Those days can be very productive. Like its predecessor, "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," 'Xena" is an effects-driven show unlike anything else on television. For the fifth-season opener, "Fallen Angel" -- in which Xena and Gabrielle team up with the Archangel Michael to battle their nemesis Callisto and the forces of hell in the air and on the ground -- Flat Earth generated 270 effects shots (including 226 blue-screen composites, nearly a quarter of the episode), a figure that would tax many a feature film's schedule and budget. Other effects high notes include the fully computer-generated harpies of "Mortal Beloved," winged skeletons in "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and the dream sequences of the third-season installment,' The Bitter Suite."

It's never easy. As described by Flat Earth principals Kevin Kutchaver and Kevin O'Neill -- who founded the company to handle digital effects work on Renaissance's "Hercules" -- creating the magic on "Xena" is typified by a lack of time, lack of budget and the distance from principal photography in New Zealand -- about 10,000 miles. "Syndicated TV is very different than film for effects," observes Kutchaver. "There's very little money." Adds O'Neill: "(Executive producer) Rob Tapert's approach is to write the show without regard to how it would be done. This is often the best way to be the most creative."

In the beginning, Flat Earth' s crew worked on their own equipment at home. "But we didn't let [that] get in the way," says Kutchaver. "We used off-the-shelf software. A shot would render and complete at 2 a.m., and an alarm would go off. I'd wake up and start another shot." Adds O'Neill: "We had things running 24 hours a day." As technology improved, the need for work grew (which always seems to be the case in effects work). But with the Internet, a funny thing happened. "People wrote to us and asked if they could help," O'Neill says. "Fans wanted to work for us. With Lightwave and the Internet, we were able to hire people across the country." The key to accessing this off-site labor was delegating wire-removal work, often used on the show in conjunction with physical stunt work.

Flat Earth works closely with the on-location crews and New Zealand visual-effects supervisor George Port to plan out what elements are needed with the principal photography. Much of the matte painting work on the series is now also handled in New 2kaland which keeps these design-oriented elements closer to the designers who are building the sets and costumes. "There have been a few episodes where [Los Angeles] has done all the mane paintings, but in the past year and a half all of them have been done here, and then digitally transferred to L.A., where they pop it into the footage," observes Port, who adds that after years of work on "Hercules" and "Xena," the cross-Pacific workflow is very efficient. The writers and Rob Tapert, we get a firm idea of what [they] want to see, and it's just a matter of going as far as we can in that direction, because obviously with a seven-day shoot you can't do as many camera moves and as many interesting state-of-the-art things."

Last spring, special-effects legend Harrison Ellenshaw joined Renaissance Films as its visual-effects supervisor, coordinating the work of vendors Flat Earth, Pixel Magic and Digital Muse with the work done in New Zealand. "I love working in television," says Ellenshaw, a veteran of effects films from "Star Wars" to 'Tron." "I love working for the people at Renaissance Pictures, because when you work on a feature film, the pressure is so intense; it's a one-shot deal. It's such a nightmare doing a big effects film that not many people go back to do a second one. So much is on the line. You don't have that same environment in television. There isn't the degree of anxiety. I get a lot more sleep, and I feel I'm far more productive in television than I am in features. I see the stuff after they've put it together. If there' s something that I think isn't quite the way the filmmakers wanted to see it, I can make the changes."

"Harrison Ellenshaw provided artwork for us to use as backgrounds," says Doug Beswick, three-dimensional animation supervisor on the show and a co-founder of Flat Earth. "We used some photos of his artwork and we also built 3-D imagery based on his design. He painted some skies for us and did some sketches of what the 3-D environment might look like, and we based our work on his sketches. And we digitized some of his paintings and used them as backgrounds."

While budgets, facilities and technology have all improved over the show's 100 episodes, the workload has kept creative demands high on the roughly 30-person team now assigned to the show at Flat Earth.

"In the first season, 12 to 20 shots per episode ballooned up to 65," recalls Kutchaver. "In 1997, we hit 212 shots in one episode, handed in Monday and due Friday. Five working days."

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