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Creative Draw

Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer

How to make it in Philadelphia.

Noir

On a low-density stretch of the Delaware River, in a district known as Penn's Landing, sits a bulky eight-story building. It provides office space for a panoply of businesses — including nonprofits, a hair salon, and an advertising agency. There's even a nightclub. On the second floor, all-in-one agency/production house Fusion has its offices. Without the freelancers that fill rooms when projects pile up, the offices seemed extremely spacious on a recent weekday. One windowless room is subleased to animation company Noir, formerly known as Innomations.

In 1992, Philadelphia native Jeff Baxter took on heavy loans to buy the expensive animation software and SGI hardware that would allow his nascent company, Innomations, to be one of the first companies in Philly that could produce digital 3D graphics. He describes Innomations' early clients as the local network news stations, the Philadelphia Eagles, and several of the area's major pharmaceutical companies — such as SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) and Merck. “Probably one of the most-seen things we've ever done was the Psychic Friends Network infomercial with Dionne Warwick,” he says. “I think we did that in a [NewTek] Video Toaster.”

Projects such as that one aren't making it to the current Noir reel. (Nor are broadcast graphics — almost all of that work went inhouse long ago.) Reflecting ambitions and accomplishments both artistic and status-driven, local Emmy trophies and colorful hand-modeled characters for stop-motion projects line display cases in Noir's small office space.

With recent advances in animation software and computer hardware — particularly the rendering power of off-the-shelf processors — now even a small boutique such as Noir, with its three permanent employees, can turn around episodic tele-vision work. In 2005, Atlas Media hired the company to do effects shots for nine episodes of the second season of Discovery Health's Dr. G: Medical Examiner. This was the first show that Noir delivered to a production company without recording a tape; instead, the company loaded Avid-codec QuickTime files to an FTP site.

Because of the heavy workload that Dr. G presented, Noir hired two freelancers for inhouse work and also subcontracted some of the work out to friends of Baxter in Los Angeles. They traded tiny 3D object and scene files back and forth over the Internet, and Noir handled processor- and bit-intensive surface modeling and rendering tasks.

After the season ended, Noir edited these sections together using one of Fusion's Avid suites and delivered a Digi Beta master to the network. “Basically because of the deal [we have with Fusion], we have free rein over the equipment if it's not being used.”

Noir currently uses five dual-processor workstations that Baxter built, four with AMD processors and one with Intel — ”whatever's the fastest when I get around to building the next wave,” he says. These each have 1TB of internal storage configured as RAID 5, and there's a mirrored server in a machine room for triple redundancy.

To Noir, the program that a particular inhouse or out-of-house animator prefers doesn't really matter — whether it's NewTek LightWave, Autodesk Maya or 3ds Max, or Softimage|XSI. Now the programs are able to save scene and object files in a variety of formats, so Baxter — who's the surfaces, lighting, and rendering expert at Noir — can focus on high-level talent rather than software competency when he's looking to hire someone.

David Van Allen, the character-animation specialist at Noir, learned Softimage in a painstaking way (plowing through a seven-volume manual; hand-coding renders) while at University of the Arts in Philadelphia in the late '90s. Later, he spent a mere month becoming competent in LightWave. When considering freelancers, “We don't care what they use,” Van Allen says. “Their work's way more important than their software competencies. When we teach our interns and teach people 3D, if they need to learn it, we teach them the terms and competencies, not the buttons.”

Van Allen, who also has a fine-arts degree, insists that his work is based in artistry. (All three Noir employees work on personal animation projects during downtime.) For his senior thesis, he spent the year creating a 4.5-minute stop-animation film, but he's also able to handle animation projects at a very productive clip. A few weeks before I visited, he had animated in LightWave about 6 or 7 minutes of E-Planet, an environmentally conscious children's show, in a single day. The style is somewhat basic, but Van Allen did all the modeling, animation, lip sync, and compositing.

The E-Planet job also turned into a website development project that the client hadn't initially considered. That's the job of the third employee at Noir, interactive lead Shama Chohan. “We basically said, ‘Hey, since we're making the show for you, why don't we make the website? And you can use it to test-market. Have people look at it and find what's working and what's not working,’” Baxter says. “We use the Web to mark up a job that he wasn't going to use it on originally.”

Baxter says he finds that advertising clients nowadays are looking to deploy integrated campaigns across several platforms — including television, the Web, and email. In addition to the business case of having an employee handling interactive elements of projects, especially Flash animation, Baxter says that it's always good to have a third designer in the room.

Baxter maintains that in Philadelphia, he's able to offer lower rates than a large animation house in New York or Los Angeles could, so it's no surprise that much of Noir's recent broadcast work has been for regional or national clients rather than local ones.

But according to Baxter, corporate clients are much more willing to spend money on projects that allow the company to use innovative techniques. When I visited, Noir was looking forward to creating a 3D program of Siemens scanners that would become a holographic presentation at a national tradeshow.

This project, which will employ display technology from Danish company Vizoo to create an illusion of holographic scanners for tradeshow attendees, actually required only a simple frame sequence as a deliverable from Noir. “What we're finding is the barriers between web and video and tradeshows and corporate and broadcast — they're just going away,” Van Allen says.

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.