New England studios chase the giants of digital imagery
Kirsten Andersen and Geoff McAuliffe were scrambling to finish a group of TV spots in time for this year's Super Bowl when the Florida Marlins had the audacity to trade one of their players to the Chicago Cubs.
Andersen and McAuliffe are employees at Brickyard VFX, a Boston company that produces special effects -- now more often called ''visual effects," or VFX -- for television commercials. They were trying to finish work on three ads for a cellphone being marketed by ESPN, one of which featured Marlins outfielder Juan Pierre. Then came the trade. There wasn't time to reshoot Pierre's four-second cameo, so Andersen and McAuliffe deftly removed his Marlins jersey and replaced it with a digitally tailored Cubs uniform.
That kind of digital artistry is becoming more prevalent in movies, television programs, and even ads, whether you notice it or not. Thanks to cheaper and more powerful hardware and software, more small companies like Brickyard are able to compete with giants of the visual effects industry like Digital Domain and Industrial Light & Magic, and tiny animation studios can turn out full-length computer-animated movies that may one day challenge Pixar and DreamWorks at the box office.
''The price of entry into the whole realm of computer-generated images is low enough now that almost anybody can afford it," says Brickyard founder Dave Waller, who mortgaged his house to start the company in 1999. ''The challenge is to get good enough that people come to you instead of your more established competitors."
Brickyard, which focuses mostly on television commercials, hasn't had much trouble there: Its AT&T spots ran during the Olympics, and it created some ghostly effects for ''The Legend of Lucy Keyes," which stars Julie Delpy and will be shown this month as part of the Independent Film Festival of Boston.
New England isn't exactly the crossroads of the digital imagery trade; that'd be California. But there is a discernible pulse of activity here, with creative shops like Brickyard and Portsmouth's Hatchling Studios cranking out animation and visual effects, companies like Avid Technology and GenArts supplying tools, and start-ups like Cambridge's Cinital exploring ways to make virtual sets more accessible to tightwad producers.
When computer-generated imagery started appearing in sci-fi movies like ''Tron," ''Star Trek," and ''The Last Starfighter" and animated films like ''Toy Story," it relied on custom-written software and the most powerful supercomputers available. ''Now, for $2,000 or $4,000, you can get a PC and the software you need to start doing [digital] animation," says Marc Stevens, vice president of Softimage, a division of Avid Technology Inc. in Tewksbury. ''And you can do much better quality work than you could've done 15 years ago."
Some of Softimage's products are priced as low as $500 per user -- not much more expensive than Microsoft Office. But the more sophisticated stuff, like Face Robot, a new product that's designed to create more realistic animated characters, still costs close to $100,000. Two of this summer's animated releases, ''Ant Bully" and ''Barnyard," are being produced using software from the company.
Cambridge's GenArts has created a comfortable niche for itself: It creates software ''plug-ins" that add flashy fillips to movies, music videos, and TV ads. Remember how Frodo's sword glowed blue when Orcs were nearby in the ''Lord of the Rings" series? GenArts's software supplied the glow. In last year's ''Sin City," GenArts plug-ins were used to add emphatic colors to the movie's black-and-white, comic book look.
''What we're finding," says GenArts founder Karl Sims, ''is that simply because more and more people are doing digital effects, we can get away with lowering our prices and increasing our volume."
Cinital is trying to start with a low-priced strategy. The company is designing a system that can blend live actors standing before the camera with a computer-crafted set. It's similar to a weather forecaster's standing in front of a map that exists only in a computer, except that Cinital's environments are three-dimensional and the actors can walk through them. Current systems capable of blending live actors and virtual sets ''all have six-figure price tags," says founder Eliot Mack. ''We're planning to sell the whole thing for a little less than $35,000."
Some film critics have derided movies that deploy digital effects for doing so at the expense of plot and character. And sometimes, that's a valid point. But did you notice which 15 shots in ''Brokeback Mountain" featured a flock of digitally animated sheep? Didn't think so.
When Softimage threw a party last month to celebrate its 20th anniversary and launch Face Robot, it selected as the venue the back lot at Sony Pictures in Los Angeles, which includes a nostalgia-inducing Main Street.
Lots like Sony's haven't been used much for shooting movies since the 1970s, when directors decided they preferred to shoot on location. In the years ahead, it's not hard to imagine those real-world locations becoming passé, as more movies, TV shows, and commercials are shot within digital realms.
Scott Kirsner is a freelance writer in San Francisco who maintains a blog on entertainment and technology, cinematech.blogspot.com. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. 
