We were recently informed by a cover line in an international digital imaging publication that the ‘Toronto scene’ is one of the world’s best kept secrets. Imagine our surprise. Toronto, as well as Vancouver and Montreal, have been handling foreign projects for years. Who knew these clients were supersleuths.

As the volume and sophistication of located-in-Canada projects has increased along with the level of the digital effects therein, Canadian digital imaging shops have kept themselves at the forefront, not only technically but talent and business-wise – providing script to compositing guidance to producers and anticipating the shifts in work in terms of format and origin.

Canadian post and effects shops have stealthily assumed a significant role in post-production the world over, tackling some of the biggest and most effects-ridden projects anywhere for clients crafty enough to crack the Canadian code and dig up talent buried like so many worms in the rich northern soil.

Toronto’s Dan Krech Productions, which recently formed an alliance with a major u.s. post and effects shop, is scoring more and more work from the u.s. and is expected to begin work on an all-cg 48-minute feature out of Columbia TriStar.

Facilities like Spin Productions have been flooded with u.s. commercial work and have been handling high-profile music video jobs, as have TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation and Mad Dog, which also report an emerging new market in the increasing amount of auto ad work coming out of Detroit.

Toronto’s Calibre Digital Design is gearing up for season two of Sinbad after the stellar success of the first season of the All American/Atlantis series and may have another pair of large service jobs in the works. Calibre will also be shopping its own equity properties at upcoming international markets.

It seems the secret is not only out, it’s traveling and staying up late and making lots of noise.

The three shops profiled here provide a roundup in miniature of some of the major Canadian and foreign effects jobs in the country’s facilities.

John Gajdecki Visual Effects

from the heady days of Paramount’s proto-effects show Friday the 13th and hand-drawn animation jobs, John Gajdecki, head of John Gajdecki Visual Effects, has built his Toronto-based shop into a multifaceted production and effects concern and himself into a visual effects supervisor who has worked on some of the biggest f/x projects that have come to Canada to do business.

Gajdecki has recently turned his proclivities for manufactured mayhem – particularly of the explosive kind – to a number of series projects including the Trilogy/Atlantis series Outer Limits.

He also acted as visual effects supervisor on Warriors of Virtue from Denver-based Law Brothers Entertainment, the biggest effects feature the West Coast has ever seen, as well as Alliance’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, for which Gajdecki undertook extensive modeling and motion-control work on location in Hungary.

Gajdecki is now one of two effects directors on the mgm series Stargate, another effects extravaganza, shooting from February to October in Vancouver, and in concert with other Canadian shops, is working on Dimension Films’ creature feature Mimic.

While Gajdecki likes the rapid, combustion-assisted dissembling of people and things, associate Gudrun Heinze prefers electrocuting them. Heinze, together with effects supervisor Mario Antognetti, is currently working on the Pebblehut feature Johnny 2.0, a story revolving around cloning which will include a number of hologram and doubling effects and, naturally, lots of lightning.

Gajdecki estimates that about 90% of his shop’s work comes from outside Canada, much of it through Vancouver, which is the source of about half of the projects coming into the facility.

Entire effects process coordinated

Visual Effects was born in 1991 after Gajdecki already had five years of creating various effects contrivances and effects, building many of the early systems he used for tv projects.

Now, rather than occupying a particular equipment or talent niche, the shop represents the accumulation of Gajdecki’s broad range of effects experience and the various fields of expertise of Gajdecki’s associates including Heinze, Tom Turnbull and John Campfens.

‘The strength of our company is we coordinate the whole effects process for our clients,’ says Gajdecki. ‘If you have a big hammer everything looks like a nail; we don’t just have a hammer, we’ll coordinate the entire thing.’

Aside from a core group of full-timers, Gajdecki regularly employs anywhere from 20 to 50 people depending on the job, including freelance artists, crew and various specialists called in for a project.

The physical resources of the company include a high-end digital imaging department with Flint and Flame running on sgi Onyx and Alias 3D Animation software (‘We don’t have the most horsepower, but then horses don’t do art,’ says Gajdecki in his trademark sound-bite-ridden mode of expression); a motion-control department with two portable motion-control packages (users – even l.a.-based – say the larger unit is the best package system they’ve seen anywhere, reports Gajdecki); a model shop, and a rentals department with various sizes of blue and green screens, video safes, stock effects and a 35mm Mitchell camera.

