Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/47583
Buyyala found a lot of raw talent and potential in India,but the artists he met "were missing the exposure to high-end, high-quality work" that was Rhythm & Hues' bread and butter — something that could be remedied with time and training. But he also got some glimpses of artist exploitation — something "we wouldn't want to partake of"— and couldn't find a company on the sub-continent that looked like a "good cultural match for a small, privately-held company that was singularly focused on delivering high-quality work and used to taking good care of its employees." The solution was to "start from the ground up and build a new studio in the image of R&H — hand-pick- ing every employee and building what would be a great cultural fit for us: a true peer and sister facility, not a second-tier operation," explains Buyyala.The Mumbai facility launched in 2001 and eventually grew a small team of artists who were tasked with wire removals for Daredevil as their first assignment. "We decided to start out with the simplest and most self-contained task in the pipeline and chal- lenged [them] to deliver the work to the same high standards as [their] peers in Los Angeles. It was defi- nitely a huge challenge with a very steep learning curve for all involved," he recalls. R&H worked out numerous communications, pipeline and technology issues with Mumbai. "The technology, while challenging in its own right, was a lot easier to solve than the people challenges," Buyyala notes."We needed everyone, halfway around the world and from different cultures, to feel like they were part of the same team and were contributing equally to the same projects. It is often difficult to do this even with everyone in the same building. Figuring [this] out was probably our biggest accomplishment." Having achieved success with the wire removals, R&H India took on rotoscoping and simple green- screen pulls, slowly growing its team to handle different stages of the pipeline, such as camera tracking and match moving, full composites, modeling, lookdev, tech- nical simulations, character animation, lighting and VFX. Today, the Mumbai facility boasts about 200 em- ployees with an equal number in the Hyderabad stu- dio. R&H opened in that southern Indian city in 2007; although Mumbai offers a cosmopolitan lifestyle, its cost of living is high and some artists there were start- ing to look for more family-friendly alternatives. About 90 of the Mumbai artists opted to move to Hyder- abad when R&H decided to open there, giving the second sister facility "a core of very experienced peo- ple with 20-30 projects under their belts," says Buyyala. Key to the R&H pipeline is its proprietary anima- Sony Pictures Imageworks India. tion, compositing and lighting software, as well as "the glue between the packages, which has also been writ- ten in-house," he notes."We have written a lot of tools that aid in collaboration to make sure we're looking at the same imagery at the same time and seeing each other's comments." Videoconferencing is a daily occurrence. Although the 12.5-hour time difference can be a challenge, key supervisors in LA who head international teams work on a "swing shift," coming in after lunch so they over- lap with both the LA and Indian teams.The work auto syncs between India and LA so what is completed in Mumbai or Hyderabad at the end of their day can be viewed in LA in the morning and vice versa."If you do it right, it's almost a 24-hour production cycle, which can be really beneficial," says Buyyala. With the Indian facilities working to capacity R&H had to decide whether to open a third office there or consider another location. "There's a lot of amazing talent in Southeast Asia," Buyyala reports. Malaysia pitched its offerings: a talented, well-educated work- force, high-quality infrastructure, an upscale lifestyle but with a competitive cost of living. In addition, the Malaysian government has been "very forward-think- ing," placing a "big emphasis on digital content cre- ation" with incentives for local business. R&H Malaysia opened in Kuala Lumpur in 2009. "Every movie we've done has all our facilities in- volved," says Buyyala. "Every production is spread across all locations — even single shots are distrib- uted across our locations.We have one unified pool of artists. Sometimes we can't tell who's done what." Recent feature credits include Yogi Bear, Hop, X-Men: First Class, Mr. Popper's Penguins and films pending re- lease or in production include Moneyball, Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, Everybody Loves Whales, Life of Pi, Snow White and the Huntsman and R.I.P.D. Following the same model as its Indian and Malaysian facilities, R&H Vancouver is set to go live in January 2012 and eventually growing to about 200 artists on board. Extremely attractive Canadian tax re- bates, a beautiful city with a high quality of life and the fact that clients "are putting more feature film produc- tion in Vancouver and have requested R&H be present there," drew the company to the city, Buyyala reports. "One of the big fears" when R&H looked to Asia was the notion of "sending jobs away from California," Buyyala admits."But, paradoxically, exactly the opposite happened.When we opened in Asia we became glob- ally competitive and consequently attracted more work to R&H. So we have actually added more new jobs in California than we added in Asia:We're up to over 750 people in LA now. By spreading the costs and compet- ing globally we've been able to create more jobs in the US rather than sending jobs overseas. "I like to get the message out about how our expan- sion internationally has been a huge boon to R&H.Un- fortunately, a lot of California-based companies in our industry have been going out of business. However, we've been able to survive as a privately-held company by embracing globalization rather than fighting it." SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS Culver City, CA-based Sony Pictures Imageworks (www.imageworks.com) took a different route to ex- pansion overseas. It began a joint venture in 2007 with an Indian company, FrameFlow, whose artists it had successfully worked with on straightforward 2D tasks that supported various productions. The sub-contracting model had worked well,"but we felt it would be more efficient if we integrated the technology a bit better and invested in training artists in our tools and techniques," says Randy Lake, execu- tive VP/GM of Imageworks."So we evaluated poten- tial partners and felt the most comfortable with FrameFlow, which had already demonstrated the quality of their work." Located in Chennai (formerly known as Madras), FrameFlow was rechristened Sony Pictures Image- works India.The Culver City HQ invested in training artists there "in a multi-disciplinary fashion," says Lake. "They started with rotoscoping, matchmoving, dust- busting and wire removal, basic but essential shot set up steps. As their skills and talent develop to include paint, compositing and rotomation,we have more flex- ibility in how to deploy our resources.The GM in Chennai is Joe Gareri, an experienced VFX producer from California who works closely with our producers in Culver City to ensure a high level of collaboration." The Indian studio is now "completely integrated with the main crew" and has worked on all of Image- works' VFX projects, including the recent Green Lantern and The Smurfs, and the upcoming Men in Black III and The Amazing Spider-Man."We don't park a single show at one location and expect that facility to support it from soup to nuts," Lake explains. "As- sets flow back and forth along an integrated pipeline. Every project we bid includes India as part of the standard template." Imageworks' primary motivation in opening up in www.postmagazine.com September 2011 • Post 25