Increasingly complex computer imaging and graphics, online Internet access, Web sites, digital transmissions

The film and television service industry has to continuously choose when and how much of this technology is worthwhile investing in, weighing questions of cost, time savings and final product quality.

And, most important in the long term, where do they see their service fitting into the virtual world quickly closing in around them?

The effects of computerization vary from service to service. In some areas of production, change has been mild. In others, the new technologies are forcing technicians and craftspeople to carve out new niches within the industry.

But whatever their area of specialty, everyone involved in servicing the film and tv production industry is left dealing with the wake as the tidal wave of digitalization sweeps through their world.

Set design and

construction

The consensus among set designers and builders is that computers make their jobs easier, as well as save them valuable time and money.

Although designers are at various stages along the path to complete digitalization, they are all eagerly trying out new technology and making it work for them. Their inventive approaches are also allowing film crews to have a clearer picture of their sets long before construction begins.

David Timmons, co-owner of Toronto-based Setworks, has come up with an innovative way to use computer technology to his advantage.

A year and a half ago, he developed a division called Wildwalls, a set rental system. Timmons designed a collection of sets and stored and catalogued them on computer. Production designers can browse through the catalogue and phone in their orders, choosing colors and any specifics. The predesigned sets are pulled out of stock, painted and delivered, finished, to the soundstage.

‘Basically, what it does is cut out the art director,’ says Timmons. ‘They don’t have to design their own set. They just choose a design, tell us what they need, we give them a computer-generated drawing, and in the meantime, the walls are being prepared.’

The cg drawings are also requested for preproduction meetings so the crew has an exact picture of the set they will be working with much earlier in the preproduction stage.

Currently, Timmons says his predesigned walls are in high demand from lower-budget, quick turnaround commercial productions in need of sets swiftly and often. But he envisions services like Wildwalls expanding to cover a wider array of productions.

‘It saves them time and money, and it saves set constructors time because the walls are already made, in stock, ready to go,’ he says.

Despite his eagerness to explore digital technology, Timmons sticks to old-fashioned methods when contracted to design specific sets.

‘I still think out of the end of my pencil,’ he laughs, admitting he does all his rough sketches and presentation drawings by hand. But on a recent project, Timmons put down his pencil and picked up a mouse, working entirely with MiniCad 5.0 drafting software to design the complex interior of a rocket ship engine. He was amazed at the time it saved and the quality of the final product.

‘If I had done that by hand it would have taken me hours and hours,’ says Timmons, ‘whereas on the computer I was able to generate very complex shapes, see what they looked like, and modify them. I was able to do a better job. It enhanced my creativity.’

At Bratton Scenery and Display in Toronto, Steve Bratton constructs many sets from designs provided to him by film and tv productions. He says most art departments still give him hand-drawn designs.

‘Computerized drafting, at this stage, is almost nonexistent,’ says Bratton. But like Timmons, Bratton has taken a digital plunge, purchasing a cad for his own set design work.

‘Going through the initial stage on drawings can take some time,’ he says. ‘It will be great to store the drawings, refer to them later, and alter them for a different process.’

Bratton says it will also help his clients visualize the sets more clearly before construction begins. ‘I used it for a Mr. Clean commercial. I designed a kitchen set, doing the whole layout – front, side, back – and the client could see the point of view of every shot,’ he explains.

Bratton has also found computer software useful for quoting on construction jobs. An estimating program gives him the ability to adjust prices at a moment’s notice when producers change their specifications. ‘They expect the quotes to come through far quicker now than ever before,’ he says, ‘and using the program I can easily adjust the numbers.’

But Bratton has found high costs and low demand keep some digital technology out of reach. He used to be involved in automated, computer-controlled scenery but dropped the service.

‘The initial startup costs and the cash outlay for hardware and software was astronomical, and there was an enormous risk involved,’ he explains. ‘You can find yourself in the poorhouse pretty damn quick. There’s just not a big demand for automated scenery in film. It’s mostly in live theater and the major musicals.’

Unlike many designers just wetting their feet in computerized drafting, Toronto art director/production designer Jeff Ginn has jumped right in. All his designs are created in 3D on MiniCad. He then imports the set designs into a Studio Pro Blitz rendering engine program, which generates colored, photographic-quality snapshots of what the finished product will look like.

