Today GenArts signed an agreement with Lucasfilm covering Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm Animation, and Lucasfilm Animation Singapore to have GenArts software as standard across all their compositing packages and to work together moving forward.
Lucasfilm has worked with GenArts plugins for years, the deal to use GenArts plugins with all compositing packages came from talks just a few months ago initiated by Katherine Hays, C.E.O of GenArts. Hays was exploring ways of standardizing and adding consistency to major pipelines. “There really was a shared vision, and it is because of the history the companies have together and their comfort with our technology they were very excited to take this next step and for us it was a great validation”.
GenArts will support the proprietary compositing packages via the OFX standard. The deal extends into gaming and Online, which is significant since it allows an audience who are familiar with a character looking a certain way (due to visual effects involving Gen Arts plugins) to now have that character rendered with the same technology in the gaming arena. When asked if this meant GenArts would be seeking to support GPU versions of it’s famous plugins? , Steve Bannerman, Chief Marketing Officer, answered, “It’s no secret that we are working on GPU” products, but he would not elaborate further on any details.
Richard Kerris, Lucasfilm Chief Technology Officer was quoted by Bannerman as saying “The business of post-production has changed in recent years: the dreams are getting bigger, but the budgets are not.” Richard Kerris joined Lucasfilm in 2007 as CTO (from Apple) and oversees the company’s technical operations. Bannerman explains that deals such as this one between LucasFilm and GenArts are extremely integral to meeting those dreams on budget, moving forward, across the industry. Budget pressures are forcing projects to be even more distributed than ever, across many locations and multiple post-houses. Meanwhile, the use of freelance artists and outsourcing is now extremely common, creating a real advantage from standardization.
Despite budget pressures, a company like Lucasfilm wants to deliver a consistent experience across a multitude of media from film to television to games. For example, Star Wars was not just a film franchise, it was also an animated television series “Clone Wars Series” as well as associated video games from LucasArts.
“The changing dynamics of the movie industry are driving the need for studios and post houses to standardize on technologies from a trusted vendor that can drive that “premium experience” across film, television and new entertainment media, while increasing productivity and therefore the profitability of their projects” explains Bannerman.
Out Sourcing R&D
Does this open the door to the outsourcing of some R&D by effects companies to companies such as Gen Arts? We asked Steve Bannerman, that very question and he responded, “At least not today, we won’t know the future until we get there, today that is not the spirit of this agreement”.
This also prompts the question as to whether GenArts would split development, of say their Sapphire plugins into the normal Sapphire R&D and another custom version of Sapphire solely for LucasFilm. Bannerman said that this was not the spirit of the agreement and they did not feel they were large enough to do this “at least not many times”. So while not ruling this out, he did say it was possible “that this could lead to the two companies getting together and collaborating on something that had never been done”, but that it was not the spirit of the current agreement. Katherine Hays further pointed out it was not impossible to imagine them developing proprietary tools for Lucasfilm that they could eventually take to the general market.
But this model of working collaboratively and jointly on exploring new tools is a model that GenArts is hoping to replicate with other studios and effects companies ” Absolutely, we hope this will be the first of several strategic agreements where we are working with major studios and post-production houses”, explained Hayes. ” Both to standardize our technology across all their seats ,… and also to collaborate with them so we can work with them to continue to push the envelope for special effects and how people use special effects to tell stories”.
OFX
GenArts will extensively use OFX to support LucasFilm. Bannerman explained that Gen Arts has long been a supporter of OFX and fully supports the new OFX Association. While OFX has been around for a while, there has not previously been an Open Effects Association.
The Open Effects Association, is now a non-profit, UK-based company that aims to develop and promote open standards across the visual effects community. Launched last month during NAB 2009, the founding members are Assimilate, Autodesk, Digieffects, FilmLight, The Foundry, GenArts and RE:Vision Effects.
Gary Oberbrunner VP of Engineering at GenArts sits on the board of the OFX Association.
We asked Gary Oberbrunner if the new OFX association signaled tighter controls on API support for OFX? “One of the main tasks of the Association will be to update the spec with suggestions and ideas from host vendors and plug-in vendors. This will ensure that the spec stays vendor-neutral and benefits the whole industry” he explained.
Oberbrunner also added that he thought that it was important for future adopters of OFX (both host and plug-in vendors) to know that the spec and code are truly vendor-independent and open source, “and that they will have a voice in the evolution of the standard” For end users of the OFX software the ” the main benefit will be more confidence in the future of OFX, and hopefully broader availability of plug-ins on their chosen host”.
OFX has suffered from suppliers not strictly adopting the API commonality across all seats. This means that not all the advantages of developing for one target API are realized. Bannerman commented that GenArts is trying to work as closely as possible with the other OFX vendors to standardize as much as possible, “while still recognizing that they need to bring products to market, and be able to sell things today”. Discussing the issue of less than exacting standards , he said, – “water has a tendency to seek its own level in many cases and that’s how standards become evolved”. In the case of LucasFilm he does not see the API as an issue. As OFX at Lucasfilm will be a collaboration and he hopes to “look and learn from LucasFilm and feed that back into the OFX standard”.
Moving forward
Looking ahead, we asked Katherine Hays about their expansion plans in light of the recent SpeedSix deal. Hays confirmed that the company was not in consolidation mode despite the current economic conditions “we are actively looking at other acquisitions,.. we are looking at expanding our portfolio of solutions… both our own internal innovation and developments as well as acquiring other technologies and/or companies”.
GenArts is financially supported largely by Insight Venture Partners a well respected VC company.