This was by far, the most ambitious made-for-TV project that I have ever been involved with in my 26+ years in visual effects.— Tommy Tran[1]
Tommy Tran was a visual effects supervisor on Season 1 of The Orville through his employing company FuseFX, which was hired by 20th Century Fox to add visual effects shots on the show. He is most notable for designing and creating New York City in the show.
History[]
Tommy Tran has worked on visual effects for films such Thor, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and The Hangover Part 3. He has also worked on television series such as Manhattan and Salem.
The Orville[]
Tran was enlisted as visual effects supervisor in 2017 on the show in its first season from the pilot through New Dimensions. He recalls he "geeked out" when he learned Fox had hired him for a Seth MacFarlane project.[2]
Together with a team of FuseFX artists, Tran created all of New York City in the year 2418, and added digital matte paintings of the city in the windows of Admiral Tom Halsey's office in later shots. "We went down to Fox early on and they had all their storyboards, all their artwork and concepts of each ship, figured out pretty well already," Tran explained in an interview.
They had been in pre-production for about a year at that point. So, all their uniforms, all their cities, ships, were on the wall as concept art throughout their office. We immediately felt like we knew where they wanted to go with the world and then it basically came down to maybe three or four concept images that someone had done on their end and a rough layout of New York City.
Through those we said, ‘We get it — there’s a mix of iconic buildings here and there and the rest is this very shiny, clean, green world.' We just ran with it and I think we submitted maybe two versions of our concept and they loved our second version. They let us loose for a month — while we did the main matte paintings for it —everything after that was smooth sailing.[2]
"It wasn’t anything groundbreaking," he noted.
But it was also very intricate that was brought to life with the help of CG ships and CG pods — lots of air traffic. It’s just a flat, two-dimensional painting of a million buildings — or 600 of whatever we ended up with. Then we added small nuances, such as moving water, clouds, little ships, little taxis, little transports here and there just to draw the eye to some sort of movement that made our matte painting come alive.[2]