What’s their Gig?

Robb Hart spent the early days of his career working – and living – quite dangerously. He was held at gunpoint in Argentina during the Falklands War, followed by the Uruguay secret service and next made a series of documentaries on human survival, ranging from the Amazon jungle to Nazi concentration camps.

After some years of roaming – and gainful employment – Hart was ready to control his own destiny. “A very good friend of mine, who worked with me at Virgin, said, ‘You know Robb, you’re always saying, “In an ideal world, I’d do it like this.” If you ever start a company, that’s got to be the name.'”

In 1997 He and his wife, Molly Talbot Hart, started An Ideal World with an SGI machine in their living room. In 2006 they bought a 1,600 square foot loft in downtown Santa Ana, CA.

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The Cool Factor

An Ideal World’s first big project, in 1998, was Klingon Academy, with Christopher Plummer reprising his role as General Chang. They planned to shoot the whole length of 97 minutes in greenscreen, but worried about effectively capturing the flow of the fight. “I’d worked with Motion Capture and I’d worked with magnetic and optical,” says Hart. “Why not motion capture the camera?” The team created a setup where they could see a wireframe of the ship through the camera. In essence, they built a holodeck.

After a stint in music videos, Robb found the perfect medium for his aesthetic, on television. “I found I loved commercials, absolutely loved them,” he says. “The idea of caring an awful lot about 30 seconds gave me a beautiful sense of craft and art and skill.” In commercials, there’s room to conjure the perfect CG bubble for a Korbel champagne spot or to perfect 12 seconds of aquatic dancing, shot at 1000 frames per second for a Honda launch video.

An Ideal World built a reputation for smoothly handling extreme formats – the Harts do most of their compositing in 4K – and for dealing with the more extreme requests, like the one for a project from Fiesta, a supermarket chain. As Hart recalls, “We have a mermaid sitting on a fish counter and she’s got to be talking to someone, but her hair’s acting like it’s underwater.” When did the client need it? Three weeks. “There was no way I was embarking on CG underwater in three weeks,” Hart says. So the studio came up with a wireframe headband that the mermaid model could wear in the Houston shoot. They then shot a wig underwater in a local pool in California. Finally, Hart’s wife, Molly, (she’s a certified diver) sat at the bottom of the pool all day puppeteering the head. “My job is to bring it all together,” says Hart. “Somebody comes to me with an idea and how can we do it. I look around for the technologies and the idea, and kind of in a magpie way, gather.”

The Geek Factor

The studio’s sense of hopeful idealism extends into its application of technology. Currently with two HD suites, An Ideal World is making room for an Autodesk Flame – a huge but inevitable step. A Flame may be a bold move in a tough economy, but it suits the studio’s ultimate goal: to be a small shop that aims for the top of the top.