F/X shops across Canada are in an expanding mood, which might sound surprising given the uncertainty characterizing the current marketplace. But new shops are popping up while shops that catered to a different kind of clientele are now looking at long form, and some established houses continue to get bigger.

Montreal’s Buzz Image Group, best known for its F/X and post work on spots, is making a big push towards features with the acquisition of a Discreet inferno/fire system on SGI Onyx 3200. This high-definition-enabled system is part of a $2-million HD investment allowing the company to perform HD mastering, in anticipation of a time when more projects will shoot in that format.

Buzz is currently providing F/X for the tentatively titled The eXtremists, directed by Montrealer Christian Duguay. The US$40-million actioner, about a film crew that must rely on its extreme sports savvy to foil reclusive war criminals in the Austrian Alps, required Buzz to create explosions and numerous cliffhanging and avalanche F/X a la Vertical Limit. It is also working on Miramax’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney’s directorial debut that shot in Montreal earlier this year at US$30 million. Based on the unlikely autobiography of Chuck Barris, host of The Gong Show, the film reveals its writer’s secret life as a CIA assassin.

Toronto animation and F/X studio Soho is also diversifying in a big way, branching out from the world of spots and broadcast design to open a CG F/X feature division. The shop’s inaugural project is Clive Barker’s Saint Sinner, the latest offering from the renowned horror writer. Soho says it is creating all the ‘wicked’ effects for the film, including head twisting, demon morphing and other gory goings-on. Soho’s Allan Magled was the on-set visual effects supervisor during the film’s Vancouver shoot this spring.

The shop’s film division is equipped with Alias|Wavefront’s Maya, Side Effects Software’s Houdini, Exluna’s Entropy rendering software on Linux, and Discreet inferno and combustion. Soho has brought in new staff to work on long-form projects, including Berj Bannayan, who has developed software for high-end productions including X-Men.

Toronto’s The Studio Upstairs built its business on broadcast design work and has used that as a springboard into feature F/X. It all started when producers of The Tuxedo, the Jackie Chan film that recently wrapped in town, hired the shop to provide graphics for computer screens seen in intelligence headquarters. Upstairs’ latest feature gig was on MGM’s Bulletproof Monk, an F/X and martial arts laden action flick based on a comic book, starring Chow Yun-Fat. Upstairs has made a substantial investment in HD-enabled systems, and this project allowed it to put its Discreet inferno and Quantel iQ to work.

The consensus of film and TV F/X business being light overall has not dissuaded new players from opening their doors. Impulse FX launched this month in Toronto, formed out of a partnership among Silvio Astarita and Seijin Ki of Silhouette Media Group and George Elliott and Brian Irving of Elliott Animation. Impulse’s edge is a strategic relationship with European post/F/X powerhouse Das Werk, which also owns L.A. shop Centropolis Effects. Impulse hopes to take advantage of the numerous copros shooting in Toronto that can start their F/X work at Impulse and finish at any one of Das Werk’s 55 affiliate shops worldwide.

Impulse currently works in Maya and Discreet’s 3ds max and plans to acquire an inferno. Ki says that out of the gate the shop has landed a low-budget U.S. feature shooting locally.

While Impulse is a new facility and Buzz, Upstairs and Soho are seeking new clients, expansion seems a safer bet for Rainmaker Digital Pictures, which has been a major long-form F/X player for the better part of two decades. Renovations are ongoing at Rainmaker’s Vancouver facility, coinciding with the opening of a new HDTV edit suite, with two more edit suites on the way.

A big part of Rainmaker’s success can be attributed to its location amidst heavy U.S. series and feature production activity and the fact that it has an ongoing relationship with some of the major U.S. studios. Rainmaker recently delivered end-of-season episodes for the futuristic Fox series Dark Angel, MGM’s post-apocalyptic Jeremiah, and Warner Bros.’ Superman prequel Smallville, for which it won a 2002 Leo Award for best visual effects for a dramatic series.

Rainmaker artists continue to be busy with the MGM sci-fi series Stargate SG-1, which has gone into production on season six. (Rainmaker is one of several B.C. shops that have regularly contributed F/X to the series, along with Image Engine, Lost Boys Studios, Northwest Imaging & FX and GVFX.) In addition to its usual quota of post and F/X, Rainmaker has been assigned to produce a new title sequence for the show.

Rainmaker has enough feature work in its resume (Castle Rock’s Dream Catcher and Disney’s Santa Clause 2 being recent examples) to reassure TV producers who require film-caliber F/X; such is the case with ABC and Touchstone Pictures, which have Rainmaker doing post and F/X work on a TV version of the 1996 supernatural feature Phenomenon.

Rainmaker is geared up with several high-end systems for its F/X compositing, including inferno, flame, Quantel Henry and Harry, and Jaleo. These systems might have been costly, but enable the shop to keep up with the kind of volume it must output.

-www.buzzimage.com

-www.26soho.com

-www.thestudioupstairs.com

-www.rainmaker.com