Hasta La Motion!

New York Design Facility Specializes in Animatics; Plans Expansion into 3D Animation with Advanced Mocap System

Los Angeles, CA (April 14, 2009)—VICON, developer of Academy Award®-winning motion capture systems, today announced the sale and installation of its T10 motion capture system at graphic design and 2D animation company The Studio, located in New York City. The Studio, which has served the advertising industry for over 20 years, including top agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi, Goodby Silverstein and McCann-Ericson, installed a top-of-the-line VICON system at its facility in January, both for use on commercial animatics and as part of its plans for expansion into 3D animation.

“We went with VICON because they’re the best,” said The Studio owner Mary Nittolo. “We looked at everything else available, including markerless systems, and were very pleased with the quality and features VICON had to offer.”

“VICON cameras are extremely high-quality, which was a big factor in choosing their system for our facility,” said Dave Voci, Director of Animation at The Studio. “I’ve worked with other motion capture systems in the past, but found limitations in the hardware that were just not acceptable. The VICON system is ideal for capturing motions ranging from action-based, such as sports, to simple and subtle interactions between two people.”

The Studio’s capture volume is configured with rail mounts for capturing facial and full-body movements for up to three actors at a time. The facility’s motion capture pipeline includes VICON’s Blade Software for managing mocap data, Autodesk MotionBuilder for character rigging, and Autodesk Maya for rendering and character development.

“Installing the VICON system was incredibly simple. We put it up, calibrated it, and had it running that same night,” Voci detailed. “We have a dual-screen set up with Blade on one screen and MotionBuilder on the other, and the connectivity between the two is immediately apparent. Clients love it because they can see instant results — so far they have been very impressed.”

The Studio, a certified woman-owned business, is in the process of developing a character library, set environments and other assets for its motion capture pipeline. Voci anticipates that they will be using the system on test commercials for clients by the end of the month. “We’re still in the development phase,” he said. “We’re perfectionists, so we want to have everything in place before we start using it on client projects.”

“We’re very happy with the performance of the VICON system,” Voci concluded. “It’s very low-maintenance, and the rail mounts we use allow it to be reconfigured for various tasks with very little down time.”

About VICON
Academy Award®-winning VICON is the world’s largest supplier of precision motion tracking systems, serving customers and CG animation applications in film, visual effects, computer games, and broadcast television, as well as engineering and life science industries. VICON operates in four offices worldwide, including its Los Angeles-based Entertainment headquarters, a 26,000 square-foot facility equipped with three performance capture stages for VICON’s service company House of Moves as well as over 250 VICON F40 cameras.

VICON is the largest holding of OMG (Oxford Metrics Group – LSE: OMG), plc., a group of technology companies that produces image understanding solutions for the entertainment, defense, life science and engineering markets. Other holdings include Emmy Award®-winning 2d3 and newly founded Geospatial Vision Ltd.

VICON’s and OMG’s global clients include: life science leaders University of Pennsylvania, the VA Hospitals, Shriners Hospitals for Children, Titleist Golf, The Andrews Institute; engineering industry leaders Ford, BMW, Airbus, Lockheed, Pratt-Whitney, NASA, Caterpillar, International Truck, and Toyota; and entertainment companies Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Computer Entertainment, Industrial Light and Magic, Sega, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Vivendi, Electronic Arts, Square Enix and many others. For more information about OMG and its subsidiaries, visit www.omg3d.com, www.vicon.com, or www.2d3.com.

VICON and VICON MX are trademarks of OMG plc. Academy Award is a trade or servicemark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Lost Boys Learning – Vancouver Studio Tour – Spring 2009

The day before spring break we embarked on our second Vancouver studio tour for the class of 2009. We were fortunate to visit four prominent studios, including Miniature Effects, Artifex Studios, Zoic Studios and Technicolor/MPC.

As always, the day began before dawn as Monica, John, Cliff, Dan, JongJun, Kaustubh and I left Courtenay, in our mini-van, and drove to Nanaimo to catch the morning ferry. We crossed the Georgia Strait into Vancouver and headed towards the Commercial Drive area for our first tour.

MINIATURE EFFECTS

In a departure from our usual visits to VFX shops, our first stop on the tour was Miniature Effects, owned and operated by Dave Asling. It was a great opportunity for the students to see behind-the-scenes miniature, model and prop work. With over 15 years in the visual effects business, Dave and his team supply visual effects concept consulting, highly detailed mechanically and and electronically functional props, motion-controlled miniature effects, design, engineering and fabrication. They’ve worked for shows such as Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (in production), Smallville, Bionic Woman, Fantastic Four and X-Men, to name a few.

ARTIFEX STUDIOS

After lunch at the famed Tony’s Deli on Commercial Drive, we visited nearby Artifex Studios with VFX Supervisor/Owner Adam Stern. Artifex expanded their East Vancouver studio last year and have been hard at work on features including this year’s Defendor, New In Town, Scourge, TV series Impact and Stormworld, and commercials for Nissan and Tourism Mexico.

