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MillimeterNice Work If You Can Find IT
Feb 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Matt Cheplic
Chasing a modern manifest destiny, Planet Blue has completed its move from Hollywood to Santa Monica. Such a move is one trend in L.A. postproduction, but president Maury Rosenfeld points to another less pleasant one.
"The business climate is different this year," he says. "Titanic is finished; Starship Troopers is finished; so there's way more capacity at this time this year than there was last year. There are serious bidding wars going on right now."
But that has not added up to idle hands at Planet Blue. The facility posted Super Bowl spots for AT&T, Micron Computers, and Budweiser, and recently finished a campaign for the MGM Grand.
Rosenfeld is most excited about Planet Blue's new, proprietary software, called "Tulip," for facial animation and lip-synch.
"It's in the 100:1 neighborhood of labor-savings," he says. "We can make multiple-language versions of the same stuff. I work with animators and modelers to generate the set of face shapes. They deliver the data to me, and I send them back the channels to drive their system. We have interfaces to Softimage and Maya and LightWave and Prisms. It's generally higher quality than you can do by hand."
Planet Blue currently offers Tulip as an added service to clients.
The Super Bowl also brought good work to Ring of Fire of West Hollywood. Executive producer John Myers and company brought elaborate versions of the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, and Big Ben into director Leslie Dektor's Morgan Stanley Dean Witter spot "Millennium."
Ring of Fire also completed CGI face manipulation of dalmatians for the Super Bowl Budweiser spot, "Separated at Birth." Myers says he is investigating NT hardware as well as high-def gear.
"The possibilities are scary, but you don't want to be reactive. You want to be proactive," he says.
While Ring of Fire will add a compositing system to its Henry and Inferno, Myers has not yet invested precisely because of HDTV's resolution issues.
Digital Muse, Santa Monica specializes in TV effects and has recently made a cottage industry of Star Trek.
Says co-founder John Parenteau, "During one three-week period, we were working on six episodes of Voyager and Deep Space Nine, effects for Star Trek: Insurrection, the trailer for Insurrection, a Discovery Channel special about Star Trek, and a version of the ride film for Dusseldorf, Germany."
Digital Muse has just established a commercials division, based in the back half of their Third Street Promenade offices.
"We're building a Henry bay. We just bought the [Henry] Infinity and Flint. And we run mainly LightWave, but we're bringing in Alias' Maya for commercials," says Parenteau.
Why a commercials division?
"We'd done a little film work, like Spawn and Devil's Advocate," he exlpains. "When we got offers on bigger pictures, we decided we had a lot more to accomplish in TV, and films might swallow the facility. That's when the commercials division was born."
Parenteau also credits lead compositor Mark Breakspear and 3D artist Matt Merkovich for their acumen with commercial work.
Michael DeMucci, vice president at Moviola Digital, also points out the paucity of big-budget features. "I know a lot of editors who were doing 80- or 100-million-dollar features last year who are scrambling to work on 10-million-dollar films."
DeMucci speaks to more than his share of editors. Aside from Moviola Digital's extensive business renting editing systems, the company has opened an authorized Avid education center in their Hollywood building. Patty Montesion, who formerly ran the training facility at Burbank's Video Symphony, runs the center.
"It's mainly Avid classes, but we also offer classes in traditional film editing, courses that prepare you for the modern digital cutting room, which incorporates non-linear as well as traditional technology," says DeMucci.
Classes also cover Digital Studio and Symphony.
Moviola Digital is reconfiguring its Web site, so customers can shop online.
"We're starting to focus on e-commerce," explains DeMucci. "We're kind of billed as a postproduction superstore, because we carry soup to nuts as far as post supplies."
DeMucci reports he is also looking into NT-based systems for both sale and rental. "NT is going to tie in to training. All these Mac people will have to be trained somewhat on NT products."
Also offering Avid training is Digital Film Works, which set aside five workstations to teach Media Illusion and Matador. Beyond drawing on Avid-supplied courseware, the company has designed additional classes, such as rotoscoping, match-moves, and UNIX for artists. Senior compositor Marco Paolini serves as the main instructor.
The facility recently served as the sole effects vendor on A Midsummer Night's Dream with Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer. But while the Shakespeare story is full of fairies and other supernatural devices, most of Digital Film Works' tasks are more subtle.
