TORONTO -- It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye.

Unless you're making a TV show using special effects, and then it's fun, games and 13-hour days of hard work.

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No one lost an eye on the set of Fox's "Wonderfalls," but Ambridge native Marita Grabiak did over- see a scene of a foam dart flying toward the face of a gift shop clerk. In December, Grabiak directed an episode of "Wonderfalls," a new series that premieres at 9 p.m. Friday.

Grabiak worked with the show's crew on this special effects shot, the sort of scene that's a regular part of this quirky series about a Niagara Falls gift shop employee who gets orders to help others from talking animal figurines.

The shot sounds simple: A camera dollies up to actor Neil Grayston, simulating the point of view of a dart shot from a toy gun that zooms toward the hapless employee. But it's tricky. The shot is actually filmed in reverse. Grayston must remain still, holding the same vacant expression without blinking as the camera begins within 2 feet of his face and travels back about 10 feet.

"When we get to the part of 'Don't blink,' try hard not to blink," Grabiak told the actor, who plays gift shop employee Alec. "If you have to blink, well, don't blink."

After a couple tries, Grayston nailed it. When Grabiak yelled "cut," he took a long, relief-filled, dramatic blink. The final scene will play as a combination of live-action dart and computer-generated dart. "We didn't actually dislodge his cornea or anything," Grabiak said reassuringly.

This episode, titled "Karma Chameleon," is scheduled to air March 19. It's Grabiak's first time directing an episode of "Wonderfalls," which was created by Bryan Fuller ("Dead Like Me") and Kittanning native Todd Holland.

Holland is a multiple Emmy-winning television director best known for setting the visual tone for Fox's "Malcolm in the Middle."

Grabiak is a comparative newcomer. She's been directing episodes of prime-time TV dramas only since February 2000. But it's something she's wanted to do since her days growing up in Pittsburgh.

TV directors come and go

No matter the visual entertainment medium, directors call the shots -- literally. Whether TV or film, the director decides what angle to shoot, consults with actors about where they should stand and when they should move in a scene and how to interpret the script.

But there's a significant difference between the power a director typically has in film or TV.

The "auteur theory" of film, propagated in America by film critic Andrew Sarris, ascribes a movie's authorship to its director. Often the writer is shut out of the creative process once a script is complete.

The opposite is true in television, which is considered a writer's medium. A TV series' show runner, often the program's creator and usually the head writer, has final say. Directors come and go on a weekly basis.

The director of a pilot -- the first episode of a TV series -- usually has more latitude than an episodic director and sets the tone for the visual look that directors of subsequent episodes will follow.

"Everything is sort of established in the pilot," said James Conway, who directed the first episode of UPN's "Star Trek: Enterprise." "If you're successful, you'll find 'ER' always looks like like 'ER' and 'West Wing' always looks like 'West Wing.' That's because a director has set a style there, and that becomes what the show is about."

"It's a very tricky business to be an episodic director for hire," Holland said. "Your talent is to come in, marry your stuff to the material and try to lift it if you can. ... You have to fit the template, but it's interesting to try and blend."

A director who has proven herself and directed multiple episodes of a particular series, as Grabiak has with The WB's "Angel," will probably get more latitude when she returns to that series than a first-timer.

"This show is lively and crisp," Grabiak said of "Wonderfalls," "and your job is to basically keep it lively and crisp and find interesting blocking that tells the story."

Instructions in the script often guide a director ("CAMERA's already PANNING OFF Jaye as she starts to react ..."), but Grabiak also tries to add her own touches. In "Karma Chameleon," a scene where the lead character, Jaye (Caroline Dhavernas), gets fired by Alec came off as ominous in the script, but no script notes actually suggested the scene should be frightening.

"So I copied a film noir technique of slanted angles and shafts of light," Grabiak said. "And I said to the actor [who plays Alec] to play this all-powerful. And I got [Dhavernas] to play it as if she was in the Twilight Zone. That kind of thing you can add. You look for things in the attitude and camera work to enhance the writer's intent without changing the story ideas."

That Grabiak was hired to direct a "Wonderfalls" episode is a testimony to her experience, to friendship and to mutual respect. Turns out, those values survive in modern-day Hollywood.

