Toronto-based Command Post/toybox has been building a reputation in Hollywood as a creator of top-line visual effects. This, in turn, led the company to open an office in l.a. last year to help streamline client liaisons.

At the top of toybox’s slate this winter are four sequences for Tarsem Dhandwar’s The Cell, produced by New Line Pictures and starring Jennifer Lopez.

toybox is also putting together an opening sequence in cg for Edward Norton’s directorial debut, titled Keeping the Faith, a story of two friends – a priest and a rabbi. (Yes, it’s a comedy.)

The company’s work has become so extensive and involved that effects supervisor Dennis Berardi rejects the label ‘post-production’ in defining toybox’s role in many such productions.

‘We have scripts coming in where minutes and minutes and minutes of the show are…100% generated [in cg],’ he says. ‘How is that post-production?’ He points out that toybox runs its own studio with a full crew, where segments are shot on two 35mm cameras.

Rather than terming it ‘post,’ Berardi prefers the term ‘media arts production’ when describing

toybox.

The work done on The Cell falls into that category. The company created entire cg sets for a series of dream sequences. These include a giant tunnel environment through which Lopez’s character drifts as she tries to uncover the horrible secrets of a serial killer. ‘We’re designing it, creating it, animating it and it’s going to be a set piece,’ says Berardi.

Berardi has been flying to l.a. to provide technical assistance for live-action sequences of Lopez shot against a blue screen and returning to Toronto to oversee the compositing of the live action into the cg environment. ‘That’s really not post-production, that’s building a set,’ he says. ‘It’s a virtual set…but it starts to be part of the production cycle.’

Delivery of the shots is due in late April.

Thanks to a string of successful u.s. projects and the opening of the l.a. office, toybox can now compete head-to-head with the Americans in their own market and on par with their dollar.

toybox has also been involved from the initial concept of Jason X (the 10th installment of the Friday The 13th movie series). The company will handle all visual effects and will supply the second-unit visual-effects team. Production commences in February.