Making the vision a reality

It’s a progressively finer line that separates post-production and production. With computer software that facilitates the creation of special effects and a film and television industry that’s increasingly developing an appetite for them, post-production and special effects houses are no longer simply the middlemen, but have real input into a project’s creative.

Chris Wallace, president of TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation, says clients are less and less coming in with clear instructions. More often they arrive with a vision and ask how it can be done.

‘The high-end 2D and 3D graphics in blockbusters like True Lies put a bug in people’s ear. It’s changed their perception of what post-production is,’ says Wallace.

Based in Toronto, topix, one of the country’s leading post houses specializing in animation and special effects, purchased the Flint system a year ago from Discreet Logic, a Montreal-based developer and distributor.

topix had no intention of becoming a post-production house when it bought Flint, says Wallace. Client demand for speedy special effects was the impetus behind the purchase, specifically a project for Coca-Cola which gave topix less than two weeks to make three 30-second spots.

The $150,000 Flint system allowed the speed and editing flexibility necessary for the project, as well as facilitating the manipulation of multiple images for special effects.

Over the year, Flint’s capabilities have exposed the company to the benefits of doing high-end post-production. topix used to have its special effects and animation elements posted out-of-house. ‘Now we do it all here,’ says Wallace, who founded the company in 1986.

topix will venture farther into the post-production field this year when it purchases Flame, Flint’s big brother. The integration of Flame will officially turn topix into a high-end digital post-production company, says Wallace.

Flame is tagged at $1 million, or about five times the cost of the Flint system. Both systems are suited to creating and combining 2D and 3D effects with animation, and both facilitate editing, compositing, blending, coloring, and special effects. The difference is in the speed of execution, says Sylvain Taillon, an animator at topix.

While Flint is no slouch, running on a powerful SGI Iris Indigo 2 with Extreme graphics, Flame runs on an advanced SGI Onyx 4 processor, a speed-demon of a machine which renders 3D graphics and animation in real time. Flame will also hold about 12 minutes of disc space, as opposed to topix’s Flint system, which holds four minutes.

It costs more to operate a system that runs in real time, but it saves money by doing the work better and faster, says Taillon. Most importantly, it allows the client to sit in the room and edit with the team, bringing the consultation process Taillon wants to encourage full circle.

According to Taillon, with the addition of Flame, the liaison between topix and the client won’t begin in the editing room. The consultation process between the special effects/post-production house and the producers and clients should begin before a piece of film is shot in order to maximize the equipment’s potential, he says.

‘Technical considerations need to start at the beginning for some things to work. You don’t want to wind up unable to do something in post because the piece wasn’t filmed that way,’ he says.

Advertisers who want to manipulate their spots for television and theater can do so using either Flint or Flame. Both are non resolution-dependent and can be used for both film and video at ntsc and pal levels. It’s a long way from the black box system that worked at only a 525-line resolution at ntsc level, says Wallace.

Both systems allow movement back and forth between resolutions, and images can be reconfigured to suit the medium. For example, when Nescafe, through McCann-Erikson, wanted to pull one of its ‘For Your Cafe State of Mind’ television spots for Nescafe specialty instant coffees for theatrical use, topix was able to reconfigure and lengthen the spot for the big screen.

Perpetually expanding in preparation for a fully digitized future, topix added a Sony Digital Betacam player and a Discus Digital Recorder from Abekas for about $100,000 at the end of 1994.

It will delve into cd-rom production this September when a new division of the company, TOPIX Interactive, opens. (See story, p. 25.)

While cd-roms are a new beast, a combination of production and post-production, all the equipment needed to produce them is in-house, says Wallace. Serving the community now in part means helping producers maximize their product’s value by twisting programs and characters to fit other multimedia.

Ken Stewart, president of Ottawa-based General Assembly, concurs that clients’ demands to produce in all media are changing the job description of production staff to consultants.

Non-traditional ways

‘People who have been comfortable with our traditional service are being compelled to consider producing or distributing in the non-traditional ways, cd-rom or the Internet, and are looking to us to help provide them with some answers.’

General Assembly is a one-stop production and post-production center housing its own editing, sound, design, and audio-visual library. As a unit, it officially launched in December, and is in the midst of a national and international marketing campaign.

Starting out as a small editing shop, Stewart opened General Assembly in 1983 and developed an eye to partnering with shops specializing in other areas of film production and post-production. Blue Turtle Sound came on board in 1989, Digg Design, which works with animation, effects and multimedia, in 1990, and finally Cyclop Vision, a database management company specializing in audio-visual libraries, about 18 months ago.

It was well worth the $1 million investment in the new facility to bring all the elements of production and post-production for film and multimedia together under one roof, says Stewart. ‘We had to expand and engineer our facilities for the next decade.’

The client demand is such that producers want to shoot a documentary, cut it for television, adapt the video sequences for a computer playback, produce a cd-rom and then whittle down the cd-rom into something usable on the Internet.

‘We’re able to sit down with our clients and ask what they want and collaborate on the project with an expert in-house in every area. We want to help our clients – the independent producers – give their clients what they want,’ Stewart adds.

The other advantage to this holistic setup and approach is that no areas of the company work in a vacuum. ‘When we put in digital Betacam, we look at the rest of the operation and say, `What does it mean to audio?’ ‘ says Stewart.

Mark Ury, director of marketing for General Assembly, says producers are invited to develop their creative with the help of on-staff designers and programmers, a technique used in film production but not so much in video and non-broadcast productions.

‘Better ideas emerge’

‘By involving the below-the-line creative talent in the creative, more and better ideas usually emerge which pay off. In some cases, we’re seeing designers coming up with the idea bed which everything passes through. Designers see the world quite differently than the rest of the world,’ Ury says.

Works in progress at General Assembly include a cd-rom information/game solicited by the federal government, produced by Blomeley Communications, and designed and programmed by Digg Design. The project will wrap in March and the government will use it to educate kids on immigration policy.

An undisclosed east coast producer is working on a project shot in 16mm, cut for tv, but then adapted to a cd-rom, which will also include a virtual walk-around a 3D environment. ‘That scenario tends to reflect how things are shaping up here,’ says Ury.