This Jack is officially out of the box and wants to change the way you think about visual effects. Scott McNiel, a VFX artist formerly with Method Studios and 525 Studios, has launched the Venice-based boutique Jack with new ideas and 10 employees including Executive Producer/VFX Supervisor Dan Connelly (formerly at TBWAChiatDay Los Angeles and Sea Level).
"Boutiques are becoming more popular," says McNiel, who began ramping up about two and a half years ago in Santa Monica, carefully scouring the industry for talent. "It’s really the attention that we can put into each project. Having a lower overhead, we can take on creative projects and not have to worry as much," he says. "There’s some really good stuff out there from unknown or newer directors."
By maintaining a small, specialized environment, Jack is also able to concentrate on a project from the previsualization stage ("Pre-vis is the way of the future," McNiel says) all the way through to the finish. "It was harder to do that at a larger company," he says. "With Jack, we want to lend everything that we can to every project, and that means getting in as early as possible and seeing it through to the end."
For example, McNiel and Connelly shot rough versions of three PlayStation 2 spots on DV before going into production. After meeting with the directors, looking at treatments and bouncing ideas back and forth to determine a more concrete concept, McNiel, Connelly and a few of their artists headed down to Venice beach to do a rough take. For "Swing," the idea was for a boy on a swing to be pushed harder and harder until he is launched high into the air. "We put Dan [Connelly] in a swing and pushed him back and forth. We took him out, and then we pushed the swing all the way around the pole. We didn’t have any green screen, so we just laid Dan on a cement pillar fence and shot him from above with his legs and arms kicking, and then we put the whole thing together," McNiel relates. "When we had our next conversation with the directors, it really helped the process. They saw it come to life."
In "Bike," a boy rides up to school on his bicycle. When he gets off, the bike folds up into his backpack. "The bike needed to disappear," says McNiel. "We had to decide, are we going to try to remove the bike, have the boy hold his position, cut and then start rolling again and try to do a morph- or should we have him roll up and when he stops, let go of the bike, have someone pull it out, and then create a clean plate where the bike is crossing over the kid’s legs?" The group shot DV tests of both approaches and decided having someone yank the boy’s bike right out of the scene worked best. "If we go onto the set and supervise every shoot we do, we eliminate so many issues on the back end," says McNiel.
About 75 to 80 percent of Jack’s business is commercials, with the rest being music videos, and only a small portion feature films. "We’ll take a few shots for a feature," says McNiel, "but I don’t want to take on something too big that would tie us up right now." The studio is outfitted with three Flames that run on Octane 2 (their main compositing base), six Shake workstations which run Maya for 3D and After Effects for design, and two PC workstations running Maya and LightWave.