‘The first set I did this for was Beyond The Call last fall for Showtime,’ says Ginn. ‘The director thought they were real photographs.’

He also asked the dop to look over the cg snapshots. ‘He could see how the light would fall on the set and asked me to make some changes,’ says Ginn. ‘We modified the set long before we started construction. That saves a lot in terms of the time and the cost of making changes after construction.’

The construction department also referred to the photographs instead of traditional sketches when building the set. ‘They were thrilled to have an actual photo of how the windows worked, how the light would fall. They could even see the paint texture,’ says Ginn.

Although some production designers like Perri Gorrara, who has been in the business for 20 years, and Louise Jobin, currently working on Lobby, find drafting design by computer is too slow, Ginn sees MiniCad and computer-generated set rendering catching on rapidly in the next few years and becoming an industry standard.

‘If I have to do a sketch, it’s not going to have much detail,’ he says. ‘But when I’m constructing with MiniCad and the rendering program, I’m constructing in real-world size. I can push walls out, make room for more furniture, add a decorative ceiling. I can work out how the grips will take away a part. I feel like I am physically working with the set, as though it were actually there,’ he says.

Timmons is also beginning to use computer-generated pictures rather than sketches. For a Kraft commercial with a background set of clouds, he started off with a picture of a cloud on disc and combined, duplicated and regenerated it on computer, scaling it to the size of the cyc wall at Lakeshore Studios.

‘The cyc was 120 feet long and the cloud shot was 35mm, so I took portions of different cloud images and combined them to make a long, skinny shot,’ explains Timmons. ‘When I made my presentation, the director could see what we were going to provide as an airbrushed drawing on the cyc and we were able to do color changes quickly on the computer.’

Timmons also found that it made the painter’s job much easier. ‘When we transferred over to the hard-wall cyc, it was easier for him to work from a piece of work 14-inches-by-three-inches high, scaled more to the cyc, than a 35mm photograph where the perspective isn’t there. Rather than giving him a drawing, this was a full-color piece of work on which he could see all the nuances, the detail.’

Web sites are another area set builders and designers are paying close attention to. Setworks has already jumped onto the Internet bandwagon and developed a home page. Right now it is being used for promotion: production designers can look up the services the company offers or browse for sets by clicking on a gallery that displays visuals of the company’s work.

Wildwalls has its own page and Timmons is looking into the possibility of clients ordering the walls directly via the Net to speed up the buying process.

Bratton is also ‘dabbling’ in the online realm as a resource tool in searching for particular hardware or looking for a particular grade of lumber or a certain plastic. ‘Someone I was talking to was searching for a film location in Philadelphia,’ he says, ‘so they tapped into the Internet and there was a site that fed them all sorts of information on the city’s architectural structures.’

Timmons believes entirely virtual sets are in his not-too-distant future. ‘One day when producers phone up for Wildwalls they will get something computer-generated, something on disc, and they will just marry it in with what they are shooting live.’

But Gorrara is not so sure. ‘A very important part of making movies is how people and elements interact together, and the more you disconnect the interaction by shooting elements separately and compositing, the less interaction you have,’ she explains. ‘This way we still build a live-action area, so whatever is happening with the actors is part of a physical set and the rest can be built in the computer.’

Physical/mechanical effects

For physical effects specialists, computerization’s biggest impact hasn’t been in changing how they do their jobs. It has meant less jobs.

At Toronto-based Global Effects, Jason Board deals in pyrotechnics, explosions, fires and atmospheric effects such as snow, rain and wind. ‘Productions are generating a lot of these effects artificially using digital technology,’ he says.

Board says although it is generally more expensive and slower going with computers, as the size and dimensions of special effects in film and tv increase, the need to create them digitally also grows.

David Lemmen, a special effects co-ordinator who has just completed work on such films as The Wrong Guy and That Old Feeling, says he is still in demand for atmospheric effects like rain, snow and wind.

‘That is still done with traditional mechanical effects and probably always will be,’ he says. ‘But more and more (effects are being generated with) computer graphics. For example, we used to work quite a bit with latex. I did a Cheerios commercial once where the Cheerios tried to jump out of the box and the package was bulging and stretching. Now that is all done on cgi, whereas before we did it by covering latex skin over a metal box and using prongs to push the packaging out.’

