to target high-end

TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation is unleashing Mad Dog Digital at the end of the month, a new division of the company that will chase the high-end special effects business.

Mad Dog will be the home to 567 Queen Street West’s newest toy, Discreet Logic’s Flame, the much-heralded $750,000 online digital production system responsible for special effects in True Lies, Forrest Gump and the new Rolling Stones video showing King Kong-sized band members stomping through the streets of New York.

Flame arrived in the middle of April, a couple of months ahead of schedule after two monster jobs from Toronto and New York came through at topix. The machine is being used for in-house jobs until the end of May, although the Mad Dog shingle won’t go out until June when renovations on the new studio begin.

Mad Dog offices will be adjacent to the topix space and headed up by president Sylvain Taillon, an executive producer at topix for more than three years. Manning the helm with Taillon are artists James Cooper, Brynley Cadman, Aaron Weintraub, and co-ordinator Joanne Sincich, all moving over from topix at the end of the month.

With the two companies sharing a floor and five topix staff migrating to Mad Dog, it’s likely people will be trying to figure out what the difference is between the two companies, says Chris Wallace, president of topix.

In the simplest terms, topix is a production house, Mad Dog a post house. At the heart of topix is a Flint system running Wavefront, Softimage and AT&T Paintbox images to produce animation, graphics and special effects.

Mad Dog is a post-production house with Flame at the center, working in real time, 30 fps, to deliver high-end special effects in a fraction of the time it takes its baby brother Flint. ‘Mad Dog is really an extension of what topix is already doing,’ says Wallace.

The need for the Flame system and a new division of topix became apparent over the past year as demand increased for special effects that needed to be choreographed faster than Flint would allow.

‘Clients were asking for something different than the animation and design work we were doing, and although we wanted to do it, the tool we had was too slow and the environment was all wrong,’ Wallace says.

The box itself is taking care of the speed problem. Flame offers the works, including compositing, painting, image processing tools, and resolution-independent editing, dished out several times faster than Flint.

Each project is unique, but as a rule, a compositing and color correcting job that takes an hour on Flint could be done in less than five minutes on Flame, says Taillon.

But the Mad Dog environment, destined to be organic, relaxing, and private, is going to take a little longer to put together.

‘The environment is the reason it isn’t just topix with a Flame. You can’t expect people to do a day-long project in a room with six computers and a dozen guys going in and out. Mad Dog will be a space where people feel good about spending time,’ says Taillon.

June is officially ‘Guerrilla Month’ at Mad Dog. There won’t be sponge-painted walls, leather chairs, and a la carte menus yet, but it’s preview month and people are being invited in to see Flame in action. It’ll also give Mad Dog staff the opportunity to explain the new creative approach to post the company will encourage, a paradigm shift in the usual post philosophy.

Traditionally, post-production has been seen as, well, post production. But with digital software and seemingly limitless ideas for special effects, post artists are now being consulted pre-production to make the most out of the technology available, says Taillon.

To the extent that clients are willing, they’re being invited to consult with the Mad Dog staff before they start shooting, in order to maximize the equipment’s abilities.

‘Getting the technical creative guidelines at the beginning gives you a better chance of having the effects turn out exactly as you have in mind. We can do damage control at the end, but it’s not the best use of resources. If we have input before shooting begins, chances are we’ll have ideas that will save time and money, because we know how to make the best use of technology,’ says Taillon.

It may seem a little unusual to have the post people working on the creative end of a project from the beginning, but that’s where digital technology is taking the industry, says Taillon. Every project requires a different combination of techniques and approaches. It’s a long way from when post was simply a cut-and-paste mechanism kicking in after the film was in the can.

‘We don’t think post-production should exclude creativity. It has for a long time because the technology is so heavy and cumbersome, but it’s a mistake to think about post as a purely technical step. The digital technology and compositing systems bring all the creative and technical into one box.’ AV