Split-job philosophy

Gajdecki spearheaded effects efforts on the us$36 million Warriors of Virtue project, handling part of the work out of Visual Effects in Toronto and divvying up most of the rest among Vancouver shops. Gajdecki says the split job helped create a more cooperative environment among shops out West, an environment he says he is trying to institute in Toronto to create efficiencies for facilities and clients.

‘When the work is broken up among three or four companies, all the shots are happening concurrently,’ he says. ‘That gives producers a lot of feedback and progress early on. And there aren’t a handful of shots you haven’t started when the end of the schedule comes up.’

Gajdecki’s work on Mimic entails the creation of several miniatures as well as a 600-foot model of an abandoned subway station, the unwieldy dimensions of which meant that it had to be built and shot at the Downsview, Ont. airport.

The feature, which stars Mira Sorvino, is based on the activities of a group of malevolent bug creatures, and a number of Canadian shops, including Toronto’s C. O. R. E Digital Pictures and Hybride, are contributing effects expertise to the film.

As effects supervisor on Stargate, Gajdecki will work out of the Vancouver production office and apportion the generous amount of effects work out to different facilities based on their equipment and talent strengths.

Gajdecki says the series will be morph-intensive and his shop will work on motion control and 3D animation. He is building 3D environments in which characters interact; doing data recording on set where cameras will record characters’ positions with the results fed into 3D computer systems used to generate the environments; a method Gajdecki used on shots for Warriors of Virtue.

In one scene, where a character is walking through a giant forest of gargantuan trees, Gajdecki modeled tall trees with hanging vines and tracked these creations onto existing tree trunks built in Beijing for the film. As the camera tilts up for a huge tree perspective – the shoot consisted of a dolly shot with a 24mm lens – it becomes an all-cg shot complete with vines swaying and leaves falling, and provides a gentle counterpoint to a body of work full of heads and other things that explode.

Hybride Technologies

if you’re driving into the Laurentian mountains these days, you’re as likely to be a film producer looking for high-end effects expertise as an Ontario skier.

Located about 45 minutes from Montreal, Hybride Technologies was the first digital post facility in Quebec with the country’s first Discreet Logic Flame suite.

After the first two years of operation, the shop expanded its purview into film work and began offering increased creative input; now it’s planning a further expansion into high-resolution international film work.

Hybride is currently working on effects for Dimension Films’ Mimic as well as Filmline International’s Dolph Lundgren action vehicle The Peacekeeper. The shop has also undertaken the challenge of 19 episodes of The Hunger, a moody, effects-heavy anthology series from Montreal’s Telescene Film Group and u.k.-based Scott Free Productions.

High-end, high-rez work

Headed by Pierre Raymond, formerly vp engineering and director of operations at late audio and video post company Andre Perry, Hybride is a high-end commercial tv and film digital effects shop which has extensive 2D and 3D imaging, editing and transfer capabilities. It has also taken major strides toward becoming an international player in high-resolution work as well as providing creative input and effects supervision and developing proprietary software solutions.

The facility utilizes Discreet Logic Inferno, Flame, two Flint suites, Xaos Tools and its own Hybride softools running on sgi Onyx and Indigo ii as well as Softimage, and has developed a strong expertise in compositing and seamless integration of live and cg elements.

In addition to Raymond and vp, special effects supervisor Daniel LeDuc, the shop consists of about 26 cg artists, engineers, colorists and editors, including freelancers.

High-rez film work

‘We aren’t really a service company,’ says Raymond. ‘We are a production house specializing in effects at independent resolution. People don’t just come here for execution but for real participation and creative input.’

Currently, Raymond says about 50% of the shop’s business is high-resolution work for cinema and about 50% is commercial work originating in Canada and the u.s. About half of the shop’s work comes from outside Canada.

Full production slate

The company’s film background includes Transfilm’s Habitat, a $13.6 million Sony high definition film for which the facility won two Images Du Futur awards, which Raymond says were captured in part due to the use of Hybride’s own particle software, a component of softools.