Tim Minear, an executive producer on "Wonderfalls" who wrote "Karma Chameleon," met Grabiak when the two worked as production assistants on the 1986 film "The Men's Club." They remained friends through the years as he gravitated toward writing and she followed her calling to direct.

Her decision to study directing came after graduating from Ambridge High School in 1976. While growing up in Ambridge, she frequently traveled to Downtown Pittsburgh with her family to see movies. Her mother, Jane, who worked as a nurse at Mercy Hospital, and her father, Joseph, a now-retired dentist, raised seven children and often found time to encourage their creativity.

"I'm probably doing what I'm doing today based on my interest in movies and stories and books my mom inspired in me when she read," Grabiak said. "She was a tremendous lover of books and movies."

While studying anthropology her freshman year at Chatham College, Grabiak began dating actor Ron Kolodziej, a CMU student whom she'd later marry. He suggested she go to film school, and she moved to California to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1983.

She had no contacts in the industry and worked her way up, doing everything from craft services (organizing the cart of food available to a TV show or film's cast and crew) to producing music videos.

Grabiak decided perhaps the best way to segue into directing was to be in close physical proximity to a director. You can't get much closer than the script supervisor, who sits next to a director on a film's set, watching the action in a scene on monitors that show what the camera sees. Grabiak worked as script supervisor on many films, including "Bat 21," "Young Guns" and "Soapdish." The script supervisor functions as an additional set of eyes for the director.

"The director can be overwhelmed by a lot of things in the scene: the lighting, the acting, the words, the camera moves," Grabiak said. "The more detail-oriented you are as a person, the better a director you're going to be."

After her first child, Nika, was born in 1989, she decided to segue into television, which offers a better schedule for working moms, with its summer hiatus mostly coinciding with summer vacation for students. Nika is now 15, Christian is 12, and Perry is 7.

Grabiak landed the script supervisor gig on the "ER" pilot and was invited back for the series. At the end of the first year, she told producers of her desire to direct. It finally happened in season six.

"I was the first director in their history to finish half a day early," Grabiak said. "I was so well prepared. I hate to say it was a walk in the park, but that was my home for five years."

But not every set works the same way, a lesson Grabiak learned her first day directing an episode of "Angel." Whereas the actors on "ER" want to be told how to block a scene, the cast of "Angel" did not.

"I realized, different strokes for different folks," she said. "Every organization runs things differently."

"She had great visual style; she was thoroughly prepared, too prepared actually," said Minear, who previously worked on "Angel," of her directing debut on that series. "She had terrific visual ideas that made sense for the storytelling and she planned it out so specifically that it was hard for her to move away from that."

Minear told Grabiak to toss her storyboards.

"She really earned the confidence of the cast, which is a huge thing in television," Minear said. "We try to find people we can constantly bring back and be part of the family, and she became one of those people. No matter how bad things got, she never backed down, never lost her enthusiasm."

After directing "ER" episodes in 2000 and 2001, Grabiak moved on to helm episodes of "Dawson's Creek," "The Division," "Firefly," "Strong Medicine," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Cold Case" and "Smallville."

"Marita did a great job," said "Smallville" executive producer Alfred Gough. "She came in and she was incredibly focused and did a really terrific job in a very hard episode."

Not only was it the first time in the show's second season that an episode was shot on a new set, but the episode, "Skinwalkers," also featured animals and an actress with no prior acting experience.

"She really took all of those elements and juggled them really well," Gough said. "She was there over Halloween and came dressed as Lex Luthor, complete with a bald cap."

Grabiak directed a second "Smallville," featuring a flashback to the '60s, this past fall. A "Gilmore Girls" she directed aired Tuesday, and tomorrow she heads to Utah to direct an episode of The WB's "Everwood."

In the future, Grabiak said she'd like to form an alliance with a writer from the ground up, directing a pilot and setting a series' visual look. She also hopes to direct a feature film. Until that happens, she's not frustrated following the styles established by others.

"My frustration comes in having great ideas that take too long to execute," she said. "The more you move the camera around, inevitably the more you move the lighting."

And that takes more time. When time is up, some shots a director envisions just don't get filmed. "That's the biggest frustration, not being able to have enough time to get all the shots you want."

Frustrating, perhaps, but thinking big and attempting to create the most interesting visuals possible is exactly what directors are paid to do. Right, Mr. Spielberg?