POST-PRODUCTION : The Revolution will televised

Post-production facilities in NZ are in for an interesting time. And they know it. Sort of. It's not something specific that anybody said, it's just how everything hangs together after you've spoken to them all.

Like the film production people interviewed for this issue, I've never seen the

But where the new-breed film companies have shed overhead and are operating lean and mean, trading on their creative flair and bang-for-buck productions, the post facilities don't have that option.

Theirs is a hardware intensive business. They simply can't operate lean and mean. The gear they run is hugely expensive, technically challenging to get working right - and must be driven by people with experience hours that would rival an airline pilot.

Like the production companies, they acknowledge that NZ continues to be a diminishing percentage of their work now, and that global clients are a prerequisite for survival. How this impacts their business model, though, differs from the film companies.

The thing is, post companies are essentially boxes, within which is housed the aforementioned equipment and the staff who run it. Unlike the film companies, however, which have long been accustomed to shooting all over the world, post companies are not by nature portable.

But that, nonetheless, is what their footprint must be in today's marketplace - more mobile, more 'on', more 24/7.

The reason for this is that they are in fact becoming film companies - hi-tech visual & sound FX film companies. Where in the past they operated at the end of a long production chain, doing film transfer, final edits and colour grading, today they're producing cutting edge 2D and 3D animation, motion-in-design, 5.1 Dolby mixes and CGI galore.

All this could still be called 'post' though, if there was still a film company driving it. That is, if the hierarchy still went agency-film company-post facility. But that's changing.

Before continuing I should point out that no post company interviewed for this feature said they were film companies, nor did they intimate in any way that they wanted to go direct to agencies and bypass film companies.

But as the demand for CGI and other VFX in commercials continues to grow, it seems to be happening whether they want it to or not. At Oktobor, Patrick McAteer gave me a long and wide-ranging interview.

The following quotes happened at different stages of the conversation, but read together they do present one possible evolution of the industry ...

" ... motion in design is a new area that allows creative teams inside agencies to deal directly with us and it's all FX so generally no live elements in there at all. In fact because some commercials are now so heavily stacked towards VFX some of our senior artists are actually asked to direct some of the live action elements because if it's very FX driven, if it is all 3D, there is no production company involved. On a recent job, we dealt directly with the agency out of New York."

One factor driving this evolution is that the post companies, simply by adopting a best-practice approach to the shoots they're working on, are now deeply involved very early in the TVC production, especially if there is any significant VFX component.

And with a sizeable chunk of their work coming from offshore (50% or more) post producers are starting to rack up the air miles, something that used to be the domain of film company directors.

"We consider anything that's a one-stop plane journey from here as our market," says Digipost's Garry Little. "We did our first job for India last year. A director found us on the web and contacted us for a quote and the next thing you know our head of 3D is flying up to Turkey on a shoot which was part one of the job.

"Then the director came over here and did a shoot down south and it turned out to be a very nice commercial which got us more notice up in Asia."

McAteer tells a similar story. "We did an ad recently for a company out of New York. The director was out of London, they shot in Bali. Our head of 3D went up to Bali. You have to be able to move around."

The common denominator is that with production budgets being so tight, VFX directors often need to be on set to ensure expensive mistakes aren't made, and in today's marketplace, that set could be anywhere on the planet.

Images & Sound Flame artist Brenton Cumberpatch explains, "There are so many things that can go wrong if a project is set up incorrectly. Frame rates, frame sizes, field orders, aspect ratios.

"People need to be mindful of what they shoot on if they're intending to do VFX work, especially keying. Some formats are just better for keying, even if the DOP prefers the look of another format.

"All these things will take more time to correct in post, so having an expert involved at the start is definitely the way to go."

Global clients also like to work to their hours, not ours. While McAteer notes that NZ's time zone often gives us a day's jump on Northern Hemisphere clients ("we can get things finished on Monday while it's still the weekend there") he says the New York job had Oktobor running 24/7.

"We work remotely," he says. "We never actually saw the agency here in that case. We had our producer here basically working a night shift so we were awake when New York was awake. The agency was able to preview the dailies via FTP, have a look at everything and sign it off while the creatives talked with us via video conferencing. It was amazing."

As the nature of their business changes (McAteer actually hired a futurist to research and assist with a five-year business plan for Oktobor), it's clear that technological leaps are changing the expectations of clients and consumers alike.

McAteer tells the story of taking his nephew to one of the recent batch of Star Wars movies. Part way through the movie a zen moment: "Sitting behind us was a bunch of young guys, and about a third of the way in one said, 'that was a shit green screen shot'."

"So we can't keep thinking in terms of where we were five or six years ago. To quote Darwin, 'It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change'.

"Technology, filtering, VFX & CGI awareness enables a much richer environment. That whole shift is happening and in a few years there'll be another generation of people coming through even more hip to what's going on in that area. And they are both audience and client in the same breath."

And while the technology speeds things up, it can also slow them down. Digipost's Bruce Langley: "The equipment and software is getting better, so things that two years ago would have taken ages to do in an audio sense we can now do that in a heartbeat."

This allows time for taking creative sidetracks, he says. "So if a client wants to try new things or if we want to initiate them maybe trying something new, the technology helps that process."

There's a downside to technically switched on clients, however. "It's a little scary because a client might look at a QuickTime of a very expensive commercial on their laptop and they'll be commenting on the colour grading and the audio. So they're seeing jobs at a far earlier stage than they were years ago, and they need to understand the limitations of their computer. Working through that sort of thing can actually prolong the process."

At the consumer end of the chain this year we'll see the fta networks broadcasting in hi-def at 16:9 aspect ratio, but none of the post houses predict that causing much confusion in the film industry, as they're all equipped to manage any transition and it makes little difference at the filming end.

One advance that everyone is talking about, though, is the Red One camera. "Basically it's a digital acquisition format with which you can use 35mm lenses on the front," says Images & Sound's Lucy St George.

"So you're getting superclean high-resolution pictures, without grain, film-float or flicker, which means none of the standard issues you might get in post-production with film for effects work."

In fact, there is so much high-definition data captured by the Red that St George says managing it becomes an issue.

"It's changing the nature of post," she says. "Rather than talking about how many rolls of film a project requires now we're talking terabytes of storage and efficient data management. With more cost effective acquisition formats there's a tendency for shooting ratios to increase tremendously, the same way that people take many more photos on their digital stills camera than they used to with their film cameras.

"The flow-on effect is more shots to sort through in the off-line edit, more data to wrangle around your network - and more storage required."

Too much quality footage to choose from? Indeed, these are interesting times.

Where do you sit?

Director David Lynch on watching movies on an iPhone: "Now if you're playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film. You'll think you have experienced it, but you'll be cheated. It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real!"

Oktobor's Patrick McAteer on watching movies on an iPhone: "I watched a movie on it the other night in bed. People said no one will ever want to watch something on that screen. I love it. But it's still 'lean-forward' entertainment. I will still have my 42-inch plasma and my 25-inch LCD at home - and a computer screen."