Lemmen admits that creating these effects digitally is on par with his costs and the quality is the same. And often it is easier to generate these effects digitally. ‘What we used to do with rigs, strings, wires and cables is all going to computers because you have more control,’ Lemmen says. ‘The rigs were limited. With the computer you can spin things around 360 degrees, but with the rig that couldn’t be done because you had to have somewhere to hide the equipment.’

On the positive side, computer technology has also offered physical effects specialists the opportunity to collaborate with experts in computer graphics.

Gorrara says she is turning more and more to combining live-action shots with computer-generated effects to save money. Currently doing production design for the Cinar tv series Emily, Gorrara has to decide the most feasible way to make a horse and rider crash into a house. ‘The preferable way to do it is as a live-action shoot, but you would spend a fortune bringing a horse and rider up from Hollywood that knows how to do this and to build a special set,’ she explains.

‘We don’t have the money, so we are going to build a blow-up replica of the wall and ceiling, blow that up, and separately shoot a horse and rider leaping into a frame against a background of limbo. Through cgi, we’ll marry that image with our exploding wall and computer-generated images of debris and chunks of wall.’

Board has found himself collaborating with computer effects technicians more often. He did the physical effects for The Santa Clause, turning a downtown Toronto street in the summer into a winter landscape by manually laying down mounds of white, fleecy material for blocks and blocks. But these physical effects required him to work closely with a computer graphics team to ensure that his snow was consistent with the computer-generated snow and the storm effects which had to be matted in during post.

Board has a grim outlook on his field. He predicts that within 20 years most of the work done by technical film crews will give way to computers.

But Gorrara insists there is still a place for live-shot physical effects in film and tv production. ‘There are many situations where computers take a lot longer and are ultimately more expensive than the old-fashioned methods,’ she says. ‘It is useful to have a good working knowledge of physical effects so you know when to go back to the old methods.

‘The more real you can go is always the best,’ is Gorrara’s motto, but the reality is that the craft of physical effect-making is rapidly changing and losing out to digital technology. How are these specialists dealing with this fact?

‘Most of them are just holding the line,’ says Lemmen. ‘They are paper and drawings type of guys; most of them aren’t that computer-literate. I tend to look at a lot of them as disappearing like dinosaurs if they’re not careful. They aren’t interested in computers at all.’

Lemmen, on the other hand, plans to avoid the possibility of extinction. Like many other physical effects technicians, he is inching his way into the expanding world of computer-generated graphics. Lemmen is starting up a 3D animation and computer effects business on the side.

Board believes that physical effects specialists have a lot of expertise and experience to offer the digital realm. ‘Many of the people doing computer effects don’t have the knowledge of the physical effects and aren’t quite sure of what they are trying to achieve, so hopefully we will fit in there.’

Lemmen’s biggest complaint is that computer effects are eating into the most challenging aspects of his physical work. ‘We are taking a big hit in terms of the fun, creative stuff we used to do,’ he says.

Ginn’s solution is in the form of a challenge for art departments as a whole: ‘The big computerized image houses in l.a. – Sony Image Works, Boss Imaging, ilm – are taking the most interesting visuals away from art departments. But the Indigo 2 computers that they use and cost in the $60,000 to $80,000 range are now available for $8,000 or $10,000.

‘In the future, I would like to see art departments get a lot more computer-literate and take back some of those mattes and interesting visual effects and do them in-house. Why shouldn’t we? All we need is for art directors to want it bad enough. Otherwise we just turn into window dressers, and I would prefer that we have the tools at hand to be more visionary and create entire worlds.’

Art direction,

production designers

Gorrara and Jobin create all their production graphics, such as books, newspapers and signage, using computer scanners. Jobin says the time saving has been phenomenal, especially working on Lobby.

‘We had to create many government documents,’ she says. ‘On the computer we scanned photos, changed the text and the arrangement of the page, and made documents and magazines. For printed matter it’s great. Before when we needed to generate newspapers, we did it by montage and collage, printing and mounting and printing again. It was a really hard job and now it is so easy. You can store information, make it bigger, smaller, change color.’

She is currently creating posters and campaign material for a fictional political race, using Adobe Illustrator, Pantone color charts and Macintosh software.

But whereas most art directors send their signage designs out to a printing house, Ginn has acquired a high-speed, computerized, vinyl sign-cutter and sign-making software system.

