Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterMeteor Studios
Jul 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by Ellen Wolff
 Meteor Studios' CG animation enlivened Chasing Giants: On The Trail of the Giant Squid. |
No matter how you view the emergence of Canada's Meteor Studios, you see significant signs of the times. The Montreal-based company, overseen by a Los Angeles-based director who specializes in HD, creates realistic CG on TV budgets. Throw in a steady flow of assignments from parent company Discovery Communications, and add a penchant for cost-effective production tools and Web-centric communications. The result is a recipe for efficiently produced — and highly rated — Discovery Channel shows such as When Dinosaurs Roamed America, which included over 500 scenes with CG integrated into live-action HD.
“Our Dinosaur show doubled the best rating that the Discovery Channel had ever achieved,” notes director Pierre De Lespinois, who co-founded Meteor with Discovery and who serves as its president. “The most popular movies are the ones with lots of visual effects, and now that's possible for Discovery.”
The prospect of creating reliable quantities of cost-effective CG was a key motivation for the Bethesda, Md.-based Discovery to launch Meteor in January 2001. By setting up a permanent facility that could build CG libraries of extinct creatures (along with ancient architecture and weather phenomena), Discovery would get a steady supply of images for its programming.
“They knew it was no longer acceptable to show a paleontologist simply holding up dinosaur bones,” notes De Lespinois. “We'd have to bring creatures back to life, and to do that we had to build the studio of the future.”
Ensconced in a large, fashionably upgraded warehouse that formerly housed Montreal's electric company, Meteor grew from 20 to 110 employees during its first year and completed 208 minutes of animation. For 2002, the studio is aiming for 300 minutes. The studio's main animation software is Maya (Meteor has 55 seats), and the company also runs the commodity packages Shake, Photoshop, Combustion, Flame, Inferno, and Boujou on SGI Windows-NT computers. Meteor has a 200 CPU render farm, and an SGI Origin 3200 server anchors the facility, which is connected with an ATM network.
 Meteor is building a digital library of prehistoric creatures, including this fur-covered bison. |
De Lespinois travels to Meteor once a month to oversee the CG work-in-progress, but most of the time he collaborates remotely from his Los Angeles-based Evergreen Films, where he produces HD live-action. While De Lespinois describes himself as “a die-hard Macintosh and Final Cut user,” his L.A. staff utilizes password-protected websites to make the collaborations with the NT-based Meteor run smoothly.
“The first thing we do is scan the storyboards into our Macs,” says De Lespinois of the process. “We put them in i-Movie and get our pacing down. Then we export things over to Final Cut and start bringing in animatics. We do that in L.A. and then ship everything to Meteor. We create private websites where everyone can see the work.”
Using websites is crucial in cases where Discovery's scientific consultants, who are scattered around the world, have to check material for accuracy.
“They can click on ‘Models’ and up will come Meteor's Saber-tooth Tigers or Wooly Mammoths,” De Lespinois notes.
Once the models are approved, the compositing of the animation gets underway.
“Anyone can click on ‘Approved Shots,’ and up will come a little Quicktime that will show the blocking of the shot,” says De Lespinois.
While this way of working is becoming standard practice at several digital post facilities, De Lespinois is pushing the integration of CG and live action even further up the production pipeline. A new miniseries called Prehistoric World, which the director describes as “costing tens of millions of dollars,” is one example of early CG/live action integration.
“We're sending wireless feeds from our HD cameras right to laptops running Maya, Shake, and Final Cut,” explains De Lespinois. “While we're shooting, we can do quick composites to make sure that everything is well. Then, at the end of each day, we burn a CD and send it up to the team at Meteor so they can jump on the animation.”
When it comes to animating extinct creatures, Meteor has pros like Don Waller and George Wong, veterans of Disney's Dinosaur. De Lespinois is bringing Meteor's CG experts onto location shoots, as well.
“We'll have an animator who's running the Maya version of a CG dinosaur on his laptop, right there in the field,” he notes. “I'll tell him what millimeter lens we're shooting with, and send the plate shot to his laptop wirelessly. He'll quickly modify the Maya animation to that scale, composite it with Shake, and edit it with Final Cut. We can determine if we have a lock on a location or if there's anything else we need to shoot.”
De Lespinois explains that he and two colleagues had a downconverter and a wireless transmitter custom built for this purpose, and that is not the only new technology impacting their way of working. At any given time, Meteor has about six to 10 programmers developing proprietary code, and they've created creature “cloning” software as well as Maya plug-ins to create fur and feather animation. Meteor has also developed a tool for removing unwanted objects from plate photography.
“Meteor has so many shows coming through the door, including the work of people who don't have much experience shooting for visual effects,” says De Lespinois. “We realized that we needed to create software to clean up their shots. Our tool saves hours of clean-up time by having computers do the mundane tasks. The whole process becomes faster — and better in terms of cost.”
Especially notable is Meteor's proprietary asset-management system.
“Our Job Tracker software tracks all the techniques, tools, and hours that we spend, including administration and the overhead of office equipment,” De Lespinois remarks. “It calculates what things cost when we do a particular type of shot and tells us what we have to bill for it. One of the hardest things to do in our business is bid a shot. For many visual effects companies it's been a real guessing game for which there is no template. It takes effort to make things accessible with the push of a button, but the effort we've spent allows us to be more efficient in our budgeting process. Our producers can put in the parameters of a potential project, and the databases that they can call from are huge.”
De Lespinois notes that Meteor has been amassing a growing library of CG elements, from character models to particles.
”As our producers bid jobs, they can do a data search of the library for various elements because these things are created in distinct layers. All of this means efficiency, which means lower costs. Spending the effort to build these databases makes a huge difference in how we can approach production.”
Future plans to improve efficiency include a switch from Windows NT to the Linux operating system, licensed from Red Hat. Although Meteor had to modify the Linux kernel for its ATM network, De Lespinois considers the transition vital.
“We'll be allowed to integrate Apple products,” he says, noting that Apple's OSX is, like Linux, a Unix variant. “We think that a mixed equipment environment is the future.”
For now, Meteor remains focused on keeping its CG critters robust and supplying high-res imagery for Discovery's recently launched HD channel. Meteor's animators are even tackling the challenge of creating realistic human-character animation. De Lespinois even predicts that in the not-too-distant future Meteor “will bring Abe Lincoln back to life.”
“We're taking areas that have been exclusive to multimillion-dollar theatrical projects and doing them for television,” De Lespinois asserts. “The core idea behind Meteor is creating more for less.”
