Hot House: Keyframe Digital

What’s Their Gig

A full-service visual effects and animation shop based in the bucolic resort town of Niagra-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Keyframe Digital sits comfortably outside the fray. Which suites them just fine. Toronto’s thriving production community is just across Lake Ontario and under a two-hour drive away, letting the folks at Keyframe carve out a comfortable niche doing television visual effects and animation work for a number of popular cable series produced there. Founded in 1997, Keyframe began doing pre-visualization work for films such as X-Men and Driven before branching out into television work for, among other, Mutant X and The Dresden Files. “Our original plan was to do animation but we kept getting calls to do visual effects,” says co-founder Darren Cranford.

The Cool Factor

Since 2009, Keyframe has been extremely busy with one effects-laden show in particular: Syfy’s hit, Warehouse 13. Cranford describes the show as a sci-fi thriller/adventure/comedy, equal parts X-Files, Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters. The warehouse of the title is a nondescript purgatory for unusual paranormal artifacts that the government keeps hidden from the public and staffs with mysterious former secret-service agents. During each episode, two or more agents (usually Pete and his female cohort Myka) set off to track down and retrieve these objects from around the world. Suspense, drama, a bit of comedy and shot after shot of visual effects ensue. In early September, Keyframe was finishing up the show’s second season. Cranford and his lead visual effects artist, Darren Locke, were a bit bleary-eyed during our Skype interview and admitted they were in the midst of finalizing comps for the season’s final two episodes, which contain more than 300 effects each. (Read more about Keyframe’s work on Warehouse 13 in Bryant Frazer’s report in Film & Video, published when the show first launched last year.)

The Geek Factor

The show’s tone, says Cranford, lets them get just as nutty with their effects. “In one favorite scene of ours, one of the characters, Pete, puts on Tom Leary’s glasses, and when he looks at his boss, Artie, he sees the head of a walrus. They write this knowing that the visual effects will turn Artie into a walrus, and then we get to have fun with it.” Set extensions for the warehouse scenes, electrical rays from the agent’s Tesla guns and the steampunk-styled   teleconferencing device, which looks like a 1950s-era TV inside a breath mint tin, are in every episode. “That alone is a big chunk of effects right there,” says Cranford. “On top of that, every show has a new artifact. And every artifact has a new effect, from superhero underwear to magical griffins, or a Phoenix that lets people come back from the dead. Never a dull moment for us!”

A  close-up on the agents’ two-way teleconferencing device

As you’d expect in a sci-fi thriller, a lot of things go up in flames or smoke in just about every episode. “For fire and smoke, we use Fume FX from After Works. We’ll also use the smoke layers for little distortion patterns or something out of the ordinary,” says Locke. New fans of the roto tool inside AE CS5, which is actually Imagineer mocha. “We like to be able to isolate characters without having to do greenscreen,” adds Cranford. “The roto tool is kind of a quick fix tool that lets us clean up when a character spills off the greenscreen, or when they shoot on location and can’t do a greenscreen. It will interpolate the frames for you as well. For example, one of the shows featured a guy that kept reappearing as a hologram, so they couldn’t keep putting up greenscreen every time he was around. It was a lock off and we had to isolate him that way.

Another favorite plug-in is Sapphire for Combustion. “We know we’re behind the times in this regard, but we’re reluctant to move away from Combustion, which we started using in its earliest form as Paint and Effect,” says Cranford. “One thing that Combustion still has that the others don’t is a robust paint system. We like that we can paint our layers. But we do already have Nuke and a couple of our artists are using it. We’ll eventually port over, kicking and screaming.” Adds Locke, “Our workflow always revolved around roto and paint, and we just never got into a node-based workflow. It’s going to be a pretty steep learning curve for the majority of us here. I like the fact that The Foundry is doing a lot of R&D around Nuke and that they’ve got full training DVDs to help you.”

Reverse engineering: Lost Girl‘s main character extracting a soul from a victim’s body

And what about the animation side of the business? “We’ve seen a downturn in the animation side of things, that’s for sure,” says Cranford, though the facility has completed another season of Pinky Dinky Doo II, a pre-school series co-produced by the Sesame Workshop and is at work on another animated children’s project. “People always want it faster and cheaper. A lot of companies like ours can do that, but it’s tough. Flash animation lets us get it out faster, but we’re still getting a lot of competition from other countries who can crank it out a lot faster.” But with clients supplying a steady stream of television effects work, the animation projects tend to get pushed aside. Keyframe is already underway with its next series, Lost Girl, another live-action supernatural thriller that will premiere on Canada’s Global network next year. “That’s our bread and butter, for sure,” says Cranford. “We love doing visual effects and it’s great to create worlds, especially for shows like Warehouse 13 that give us a lot of creative control. We certainly take advantage of that and in return, get to add some really cool new effects to the show.”

Who They Are

Darren Cranford, President and Co-founder
Clint Green, Vice President and Co-founder
Brian Simpson, Vice President and CEO
Darren Locke, Lead Visual Effects Artist
Full-time and freelance animators and effects artists

Keyframe Digital
509 Glendale Avenue East
Suite 201
Niagra-on-the-Lake, Ontario
CANADA L0S 1J0
tel. 905-988-6440
www.keyframe.ca