...Threshold Digital Research Labs, a midsize animation studio with a feature film called "Food Fight" slated for release in 2006. "They've watched too many behind-the-camera shows and played too many video games. A game-trained society is a very fast visual-processing society."
Homing in on "Valiant"
The "Valiant" producers are quick to say that their experience can't be attributed all to technology. Indeed, much of their cost-cutting came from their ability to start from scratch, without the full infrastructure of an established studio.
Williams started the project in 2001 by coming to Collum and his visual effects production partner Curtis Augspurger, who had worked on movies including "Scooby Doo", and asking them whether a "Shrek"-style film could be done much more cheaply. The three hashed out the question over a series of months, decided the answer was yes, and launched what would become the "Valiant" project.
By early 2003, they had the project funded and an agreement with Disney to distribute their work. They hired story developers and set up a preproduction shop in Los Angeles, where computer artists began work on the characters. Late that year, they moved to the United Kingdom for full production work — in part because that allowed them to access British tax breaks, funding and cheaper animators, and also because it is a very British movie, with a UK director and actor Ewan McGregor providing the voice of the lead pigeon.
Collum said the team also took advantage of powerful off-the-shelf software now available such as Alias Systems' Maya animation package, and Pixar's RenderMan, while some studios create their own. On the hardware side, it kept everything in-house, ultimately using about 500 "nodes" — the equivalent of 1,000 processors — to render the artists' work into the final film.
The end result? A big-budget film that cost less than half of Pixar's and DreamWorks' latest. Reviews have been just lukewarm, however, with the BBC online calling it "bland as birdseed".
Whatever the critics' response, Vanguard's creative juggling of technological and staffing norms has blazed a path that smaller companies may also be able to follow.
"I think this is clearly something where technology is levelling the playing field between the bigger companies and smaller companies," said Dick Anderson, general manager of IBM's Media and Entertainment division, who oversees the company's close relationship with many studios. "This industry has really transformed itself in 18 months in terms of the technology base that it is running on."
That may be true — but the technology side will never be enough to produce success by itself, studio executives say.
"It ultimately has nothing to do with hardware," Threshold's Johnsen said. "Hardware is egalitarian. But not everyone can have talent."
