With commercial production across Canada humming and the city of Calgary benefiting from studio overflow from Vancouver and Toronto, Edmonton post house Studio Post wants a bigger piece of the action.

‘We have an Edmonton base, but we’ve set up an office in Calgary as well, and we’re hoping to slowly move into [that market],’ says Frank Coulas, senior animator at Studio Post. ‘I think many clients feel you need to be in that city. They want to be able to just jump in a car and come down and see you and say ‘Okay – what’s happening?’ ‘

Much of the commercial work done at the 30-staff company, which also does substantial long-form post and which was recently purchased by CanWest Global Communications, is in the realm of graphics, visual effects and animation. Recent character animation projects include one with agency Inhouse Advertising Group for local client West Edmonton Mall.

‘The whole spot consisted of different shots of saltwater fish, on top of which they put graphics,’ Coulas explains. ‘Then they wanted a talking butterfly fish to swim up to the screen and say, ‘Where else – West Edmonton Mall.’ That was a cool little project to do and the client was quite happy.’

The talking fish was fully built with Maya 2.5 3D animation software from Alias|Wavefront. Studio Post also uses software-based Maya Composer – a popular solution for movie effects shots – for multilayer video compositing. Coulas calls the Maya systems ‘great tools.’

‘We’ve been able to handle the projects and the requests for effects that have come in with that software, and the compositing capabilities are quite good,’ he adds.

Studio Post is also equipped with Avid Matador for rotoscoping, paint and 2D animation as well as a Power Mac G4 400 bundled with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and other software for design and production.

As satisfied as he is with the gear, Coulas, like everybody else in the biz, admits to a personal wish list.

‘We’re using our online suite also as a compositing suite, whereas other people might have a Softimage ds system,’ he says. ‘It would be great to have more capabilities, like a ds system or some Discreet product such as a Flame, but in the market we’re in, I don’t know if it’s affordable to go that route.’

Another Brick in the wall

Studio Post also does commercial visual effects work for spots for furniture store The Brick Warehouse, which is constantly coming out with new tv ads. Coulas appreciates the notion of the steady gig, especially considering the seasonal nature of Alberta production.

‘Spring and fall seem to be our busiest times,’ he notes. ‘The Brick takes up quite a bit of our time. That’s a weekly relationship we have, and all the other pieces that come in are a bonus.’

Some of Studio Post’s other commercial clients include Frame 30 Productions and Combustion Inc. With Apple Box Productions it also recently completed ‘Yellow Pages’ for Telus (out of Ogilvy & Mather, Calgary), as well as ‘Safety’ for the Workers’ Compensation Board and ‘Flick Trix’ for Spinmaster Toys.

A trend emerging with shops that do graphics for tv broadcast is that they are branching out into multimedia as well, and to that end Studio Post has recently added staff to focus on Web page design and streaming media. Coulas notes that in this era of production across numerous platforms, you have to keep your bases covered.

‘We try to do just about anything and everything that comes across our plate, so if someone is interested in having a website designed or getting their video put across to cd, we can do that. We’ve put out streaming video for clients’ websites.’

Studio Post strives to be Alberta’s premier one-stop post house, and, as Coulas explains, it has the facility to back that up.

‘We’ve got two online editing suites, an Avid for offline editing, a Photomec 16mm and 35mm color negative processor, Rank Ursula Telecine with daVinci 8:8:8 color correction and closed captioning. We’ve also just recently built a digital audio suite upstairs. We’re located right in a soundstage – we have quite a lot of capabilities.’ *

-www.studiopost.ab.ca