Los Angeles and San Francisco-based visual effects company Orphanage Spots has been launched with the participation of Roberto Cecchini of The Artists Company.

The Orphanage, a VFX house serving the feature community, was founded in 1999 by former Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) personnel Scott Stewart, Stuart Maschwitz and Jonathan Rothbart. Another former ILM staffer, John Benson, comes aboard Orphanage Spots as executive producer. Cecchini is partnered with the new venture and will act as an executive producer, but the company operates independently of The Artists Company.

The goal of the company is to bring feature level effects to the both spots and music videos. Orphanage offers 2D compositing, digital matte painting and 3D hard surface modeling and animation, and a proprietary software called "Magic Bullet."

"Magic Bullet is something developed in house that began as a solution to solving a problem. A few years ago, Stuart (Maschwitz) was doing a short film, shooting on NTSC mini DV. He figured out how to deinterlace and convert DV [50i PAL or 60i NTSC] footage to 24 fps, whole frames and allowed an arena to manipulate the colors," says Benson. "He looked at color as an extension of effects. Magic Bullet allowed him to capture in a DV format then in post manipulate color to make it look Technicolor or whatever."

Cecchini adds: "It allows DV to take on many of the qualities of 35mm color, which is extremely adaptable to artistic manipultion and interpretation."

Orphanage Spots completed its first commercial work in its first month of operation; six 15 second and 6 30 second spots for Fox Sports out of FCB, San Francisco.

"They came to us early on saying the idea they had was the four co-hosts appearing as holograms in these commercials, dispensing advice to players in every day situations," says Benson.

The creatives had seen the hologram work some Orphanage artists contributed to "Starwars Episode One" while at ILM.

"We started working with them early on, which creatively and also budget wise made it work. We did some tests and look development and came up with what they were looking for," says Benson, noting that the campaign was directed by Barton Landsman through @radical.media.

"We pride ourselves on getting actively involved as soon as possible. We think it's important for our visual effects supervisor to speak with the director or creative early in the process. This demystifies what effects are and what they can be, and can make it more cost effective," says Benson.

Orphanage is a Mac-based facility running traditional software packages such as After Effects, Electric Image and Maya for OSX, combined with plug-ins developed in-house.

Based in Los Angles are Benson, as well as co-founder/head of development Stewart and head of production Chris Uettwiller. In San Francisco are co-founder/head of post-production Rothbart and chief technology officer/visual effects supervisor Maschwitz. Artists working at Orphanage are senior matte painter Brian Flora, digital artists Ryan Tudhope and Kevin Baillie, broadcast designer Dav Rauch and colorist/Magic Bullet artist Aaron Rhodes.

Webfiles:

http://www.artists-ar.com
http://www.theorphanage.com