ZOIC STUDIOS

Next up was Zoic Studios, located at the edge of Gastown, where VFX Producer Patrick Mooney gave us a tour. Zoic Vancouver is a sister studio to their LA operation, and they have been busy with TV series and features. They recently worked on the feature films One Missed Call for Warner Brothers and Pathfinder for 20th Century Fox, and TV episodics Drive and Eureka.

MPC/TECHNICOLOR

Last on our tour was one of Vancouver’s newest imports, MPC (Moving Picture Company), which has been sharing resources and management with Technicolor the past year or so. Hot on the heels of their work on Watchmen, they were gearing up for effects on the Chris Columbus feature Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. VFX Producer Persis Reynolds toured us through the facility and talked about their pipeline.

Our next tour will be in early June, a few weeks before our fourth graduating class heads out to enter the workforce. Thanks to all the studios in Vancouver who have been so generous over the years to open their doors to us!

Cheers,

Mark

Render Queue Management Software Now with MetaRender Support from IRIDAS

Las Vegas, NV-NAB 2009, Booth #SL4430 -Frantic Films Software, the R&D division of award-winning visual effects company Frantic Films VFX and a division of Prime Focus Group, today announced the launch of Deadline 3.1, the company’s hassle-free administration and rendering toolkit for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX-based render farms. The latest version provides support for MetaRender, the render package from IRIDAS that automates complex transcoding tasks in production pipelines and post facilities. MetaRender works across platforms and greatly simplifies the task of managing file conversions, including burning-in grading or LUTs and adding file information for viewing with digital dailies.

"Deadline has a reputation and history for being an ultra-reliable render farm management system," said Patrick J. Palmer, COO, IRIDAS. "It’s great to have a front-end product like Deadline, which is so user-friendly, to act as the interface for MetaRender, and we are extremely pleased that Deadline 3.1 now provides integration with MetaRender’s automated transcoding capabilities."

Prior to its release, Deadline 3.1 underwent thorough beta testing by several longtime Deadline customers, including lead technical artist Mike Owen at the UK’s Burrows nVisage. Owen has been a Deadline customer since 2007.

"The design visualization and VFX industry moves at a breakneck speed, and it’s refreshing to find a software developer that’s always one step ahead," said Owen. "Deadline’s installation design makes it very easy to deploy silently. New versions only have to be updated on the server, which then automatically updates your entire farm! The system can then be configured through one common interface, allowing as much customization as you want."

"Deadline is highly stable, expandable, manageable, dependable, and every other -able you can think of," Owen continued. "For over two years now, Deadline has never failed, not even once. Now that’s a statistic I wish I could say about some of the other software we’ve used. Deadline was born from a production studio’s needs and as a result, caters to artists and studios like mine perfectly. Deadline brings our mixture of software and bespoke tools all together into one manageable pipeline."

Deadline 3.1‘s new features include:
* Mac OSX support: The Monitor, Job Monitor, Slave, Pulse, Launcher and command line applications have all been ported to Mac OSX.
* Improved Linux support: The Monitor and Job Monitor have been ported to Linux with improved functionality and performance.
* Statistics Gathering has been re-implemented.
* New render packages supported: fryrender, MetaRender, Vue 7 and REDAlert.

For a complete list of Deadline 3.1 features, visit:
http://www.franticfilms.com/software…e/feature_set/

Deadline 3.1 Pricing and Availability
Deadline 3.1 is available now directly through the Frantic Films Software Division. Please visit http://software.franticfilms.com or contact deadline-sales@franticfilms.com with sales inquiries. Deadline is available for a list price starting at US$140 per render node for the first 25 licenses; prices drop per unit with increased volume.

About IRIDAS
IRIDAS pioneered desktop film-resolution playback in 2001. Its FrameCycler products are the industry standard for frame-based image review. In 2003 IRIDAS introduced SpeedGrade, the first desktop grading application to provide full 2K performance on a regular PC workstation. In 2007, IRIDAS presented the first real time render quality RAW playback technology. Today SpeedGrade, FrameCycler and MetaRender, provide the critical links in an end-to-end pipeline for digital image content and color metadata. IRIDAS’ applications are used by filmmakers around the world and major animation and postproduction houses. IRIDAS is an independent, privately held company, headquartered in Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.iridas.com.

About Frantic Films Software
Frantic Films Software, a division of Prime Focus Group, has developed a reputation for creating innovative custom-built R&D solutions and quality software products. From the Deadline(tm) Render Farm Management System, to the Awake stereoscopic plug-ins for eyeon Fusion, to the Krakatoa high volume particle renderer, Frantic Films Software is pushing the envelope of conventional thought and applying real science to create tools and technology that truly open a whole new world of possibilities for VFX professionals. For more information, visit Frantic Films Software at http://software.franticfilms.com.

