This Los Angeles-based Animation and Effects Facility Manages a Staff of Hundreds Across China but Keeps a Boutique of Supes at Home

Dynasty Visual Effects and Animation, LLC, a facility with offices in Los Angeles and China, first opened its doors last June amid some very public and turbulent shifts in the post-production market here in the U.S but at a time of record economic growth for the Asian nation. We asked co-founder Bruce Silverman why he and his partners decided to build an effects business based on an outsourced model and what that ultimately means to their clients.


StudioDaily: You launched your company, which relies heavily on outsourced talent, at a time when several other post facilities in Hollywood were folding. Did you see that as an opportunity?

Silverman: I think there are two things that we’ve doing differently. There is nothing new about outsourcing, particularly to Asia, but doing work in China is relatively new. There’s a company in Beijing called Base FX that did some really nice work on HBO’s The Pacific and Boardwalk Empire. There are not a lot of Chinese effects houses working on features, however. Our view of it, you’ve got a country with 1.3 billion people, they all have televisions, they all watch TV, there are movie theaters everywhere, and there’s a huge amount of domestic production because the government tries to restrict imports. So we figured, there must be some great talent and resources over there and we found them.

From a price standpoint, the cost of labor over there, relative to the cost of labor in other countries doing outsourced work, is lower. The capabilities are just as high. If you look at it from a commodities standpoint, basically what we’re offering is to do the same stuff for less. But we add another twist to it: Our people based here in Los Angeles supervise all the work so the clients aren’t dealing with China. They don’t have to talk to people in the middle of the night and they don’t have to worry about language. We do all of that. We believe we’ve put together a best of all possible worlds solution. Our clients here in Hollywood are still dealing with a local visual effects company. It just has an incredibly long corridor. The reality is with today’s communication technology, it’s not a very long corridor after all. We talk with them on Skype all the time.

How do your producers handle the language barriers? Do they all speak Chinese? Are your artists also bilingual?

It’s a combination. Number one, we have people here in LA who are Chinese Americans and speak both English and Mandarin fluently. I’m from Brooklyn, so they speak better than I do. In China, we originally looked for companies to invest in and become our exclusive resources that had artists who already spoke English well. Interestingly, the final companies we made our deals with all are run by very talented people who trained in the West, whether Australia, our at Rhythm & Hues here in LA. The top supervisors at these places are either Americans who have opted to move to China and Chinese people who came to America, worked at top facilities, and then wanted to go home. Depending on the job, we speak in whichever language we need to speak in and communicate what we have to communicate. And it works well. In the very beginning, that issue was very much on our minds. We’re dealing with a business that involves nuance and artistry, and it can be tricky. One of the thing I learned culturally is that Asians now their heads if they understand what you’re saying. But that doesn’t mean that they agree with it. We’re fortunate in that one of our founders, Leo Chen, is a Chinese-American who first came to this country for graduate school and stayed. He’s had a spectacular career. Because he was so integral to forming the company, he helped us understand what we were going to need to understand to pull this thing off.

Skype has also helped us on more than one occasion. In one instance, the animators were having trouble getting an expression we wanted just right on a character. It was a little anthropomorphized kitten and it was supposed to be an expression of real surprise. The words weren’t translating somehow. The supervisor here finally looked into the camera and pretended he had been completely spooked. The resulting kitten, which is very cute, now looks like an orthodox Jewish guy.

What else are you working on beside 2D animation?

We’ve already done and continue to work on features and commercials, and lately we’ve done a lot of animated Webisodes. At least one of those has a good shot at turning into a TV series. In China, we have separate operations for our cartoon operation and for our VFX operations. They are in different cities, in fact.

Dynasty Demo Reel from Dynasty FX on Vimeo.


How big are your offices in China and who’s on staff in LA?

We have about 300 effects artists, animators and technicians in China. Here in LA we have a boutique setup, with our executive team, admin, sales and our supervisors. They start supervising the work at 5 pm, which is 9 am the following day in Beijing. So it’s definitely shift work. There are times when they’ll call us very early in the morning. In truth, if they have a question that needs answering, they’ll call a supervisor here in the middle of the night. Our guys really do work hard; they go to sleep with their laptops next to their beds.

What’s your biggest selling point and who are you competing with for jobs?

I believe we have a price story. The tag line we’ve been using is “we make the unaffordable affordable.” I will say that when it comes to features, we are not competing with ILM, Digital Domain or Rhythm & Hues. They do fabulous work but that’s not what we are. What we’re trying to do is get to producers who either need to get their work done and have a very sharp pencil, or are trying to get more work done than they could before, whether that’s more visual effects shots, or very involved VFX shots. We can deliver what I think is basic stuff: split-screens and compositing, roto and wire removal. Our speed of delivery is the same. It’s just our prices are significantly better. The only thing that delays us, ever, is the need to physically ship a hard drive from Beijing to LA when the job is done, since the files are so gigantic. Everybody else who uses outsource has the same situation.

We have, however, found that on the television and feature side of things, we’ve been taking work away much more from India or Korea than we are from anybody in the U.S. The guys who work for us in China live very well, it’s just simply they operate on a different metric than we do. By our standard, they make a lot less money, but that money goes so much further over there.

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