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JANUARY 2010

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30 Post • January 2010 www.postmagazine.com R A D I U M S A N TA M O N I C A Dariush Derakhshani, VFX super visor/ head of CG at Radium Santa Monica (www.radium.com), says for commercial work, the trend has always been "fast and easy. The sooner you can get something vi- sualized and finished and out the door, the better." So having an efficient workflow plays a big role. In terms of Radium's workflow, Der- akhshani points to the release of Vray for Maya as having a big affect on how the studio remains efficient. "It is a renderer that does a very nice job of working with glossy, photo- real images, very quickly. Out of he box you can get to 85 to 90 percent a lot faster than you could with Mental Ray, as an example." In the past year, this tool has affected a big change internally at the studio. "We dis- covered we could hit tests that look a lot better in shor ter turnaround and we could deliver closer to photoreal without as much hassles. With something like Mental Ray you need to have more customizations to make your pipeline work. We have been using Vray in conjunction with Nuke and EXRs just to keep things simple." Derakhshani has also been seeing the faster and cheaper trend from the agencies. "Clients are happy to keep things simpler to fit it into ever tighter ad budgets as the economy slowly regains momentum." How does Radium straddle the line be- tween high quality creative, smaller budgets and less time? Sometimes it's educating clients to what can be done, even for just a little bit more budget, and sometimes it's about investing in the client. "Ever y now and then you are able to convince them to go with the more dressed-up approach once they see the value in what extra they are getting. Of course, we won't ask them to go it alone; we'll invest ourselves as well. We'll do a test and cut them a deal and explain we really want to put out something that everyone is proud of, and we'll work it from there." Some agencies are asking stu- dios to do more in-house and Ra- dium, thanks to Radium Dallas, can offer that as an option. "We will end up packaging out of the Dallas office for more editing and sound design in addition to the visual ef- fects we are doing. It's easier for an agency to do ever ything in once place, and it's more cost effective." Derakhshani admits this is not a huge trend, but it is growing. He offers up a recent spot with Aero Film's Aero Post for a Fidelity ad called Around the World as an ex- ample of investing and par tner- ing with a client. "We worked with one of their directors [Michael Har tog] and ended up co-directing as well an all-CG paper world spot in keeping with Fidelity's green line theme," explains Derakhshani. "We worked with Aero to come up with a budget that was appro- priate for Fidelity but without cutting corners because they re- ally wanted a hallmark piece. We dug deep and invested a lot into it." Because they were willing to going that extra step, Radium is seeing more work in conjunc- tion with Aero and Fidelity. Another recent project was an in-theatre adver tising trailer for the AMC chain done in con- junction with AMC and Coke for Fitzgerald & Co. "It was an- other ver y large project that was good visibility for us and we de- cided to invest in it. We worked with them to bring the budget down but keep the creative and execution as strong as possible." The spot opens on three friends drinking Coke in a movie theatre. Slowly their seats are enveloped in colorful vines and the teens are transpor ted to a magical-looking forest where they have the best seat in the house — the sky is their AMC screen.The VFX lead on this was Rob Nederhorst. One more trend that Radium has been experiencing is clients wanting an HD fin- ish with an SD cut down. And the studio is responding by building the infrastructure to suppor t those chunky files. "That is a trend we have been noticing in the last year and a half," concludes Derakhshani. B U F Steven Adams is head of US operations at visual effects and animation house BUF (www.buf.com) in Los Angeles. This office grew out of main location in Paris, France, which has been operating for 25 years, so they obviously know how to read and react to industry trends. Adams, like the others we inter viewed for this piece, agrees that the economic downfall has created cer tain trends. "With the financial crisis, we saw almost a vir tual stand still in commercial production," he ex- plains. "Ever ybody star ted dealing with the brave new world we found ourselves in, but that world is now off of life suppor t and functioning again. When recovery began we were left with smaller budgets and different kinds of concepts." And those concepts tend to include photorealistic imagery that makes the impossible look real. Adams calls it "a plausible unreality." He points to a Jello spot for Draftfcb that features models walking through a world MassMarket's Justin Lane: Creating some elements in CG saved money for this LG spot with a tight budget. The Apples PSA for City Harvest was co-directed by Angus Kneale (back) and Yann Mabille, who is The Mill, NY's joint head of 3D. BUF provided photoreal VFX work for this Nissan Altima Look Closer spot. VFX for Spots continued on page 43

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