European Reps Should Pay Off
Ari Golan has taken advantage of the shrinking cost of CGI tools to carve a corporate niche for his Atomic Imaging production company.
Half of his assignments in video, CD-ROM and Web design are corporate. About 20% are awarded by agencies, but spot assignments are rare. The remainder is devoted to live events and concerts.
That balance will probably change even more toward corporate multimedia if sales efforts from reps in Barcelona and Milan begin to pay off. Golan is also represented in New York.
“The technology lends itself to remote production,” he says. “There’s a huge interest and potential demand for multimedia in Europe. They just haven’t yet allocated the budgets.”
Golan is entirely committed to the Macintosh as a CGI and postproduction tool, but within that limitation his new Goose Island facility is entirely state-of-the art.
All of the compositing, CGI and editorial workstations are hooked into an Ethernet network with a managed hub that allows the boxes to share media, rather than laboriously copying files from each other.
“The Mac gives us an open architecture compatible with the software we use for CGI, effects and compositing,” says Golan. “The rendering times on the new G3 are so fast that I can’t justify the cost for more expensive hardware.”
The Mac commitment now extends to becoming a value-added software dealer for Electric Image, After Effects, Commotion, and Media 100.
He calls his collection of tools the Digital Production Suite, and established a users group to meet monthly with engineers from the publishers.
Commotion became commercially available only a few months ago. It is a realtime painting, compositing and rotoscoping package that runs on a dual processor Mac with 120 megabytes of memory.
Atomic Imaging used a beta Commotion version to create a seven-minute trade show video which played live talent into an entirely virtual prop and background environment.
Actors performing on virtual sets need to see something to move over or around, so modular objects are painted blue to simulate the objects which will be composited into a scene.
SCREEN MAGAZINE
MARCH 30 ’98
VOLUME 20 NO. 13
PG 31