Heroes of the North - Christian Viel

Posted by Steve on 17 May 2010 | 0 Comments

Tell us about your sci-fi web series.

Heroes of the North relates the adventures of a group of Canadian superheroes asked to work together to counter a terrorist menace from a mysterious organization known as Medusa. There are 20 episodes between 3 and 6 minutes long, to be released weekly, starting on August 1, 2010. The show is also a transmedia experiment, where part of the story will be told in comic book form, in a short novel, through a videogame, and via photo-novels.

Where did the idea/concept for your web series come from?

It is an amalgam of various superhero ideas and films we tried to do over the years - we just decided to mix them all up together and make a web series instead of trying to get one feature made. We got tired of waiting for the powers that be. The technology and tools are now affordable. Who needs them when you can do it yourself?

Name some of your sci-fi influences. Any favorite movies, TV shows, novels?

Favorite Movies: Starship Troopers, Total Recall, The Rock, Robocop, Sin City, Planet Terror, Requiem for a Dream

TV Shows: Blake's 7, V, X-Files, Dexter, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica (Ron Moore version), Heroes (First two seasons), Reaper, Dempsey and Makepeace

Novels: Vampire$, Ubik, John Carter of Mars series, Stephen King's The Mist

Tell us about the technical production of your show. What camera & equipment did you use? Editing software & hardware? For visual effects, etc?

Camera: 2 and sometimes 3 Panasonic HVX-200A
Editing Software: Final Cut Pro
Hardware: Mac Intel quadcore
Visual Effects: Shake, After Effects, Photoshop, E-On Vue, VisionLab

Can you tell us any interesting facts or trivia about your show? Any funny stories?

We had to shoot at a very expensive location with a major local star, a scene we would have normally needed two days to shoot. We tried very hard to compress the day into one and were hoping for the best to managed to get everything in on time and on budget... Of course, everything went wrong: The day of that shoot, we had a major snow storm which made some of the cast and crew arrived as late as an hour, lost the spirit gum that was needed for the masks, delaying us even further, found out we had also lost a very important piece of costume of a major character the day before and somehow managed to make the whole day in full, without going into overtime... To this day, we still don't know how we pulled it off!

You can find Heroes of the North online here and on Twitter here.

Heroes of the North - SciFinal Page

Cast, crew, and more behind the scenes from Heroes of the North below:

Christian Viel manning the camera on set of Heroes of the North

Shooting an action scene for Heroes of the North

Ladies getting ready for a fight in Heroes of the North

The costumed cast of Heroes of the North