Toronto’s Dan Krech Productions celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this month. The visual effects/animation shop officially opened its doors June 24, 1985, and partner Dan Krech estimates the studio has since put together or contributed to upwards of 2,000 commercials and long-form projects. He adds that the next 15 years look just as busy.

Krech claims his shop was the first of its kind in Toronto. Many other effects houses established themselves after dkp, but many have also since shut down. dkp is among those that have thrived, according to Krech, because it never lost sight of what it is.

‘From that very first day when we decided to focus on effects, [the emphasis] hasn’t changed,’ he says. ‘I think people know what to expect from us, so they keep coming back. The level of service we are doing after 15 years is the same as we were providing on day one. It was a consistency that has allowed us to maintain a high level of clientele.’

Some of the recent projects dkp has completed include spots for Future Shop, Blockbuster Video, the Canadian Cancer Society and Canadian Tire. It also crafted an opening video for the 2000 Bessies Awards Show.

The folks at dkp all agree that one of the factors contributing to the shop’s success is its efforts to keep up to date with the latest production technology. But dkp production manager Ron Marinic insists that even more important has been its philosophy to put the concept before the computer.

‘Our mission statement from day one has been putting the creative in front of the technology,’ says Marinic. ‘We don’t compromise the creative at all and we still find the best method of creating the effect. That was our focus in 1985 and it still is.’

Changes at dkp since 1985 include the formation of divisions for long-form and commercial work, an r&d department where new proprietary software is being developed, and a recent focus on branching out into new media.

The shop has the technology to move in whatever direction in the effects and animation world it pleases. It is equipped with its own in-house tracking system, three Jaleo systems and a Discreet Flame for high-end compositing, as well as Side Effects’ Houdini, Avid Softimage and Alias|Wavefront’s Maya software for 3D animation and effects, Adobe After Effects, and an assortment of other packages.

‘We’ve always been ahead of everyone else,’ Krech proclaims. He says in 1987, dkp became the first company in Canada – and the third in the world – to develop an in-house digital suite.

‘Since then there has been a lot of off-the-shelf hardware people have been buying and starting companies with, and we are finding a lot more competition that way. A lot of the people who are running companies in Toronto were once our clients. We feel we were really a driving force for special effects in the early days and helped develop the whole industry.’

Aside from customers becoming competitors, Krech has observed other industry trends. He marvels at how the business has grown over the past decade and a half and adds the increasingly shrewd eye of television watchers is a major reason for this.

‘The sophistication of viewers has really grown,’ he says. ‘People are expecting to see more visually enhanced and believable effects, so there is more need for this work than ever before, and there are more companies supplying it.’

dkp creative director Chad Nixon, who has worked in the industry for five years (three with dkp), says even during his short time he can gauge ‘distinct changes,’ and is impressed by the ability of his bosses to adjust to them.

‘I think one of the abilities Dan and Jackie [Lynette, dkp partner] have been able to bring to the effects business, while maintaining the level of services they’ve set, is an adaptability,’ says Nixon. ‘When they started out there were a lot of people who were mystified by the technology. Soon the technology and the ability to do things was more important than the idea behind it.’

As an example, he points out that after Michael Jackson’s Black or White music video came out in the early 1990s, scenes of one person morphing into another became very chic in the commercial biz.

‘You could tell people designed commercials around morphing, and that doesn’t work,’ says Nixon. ‘As technology and abilities become more widespread, what is going to single you out from your competitors is creative, and your aptitude toward that creative.’

In long form, dkp recently completed DreamWorks’ Joseph, the direct-to-video prequel to The Prince of Egypt. Production manager Marinic says dkp set up a pipeline for the project among the studios involved in Toronto, Vancouver, and l.a. to smoothly transfer information from location to location.

As well, dkp is developing a virtual car, using all the technology at its fingertips.

‘We see a need in the industry,’ says Krech. ‘That need is to find a faster and better way to accommodate the client by creating the [virtual] car, which makes doing car commercials easier and more cost-effective, but more importantly, gives you more creative freedom than you have in a standard shoot scenario.’

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