Post Box Expands Hollywood Services with Avid DS
It’s no secret that the Hollywood post-production market is highly competitive. Major studios have opened finishing departments on their studio lots, and independent post houses across the city are constantly searching for new business and looking for ways to differentiate their services. This is something that Michael Forrest, the founder of Post Box, knows well. His company, which is located in the heart of Hollywood, offers a broad range of post services from creative work to finishing and specializes in packaging high-end marketing for movies such as Resident Evil Extinction, Spider-Man 3, Nim’s Island, and Ratatouille, as well as video games, including DC Universe Online and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
“We do extremely demanding work, so our strategy is to not only catch the technologies as they are emerging, but also expand our capabilities and deliver the best work while keeping an eye out for what’s coming next,” says Forrest. To this end, he has built his facility exclusively around Avid systems, including two Avid DS systems for online effects, graphics, compositing, and high resolution conform; and one Media Composer Adrenaline system for offline, file-based editing. Combined, these systems have given him the power to take on some of Hollywood’s most technically challenging projects.
“Our clients are continuously blown away by what we can do with Avid DS.”
- Michael Forrest, Founder/Avid DS Artist, Post Box
Always One Step Ahead of the Competition
“I was a [post systems] trainer in the L.A. studio system for many years, so I was always exposed to new technologies,” says Forrest who started using Avid DS systems more than a decade ago as a freelancer and during that time worked on films such as Kill Bill, Cinderella Man, and Cars. “I know how quickly things can change and how important it is to have the best tools for the job.” Forrest bought his first Avid DS system in 2005 and shortly after opened the doors to Post Box, where the Avid DS system has supported his work ever since.
“Our clients are continuously blown away by what we can do with Avid DS,” says Forrest, who has the challenging task of being both a small business owner and an Avid DS artist. “The system is lightning fast, which means I can do things like blurs, titles, and color correction in no time. And with the RGB 4:4:4 architecture I can attract work and keep more projects in-house from start to finish.”
Keeping this business is essential. Forrest, who has been a beta tester of Avid DS version 10, sees the system’s core design as key to its success with multi-core processing and integrated architecture that create a seamlessly interactive experience no matter if Forrest is working in SD or HD. The system’s extensive 4:4:4 and 10-bit capabilities mean that top-quality work can be done faster than ever before. He believes that this finishing and mastering strength is not only attractive to clients, but also to the high-end Media Composer and Avid DS editors whom he wants to attract to Post Box to provide the best creative services possible. He currently has three full-time staff members and a team of freelance editors and assistants and sees his Avid products as a means of attracting and retaining talent. “It’s important for me to have editors whom I can trust, and I’ve found that when talented Avid editors start working on Avid DS they don’t want to work on anything else again,” he says.
“Our goal is to be the expert in new technology by the time that everyone else is catching up. With Avid DS I know that I can do this. It is just an amazing system.”
- Michael Forrest, Founder/Avid DS Artist, Post Box
Total Conform Leaves More Time for Creativity
Time is everything in an online session and Forrest found that with Avid product interoperability and specifically the Total Conform feature, he could start his creative work immediately and make his online sessions more about the artistry of the finishing and less about the mechanics of assembling base layers. “Total Conform makes the difference between doing a project good enough, and doing it really well,” says Forrest.
He describes the work he did for Walden Media on Nim’s Island, a film that was offlined at Walden’s facility on Avid Media Composer systems. Forrest conformed the film for screenings on an Avid Symphony system at Walden and later, when the film was being finished for film out, he recreated some of the optical effects at 2K on his Avid DS systems. “We were able to recreate the Fluid Motion effects that they tried to work out on their Assimilate Scratch systems but couldn’t because the image was not fluid enough. The motion effects they had were stuttery and ghosted, but we could recreate the effects perfectly because the key frames from Symphony conformed exactly on the Avid DS at 2K 4:4:4,” says Forrest. “We could show them a perfect, clean frame at full resolution. It was something that was extremely difficult to recreate in their DI box. [Avid] DS got the job done faster and more economically than it would have on any other system.”
With the conforming done, Forrest could spend more time on the creative aspects of the Nim’s Island project. He worked on effects, painted out wires, and went well beyond the client’s expectations. Walden Media has repeatedly used Forrest on preview screenings for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Nim’s Island, and Rock On, and given him the opportunity to do marketing reels for films such as Charlotte’s Web.
But the speed and value of the Total Conform feature does not only apply to film clients. Forrest has found that with the Avid DS system he can apply his finishing skills to an entire television show in only six to eight hours. He has worked on everything from Nip Tuck and The Deadliest Catch to Ax Men and has found that with a faster conform, he has more time to delve into the fine adjustments that make the work really shine.
Unmatched Color Management
Color calibration is a critical need for Forrest’s clients, so features such as secondary color correction and look-up tables (LUTs) have become indispensable to the work that he does each day on the Avid DS system. For the upcoming film The Yellow Handkerchief, Forrest found that he could make fine color adjustments to the Louisiana landscape with real-time secondary color correction. He explains: “There was one shot of a car that transitions out to a long shot of the car against the water and the sky. There was too much blue in the shot, so I just grabbed the blue of the sky and the water and warmed it up with the right amount of yellow.” He did similar adjustments, selecting all of the trees in a shot and effectively changing the season to fall by adding the right amount of yellow.
He also finds that the expanded LUTs in the Avid DS system not only help in terms of correction, but also for keeping client work in house. With color-managed pipelines, he and his clients can trust the monitoring of their project. Regardless of acquisition format and color space, the client is assured that the work will maintain color integrity throughout the finishing process all the way to the screen. “We can do all of the work in-house from start to finish,” says Forrest. “I’m definitely going to market this capability to my clients.”
An Advantage in Emerging Technologies
In order to keep on top in the Hollywood post market, Forrest knows that it is not enough to simply be current with the latest camera and editing technologies, he must be ahead of the curve and ready to work with the newest tools as they emerge. With Avid DS he finds that time and again he is prepared for new work, such as a recent project for Medalla Beer that was shot using RED cameras in Puerto Rico. The client wanted four television commercials in 10 days and Forrest found that he could do it completely on the Avid DS system.
“We were in an entirely tapeless workflow,” Forrest says of the four pieces, which were each shot in a day. “My assistant would load the footage directly onto Avid DS each night and I would be cutting first thing the following morning. It was an incredible workflow. I had complete artistic control from start to finish and there was no need to rent decks or send the work out to a lab.”
Forrest was similarly impressed with the advanced file-based editing abilities of Avid DS on a recent project for the DVD re-release of the 1962 film How the West Was Won. Working from the original footage, which had been shot on three cameras, he used the Avid DS system to stitch these sources into a single 6K file. “It was something that a lot of finishing systems couldn’t handle, and the speed and performance was superb,” he says.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of new technologies. Forrest predicts that the 3D realm is going to be huge in Hollywood. As a result, he is already preparing a marketing campaign to let his clients know that Post Box is 3D capable. As part of the marketing, he plans to shoot a piece in 3D and, using the Avid DS stereoscopic container, he will finish it and then screen the 3D product for his clients. “Our goal is to be the expert in new technology by the time that everyone else is catching up. With Avid DS I know that I can do this. It is just an amazing system.”
CREDIT: Courtesy of AIFA/2.0. Production company: AIFA/2.0; Executive producer: Hector Ivan Rosa; Director: Michael Abt; Director of photography: Emilio Guede, Jr.; Editor/Avid DS Artist: Michael Forrest; Audio/Video Post: AIFA/2.0.