‘By doing it all in-house I am able to see the graphic on the screen, in color, in the typeface it is going to be. I can output to the printer to check it and then cut the sign right there in the office, straight from the computer to the machine.

Ginn notes he is one of the few art directors in Canada with a full sign shop in house. ‘It saves about 40% of my graphics costs.’

The signage quality is also improved and hassles minimized. ‘Before you would have a draftsman with a pencil putting block letters on a page and you couldn’t see what the fonts or the color would actually look like on that sign.’

Ginn says the sign-cutting software was a lifesaver when working recently on RKO Pictures’ Holiday Affair.

‘It’s a Christmas film so we had to do a long stretch of stores with Christmas graphics, dress an entire upscale department store, as well as change all the subway graphics to American designations,’ he says. ‘We shot six days a week. I don’t know how we could have done it without the in-house signage. The script was rewritten three times and I got a production schedule a day before we started shooting.

He says: ‘I have had panic situations in the past where we needed something for camera asap and I sent a third assistant art director out in a car to get across town at light speed and he gets into an accident. Art department people should be creating, with the tools in-house, not sitting in traffic.’

The extent of computerization in his art department means that Ginn requires all his designers to have training on Mac computers, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and QuarkXPress. This can be a challenge. ‘You have to find talented creative people who are also computer-literate.’

Ginn says there was some resistance to the computers among production design staff a few years ago years, but the people fresh from college are much more tech-savvy. ‘They have the experience, they are the best at knowing how to get the computer to do what they want it to do. ‘

Stock footage

cd-roms, fiber optics, digital transmission technologyan ever-changing flood of video innovations is affecting the way stock footage is accessed, viewed and transmitted. But the extent to which stock footage companies are embracing this new technology spans a broad spectrum.

Fabulous Footage, a stock footage firm with offices in New York, Toronto and Vancouver, is still behind in terms of digital advancement. When a client makes a request for a specific shot, key words are punched into a computer and available shots are identified by the serial number of the tape it will be found on.

But gm Andrew Duncomb is hoping to move towards the latest in technology, which will speed this process up further so they can view that material on-screen, make selections, download from the computer and send it straight to the client’s software.

The Image Bank is a few steps closer to making this a reality. To speed up stock footage searches, frames from stock shots are dropped onto a laser disc. Clients then search their database and view the still shots on file as opposed to reading a description of the shot.

‘For a specific 10-second shot we cut four frames at two-and-a-half-second intervals, which gives the client a sense of the movement in the still frame,’ explains co-owner Andy Roeder. ‘The client can see what the images look like before they choose shots for a composite tape.’

To offer even quicker access, Image Bank often gives clients a copy of its laser disc so they can scan the visual images on laptop computers at location sites and see how various stock shots will work with the live shoot.

The company has also come out with a cd-rom version that clients can obtain to choose their shots. ‘They look up key words, view the still frames and create short lists by clicking on shots they like,’ explains Roeder. ‘With the push of the print command, a preformatted fax sheet with their choices is printed and they can fax us the shots they want us to lay down in full motion.’

But at this point, Image Bank’s digital capabilities end. The company still uses three-quarter-inch reference tape for its composite wheels. This is sent to the client who makes a final decision on the shots wanted and the final element transfers are done.

But in January, the company will make the next jump into the digital arena. ‘Instead of still-frame references, when (the client) clicks on the key frame, they will be able to watch a full-motion version right on the computer screen,’ explains Roeder.

Even this technology is nothing new, but Roeder is playing the waiting game to see how the latest digital innovations evolve.

‘The dvd, the digital versatile disc, is coming out in the fall, which will give a lot more capacity in the hard format than the cd-rom drive does now,’ he says. ‘With motion video you are talking about a lot of data, so the dvd will give us the capacity to put more shots on a disc and get a greater amount of our library right on the desktop.

Roeder explains that with more stock footage accessible from the computer, he seldom will have to fast-forward through tapes to find what he is looking for.

‘What’s great is this is a nonlinear process, you can go anywhere on the disc directly.’

But this on-screen footage is still not broadcast-quality, Roeder points out. ‘They can’t go to an offline edit with dvd technology,’ he says. ‘This technology is currently available but far too expensive for widespread use in film production.’

