included the creation of a virtual environment called the "Tank" in which actor Sam Neill explores the varsity of Space, the Galaxies and our Universe. Live action plates were filmed on location in Queenstown, New Zealand and featured stunning panoramas designed to simulate the environment of a virtual planet. BEEPS principal role was to create all of the CG imagery that appears in the Tank and composite these elements together with the live action plates.

"Shake was a natural choice for us on the basis that it could provide us with the versatility needed to handle the complexities of the compositing required for this project."

"For some of the composites we're working on for this project, there can be as many as 30 Layers in each shot", says Andy Mckenna, one of the Shake Artists on the project. "Naturally, there are changes and then it's a matter of tweaking all the layers, explosions, lighting fx, 3D and timing. Fortunately, Shakes' tree based interface allows you to work through the different nodes easily in order to find the areas that you want to adjust. Even if I didn't do the initial set up, it's easy to work it out and being able to copy and paste comps (which may have been created on Another box) means that you don't have to start from scratch. All the images, layers, fx, keyframes, you name it: it's already done! saves boatloads of time. Wicked!"

"By using Expressions I was able to write an expression based on the value of another item. ie. I want the brightness of an image to be controlled by the "Y" axis of a 3D sun that I am animating, so that the whole plate brightens as the 3D sun moves up in frame. That sort of stuff I found very handy!"

"And then there was the rendering; there is only 'ONE' render in Shake! No secondary or triple passes required. Everything is contained in the one "tree". Love that! And oh yeah, it's open platform in terms of resolution, which makes it extremely cool. I can composite stuff from Mac, 3D, PAL, NTSC, FILM, High Def, 2,4,5,6k whatever. Pretty handy when you've got a HD Telecine firing HD files up for me to work on."

"I have a new friend called "SHAKE". Very, Very happy! Don't get me wrong, Flame is awesome but, If I were compositing this job in Flame, I'm sure my head would have been "done in" by now."