While working in l.a. on Habitat, the company met Mimic producer B.J. Rack and submitted a test showcasing the shop’s compositing flair. Hybride will be involved in about 50 shots for Mimic, focusing on cg scenes with strong interplay with live action and tracking of actors. Hybride will use its own tracking and exporting software to establish an interface between Flame and 3D animation platforms.

The company is also handling about 50 shots for The Peacekeeper, mostly high-energy action scenes like car chases requiring multilayered compositing finesse.

For The Hunger, Raymond says the challenge was akin to turning out 19 separate film projects, as each of the anthology pieces has a different director and different set of specialized effects.

With a full slate of production underway, the planned facility expansion will be difficult, and Raymond says it will entail a multiphased construction process to build a dedicated shop set up to handle high-end special effects for film.

Rainmaker Digital Imaging

rainmaker Imaging was formed in 1995, and as a component of Rainmaker Digital Pictures, complements Gastown Post’s film processing post and online services for tv series, mows and commercials. The facility was conceived to provide tv-resolution effects, but with its open-architecture bent and array of multi-resolution software, the shop was also positioned to offer digital effects for film.

Rainmaker is equipped with Cineon, Discreet Logic Inferno, Lightwave Alias and Softimage software as well as capability for high-resolution film scanning and recording.

The shop’s l.a. office, operational as of fall 1996, is also based on an open-architecture sgi platform, running Cineon, Inferno and Alias.

Each facility is comprised of about 14 staff and cg artists.

The Vancouver office turns out a high volume of work for commercials, mows and tv series, recently working on a number of series including Trilogy/Atlantis’ Outer Limits, Poltergeist and New World’s Two, and is gearing up to start on mgm’s Stargate series.

In the past few months, the company also completed effects for three big-budget films, including Law Brothers Entertainment’s Warriors of Virtue, Columbia/TriStar’s Masterminds and Free Willy iii from Warner Bros., a $20 million project which began with a bit of compositing work and ended as an invisible effects job of leviathan proportions.

85% of work

originates outside Canada

Rainmaker president Bob Scarabelli says Rainmaker has extended the breadth of services technically as well as creatively with the addition of visual effects supervisor Lee Wilson. Wilson provides consultation and creative input from the script and storyboard stage to the supervising of plate shots and on-set elements and subsequent compositing and digital effects creation.

Scarabelli says the shop derives about 85% of its work from long-form projects and 20% from commercials. Roughly 85% of their total business comes from outside the country (this figure is qualified by the fact that many projects originate out of a u.s. studio but are shot in Canada, have a large Canadian creative contribution, and are considered Canadian content).

Rainmaker generated about $2.3 million in business in a truncated year beginning effectively in the summer of 1996. Scarabelli says in the early days of the shop, having serviced long-standing clients on the post side, it was initially hard to break into the effects side of the business, but with a large body of effects work now behind the shop, he expects a great deal more volume in 1997.

Part of that volume has already been provided by the massive amount of cetaceous cgi on Free Willy. Wilson says the film entailed a work-intensive 57 shots for the theater-destined version and an additional several shots for a planned tv version.

Originally producers wanted a handful of effects to turn existing wildlife footage into the lovable Willy, complete with endearingly droopy dorsal fin and distinctive markings. Rainmaker was charged with removing existing fins, replacing the water in the scene behind the whale, creating a 3D fin – or in some instances almost entire whales – and tracking those elements to existing shots with layers of ocean spray.

The facility also had to handle umbilical removal; erasing the massive cable that trailed off the backs of the animatronic whales, created by Walt Conti.

Wilson says what started as being a few compositing and rig removal shots turned into a major part of the project; where cg artists had to recreate whole watery scenes.

‘There was not only tank footage but removal of the floor of the tank, and then the entire water plate behind the whales had to be rebuilt and things like light rays coming through the water added again,’ says Wilson.

‘Portions of whales missing because they were blocked by the umbilical cables had to be repainted or created in 3D. There are probably about 20 shots, some where the entire backgrounds had to be reconstructed with shimmery light effects and whales rotoscoped and put back into the shot.’

The Rainmakers used Flame, Inferno and Cineon for compositing and Lightwave for 3D work.