On rare, emergency situations, when a client in New York is sitting in an expensive editing suite waiting for stocks, Roeder uses the Stentor/Vyvx fibreoptic technology available at DOME Productions and transmits broadcast-quality footage digitally to a New York site.

‘It’s fast but very expensive. It runs about a thousand bucks for a 10-second transfer. Right now Stentor/Vyvx is a very high-end and not very accessible system.’

Sprint is testing a new product called Sprint Drums, which utilizes compression technology to transmit broadcast-quality tape via computers.

‘It’s a hard-wire, site-to-site delivery mechanism for transmitting footage digitally from one place to another,’ explains Roeder, but he says that until more lines are converted to fiber optics, the capacity of phone lines to handle broadcast-quality footage and the length of time it takes for the transmission (due to limits on bandwidth) remain obstacles.

But he is convinced this technology will funnel down to the stock-footage market. ‘Who knows what form it will take, but there will be online access for broadcast-quality footage as soon as there is a broader base and a more reasonable price to participate,’ he predicts.

‘Eventually, I see our clients visiting our Web site and downloading broadcast-quality footage.’

Talent agencies,

casting

The incredible popularity and surge in the use of the Internet is pushing talent agencies and the casting community to explore the potential of online services to access talent. But, as with other sectors of the film and tv service industry, some companies are on the leading edge of the digital wave, while others are lagging far behind.

The Talent Group in Toronto uses a computer software package designed specifically for talent agencies to manage its administrative needs.

‘It helps us track what our people are doing all the time, what jobs they are on, helps us keep their resumes up to date and easily accessible, keeps track of any conflicts in commercial work, tells how much money they should be receiving, how much money we should be receiving, it processes their wages and pays them,’ explains agent Lawrie Rotenberg.

But this is a mere puddle in comparison to the much bigger pond the agency is currently dipping its toes into. Talent Group is embarking on two experimental Internet-based projects with BC Actors Net in Vancouver and Cameo Casting in Toronto.

The Cameo service is scheduled to be up and running in a few weeks and, although the b.c. service is already online, Talent Group is just in the process of joining up and has not used the service yet. Only subscribers who are given a password are able to gain access to the system.

‘We supplied the providers with pictures, resumes, video and audio clips on our people and they load them into their database,’ explains Rotenberg. ‘Casting directors input their talent requirements into this service and agents log on to see the breakdowns for that day.

‘Instead of typing up lists and faxing them to casting directors, we will annotate or click on the files of the talent we recommend. The casting director will go into the system and download all the suggestions, look at their pictures, video clips, resumes, and print out the ones they want the director to look at. It also has a communication page where we can leave notes for each other.’

The financial and time savings will be enormous, says Rotenberg. ‘There are huge costs in printing pictures and resumes and making deliveries to the various producers and casting directors,’ he says. This way one copy stays in the computer and the casting agencies can print out only the ones they are interested in.’

The service will also allow Rotenburg to work from a computer at home when dealing with emergency weekend or late-night calls.

But Paul Jackson, co-owner and casting director at Masala Blue Casting, is unconvinced of the usefulness of such services. ‘Unless there is comprehensive and complete information over the Internet, it is of no use,’ says Jackson. ‘I may end up spending my time trying to access a specific talent over the Internet only to find that their agent doesn’t subscribe to the service.’

Masala Blue co-owner Linda Continenza recently accessed an American Internet service to look for information on a list of American actors she had compiled.

‘In a matter of seconds we could pull up bios on the actors rather than having to call all their agents and having the information faxed,’ she says.

But there were limits to the usefulness of the service. It organized the actors only by last name, not by pay rate or talent level, so they had to manually come up with their own list of actors suitable for the role before going to the Internet. Furthermore, the service did not provide the actor’s agents or their phone numbers. ‘The most important information was not listed,’ Jackson says with amazement.

Jackson says this points to one of the other major obstacles in searching for talent online. He speculates that the information was omitted because it is too difficult to keep accurate and timely.

‘Information in terms of securing and locating talent is only as good as how accurate and up to date it is,’ he says. ‘I could spend hours coming up with a list of talent from the Internet and then find out that two days ago talent x moved out of the country, another went on holiday.’

‘And we don’t usually have the luxury of time,’ adds Continenza.

No matter how much time digital tools shave off the process, it seems that the production schedule shrinks accordingly to swallow up the leeway, leaving once again, never enough time