"Ninety percent of the work we do is not the big spaceship flying through space, but putting things into scenes with real people and making sure it's transparent," says president Peter Moyer.
Digital Film Works has also been busy compositing 20th Century Fox's Brokedown Palace.
"We use a combination of Avid Media Illusion and Shake, a good, cost-effective compositing system," Moyer elaborates.
Even though Klasky Csupo is already a household name around town, the Hollywood animation house recently renamed their commercials division Class-Key Chew-Po. It is more than a surface makeover, though.
"We're branching out from 2D into CGI and stop motion," reports CEO/President Terry Thoren. "We've hired nine new directors and invested in Silicon Graphics and NT workstations." The company recently landed its first CGI commercial job.
Still enjoying the fruits of The Rugrats Movie, Klasky Csupo began recording the sequel in January.
"By spring of 2000, we'll have three features, and at least that many TV series in production at the same time," says Thoren.
Speaking of TV, the studio is finessing a new series, adding to The Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys, and the BBC staple Stressed Eric. They also bought a building on Sunset Boulevard across from the Cinerama Dome to accommodate their employee roster, which has grown from 75 in 1994 to over 400.
"Somebody realizes: 'Gee, we spent a pile of money here. What are we doing to protect our elements?' That's when we come into the picture." So says David Wexler in describing the appeal of his company, Hollywood Vaults. The facility stores all elements at 45 degrees and 25-percent humidity to insure they will not deteriorate and offers private storage spaces with 24-hour access.
"We store a lot of film, but it's more audio, videotape, and folks with data," says Wexler. "This off-site vaulting is a newer concept for them. They get excited about 24-hour access to the material and knowing it won't be pirated, mislabeled, or misplaced."
Hollywood Vaults rents their spaces month to month. Wexler asserts, "Most clients stay for a long time, but no one's locked into a long commitment."
525 Post Production is another company making the most of the coast with a second facility in Santa Monica.
"We'll probably put another Flame on line in order to have four in Santa Monica and two in Hollywood," says president and CEO Eric Bonniot. "We're evaluating da Vinci color correction versus Pogle and looking at a strong high-def path those systems will take us on."
According to Bonniot, the Santa Monica location will be more commercial-based, while 525's Hollywood site will maintain its mixture of music video, commercial, and film work. The penthouse of the Santa Monica building will be treated to two Infernos, two Henrys, and a Mac bay.
"Then, we'll open two telecines, two more Infernos, Avids, a 3D department, and a design branch," says Bonniot.
In truth, 525's design work has already taken off, as illustrated by a recent promo package for NBC.
Stock footage house Energy Film Library just purchased the Imageways archival collection out of New York.
"We were struck by the uniqueness of its content," says VP for business development Rob Sherman. "There's a lot of early color TV material and newsreel from '50s and '60s-very humorous and stylish for the time." Energy has distilled its archives (the largest collection of 35mm available for license, Sherman estimates) into a Core Collection, essentially a sampler for customers to start with, built on Energy's Quantel Editbox.
The Studio City-based (but global) operation has stepped up production, too. In the last year, Energy produced major shoots in L.A., London, Berlin, Prague, and Madrid to procure establishers, landmarks, lifestyles, and business footage.
"We have an in-house creative director now, Alwyn Gofford. We're doing a huge amount of supervising productions," Bonniot states.
Crest National, which has tripled in size over the last six years, is probably best known for feature-film restoration. The company offers telecine services and recently updated their suites with Pogle color correction. Crest also edits film for content and conforms cuts for television and in-flight entertainment.
But it is the world of DVD that is shaking things up most at the Hollywood company.
"We have a wider range of DVD services than anyone on the planet," declares John M. Walker, executive VP, sales and marketing. "We offer pre-mastering, MPEG compression, authoring, AC3 encoding, foreign-language subtitling in 65 languages, dubbing in nine languages, menu design."
Crest National even boasts its own CD and DVD manufacturing plant, which produces about 12,000 DVD units per day. Walker says they will ramp up to 36,000 daily by late 1999 or early 2000.
"DVD is unquestionably the most dynamic area," he says. "You've got independents taking advantage of short-term opportunities until the majors catch up with the marketplace, which I think they'll do rapidly. Also, DVD is a great method to deliver HD material to the home."
Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, Meteor Attack, Macho, Macho Movies...don't let Blur Studios' ferocious-sounding jobs scare you. The Venice facility houses a perfectly level-headed staff. But with two spots for the Duke Nukem game; the four-minute, meteor-themed ride film for a Japanese park; and promos for the FX network's Saturday night Macho, Macho Movies lineup, they do mean business.
Blur also produced 30 minutes of cinematic animation for the Activision game Interstate 82 and nine minutes of animation for the game Ultima. Other recent credits include spots for Hot Wheels, shots for the Guinness ride film Ride the Records, shots for the upcoming South Park feature, and the majority of effects work for the Miramax film For the Cause. CGI IDs for WB's Saturday morning programming, teasers for USA's GVSE, and regional Lexus dealer spots reflect Blur's latest endeavor: broadcast design.
Creative director Tim Miller expects to buy five or six Intergraph TDZ2000 workstations within the year. He recently added a DPS Perception RT board and is evaluating Fibre Channel. The "totally NT from the get-go" company offers free plug-ins to 3D Studio MAX on their Web site (www.blur.com).
West Valley Studios in Chatsworth is likewise occupied with broadcast design and boasts package work for PBS, ESPN, and Playboy. The facility handles all postproduction on ESPN's monthly Up Close Primetime with Roy Firestone, which travels via Fibre Channel to Bristol, Connecticut, a few hours before airing on the sports network.
"Most of that work is Chyron stuff," says Alan Popkin, director of production. "Other stuff we build using footage, the Grass Valley 4000, and [Abekas] Dveous. It's all done online, because there's too much footage to digitize."
West Valley uses Stratosphere systems for non-linear work, as they did for a recent Playmate Review for Playboy. Popkin reports his facility has upgraded Stratosphere storage and will soon launch Alias|Wavefront's Maya. West Valley also offers audio post and stages; the latter have accommodated the Discovery Channel and MSNBC.
The Sony High Definition Center in Culver City is doing its part to prepare for an HD-ready future. Armed with three telecines-one made by Sony and two by Cinema Products-plus custom software and hardware, the facility transfers feature films to high-definition masters ready for HDTV broadcast or DVD duplication. The Center has transferred about 400 Sony films, but it works with a variety of studios.
"We're getting the most notice from independent filmmakers for our two electron-beam recorders, which allow us to go from video back to 35mm film," says VP of business development Don Miskowich. "The upconverters take SD video, upconvert it to HD video, and run it through a preprocessing step called 'M mode,' then run that through the recorder for smooth-looking, commercially viewable results. Michael Moore took advantage of that early this year for The Big One, and The Cruise was done that way."
The Center also harbors a few high-definition edit bays, equipped with Ultimatte technology for HD green screen work. And the facility has been doing "quite a bit of work in restoration." Miskowich reveals that the Center is cleaning up Easy Rider for a 1999 re-release.
More evidence that the winds of change are blowing through telecine suites is found at the Hollywood branch of NT Audio. The facility has been loading footage off their Rank Telecines and, instead of laying off to tape, digitizing directly into Avid's Media Station. Undergoing such a treatment are Steven Soderbergh's The Limey and the Austin Powers sequel, The Spy Who Shagged Me.
"With Austin Powers, we're using 2-gig Jaz drives to transport media from our facility to theirs," explains engineer Kevin Mittan. "They don't have to worry about digitizing off tape or time-code problems, and image quality was better than coming off tape."
NT Audio's Hollywood facility deals chiefly with transfers, while the company's Santa Monica site handles mag transfers and color dupes. Mittan points out they were the first to do quad format work, which is a half-speed analog stereo soundtrack format.
Rental house Bexel in Burbank is becoming, in the words of Tom Dickinson, VP of sales, "a full-service, high-def house." Already a major dealer for HD D-5 gear, Bexel has begun purchasing Sony HDCAM cameras and tape machines. While converters, adapters, monitors, and synch generators for HD are also abundant, Dickinson says a fully switchable, multi-camera setup is still on his wish list for the coming year.
"The first wave for high-def rentals was corporate, demos, and trade shows," he says. "But that changed last fall and shifted to post facilities."
Dickinson has even rented HD D-5 gear to Panasonic in promoting HD sets in store displays.
Because of Bexel's frequent work with large events like the Super Bowl, the company established a sub-group called Bexel Broadcast Services to ensure constant on-site supervision of technical issues.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