About Frantic Films VFX
Located in the three different locations across North America with offices in Winnipeg, Canada, Vancouver, and Los Angeles, Calif., Frantic Films VFX has been operating divisions that provide visual effects for film and television, and VFX software development since 1997. Frantic Films’ VFX award-winning visual effects teams have worked on films including Watchmen, Dragonball Evolution, Red Cliff, W., Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Grindhouse, Superman Returns, X-Men 3, Poseidon and many others. The company’s software tools were developed to solve complex production challenges on in-house feature effects projects, and are also in use at many leading 3D animation and effects facilities worldwide. In November of 2007 Frantic Films VFX became a division of international post and VFX leader Prime Focus Group. For more information, visit http://www.franticfilms.com.

Award-winning VFX studio Frantic Films VFX, a division of Prime Focus Group, has contributed 334 shots to the forthcoming feature film “Dragonball: Evolution” from Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by James Wong, the movie releases in the U.S. nationwide on April 10, 2009 and stars Justin Chatwin, Emmy Rossum, Jamie Chung, and Chow Yun-Fat in the live-action film adaptation of the popular Japanese manga comic book series.

“Dragonball: Evolution” is based on the popular Japanese manga created by Akira Toriyama, whose work spawned best selling graphic novels, video games and a phenomenally successful television series. The live action adventure centers on a team of warriors, each of whom possesses special abilities. Together, they protect Earth from a force bent on dominating the Universe and controlling the mystical objects from which the film takes its name.

Frantic’s Vancouver and Winnipeg facilities handled the bulk of the VFX shots, with VFX Supervisors Chad Wiebe and Mike Shand overseeing the work from Vancouver and Winnipeg, respectively. Ken Nakada, one of the industry’s leading matte painters, oversaw about 30 matte painting shots from Frantic’s Hollywood studio, while additional rotoscoping and paint work was completed at sister company Prime Focus in Mumbai. Prime Focus Group company Machine FX in London also contributed plate treatment to about 35 shots. Frantic and its partner studios worked directly with the film’s VFX Supervisor Ariel Velasco-Shaw and VFX Producer Janet Muswell Hamilton.

“Because the movie is based on a very popular animé series—and because fans tend to scrutinize comic book adaptations much more than regular films—Mike Shand and I acknowledged that this was sacred material,” shared Chad Wiebe, co-VFX supervisor, Frantic Films VFX.

Added Mike Shand, co-VFX supervisor, Frantic Films, “This meant we had to be extremely careful and thoughtful in the crafting of the visual effects, particularly regarding the look and development of the energy effects used by Goku and Picollo.”

In addition to assisting with overall look development for the film and color treating plates throughout the movie, Frantic handled two primary scenes in the movie: an extremely technically challenging lava lake sequence in which Goku battles an army of virtually indestructible demon warriors called the Fulum Assassins, and a climactic fight sequence between Goku and his enemy, the evil Lord Piccolo.

For the lava lake sequence, Frantic provided on-set VFX supervision in Durango, Mexico. Artists at Frantic’s Vancouver facility designed a digital environment, including mountainscapes and a molten lava lake complete with lava falls and crust, rocks and debris swirling about, that all had to interact fully with Goku and the Fulum Assassins.

Frantic created full digital versions of these Fulum Assassins that had to match up seamlessly with shots of the actors in costume. During one dailies review, the Frantic team actually had to remind the producers which characters were real and which were digital replacements. Additional work done by Frantic on this scene included extensive sky replacement and the scripting of custom tools for Frantic’s in-house fluid simulation toolset Flood to generate the photo-real lava.

Frantic Films VFX’s Technical Director and Science Advisor Marcus Steeds oversaw the development of new architecture for the Flood fluid simulator, which gave full scripting access to the TDs. It also gave Frantic an integrated pipeline for voxel and particle-based simulations using an enhanced meshing technology. Frantic also made a custom direct-to-renderer mesh loader. The new architecture, scripting access and tools gave the studio’s artists an integrated simulation pipeline workflow that was more efficient and allowed it to tackle bigger problems with more speed.

For the climactic fight scene, Frantic’s artists in Winnipeg did complete set extension of the film’s practical set of a stone temple that forms out of the ground, and also did full sky replacement as well as creating the “energy ball” effects generated by Goku and Piccolo during the battle.

“I’m very proud of the work that we completed for ‘Dragonball Evolution,’” commented Michael Fink, CEO, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor, Frantic Films. “The sheer number of shots we completed in such a short timeframe is pretty phenomenal. It’s a true testament to the collaborative workflow we have between our global network of facilities—Frantic Films VFX in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Los Angeles, and our parent company Prime Focus Group in Mumbai and sister shop Machine FX in London.”

About Frantic Films VFX
Headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, with offices in Vancouver and Los Angeles, Calif., Frantic Films VFX has been operating divisions that provide visual effects for film and television, and VFX software development since 1997. Frantic Films’ VFX award-winning visual effects teams have worked on films including Dragonball Evolution, Red Cliff, W., Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Grindhouse, Superman Returns, X-Men 3, Poseidon and many others. The company’s software tools were developed to solve complex production challenges on in-house feature effects projects, and are also in use at many leading 3D animation and effects facilities worldwide. In November of 2007 Frantic Films VFX became a division of international post and VFX leader Prime Focus Group. For more information, visit http://www.franticfilms.com.

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