‘Cloud computing to bring better movie special effects’

Rhythm & Hues in talks on possibility of setting up visual effects studio in Korea


Visual effects in cinema have come a long way, becoming an essential part of storytelling that helps make lasting impressions among movie-goers.

As audience expectations to see eye-popping scenes and sequences in movies grow further, leading VFX studios such as U.S.-based Rhythm and Hues have to keep up to date with technology to meet such demand.

Erika Burton, co-president of R&H, said that the emergence of cloud computing and mobile technologies is making it possible to produce quality effects.

“It’s giving us more capacity and capability to do more work and bigger work at efficient costs,” Burton told The Korea Herald.

“Because of the cloud, we can produce quality-level work such as photo-real characters, environments and other huge effects that require a big amount of data space and rendering.”

R&H is one of Hollywood’s biggest effects producers, alongside Industrial Light & Magic owned by George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars franchise, Digital Domain by Michael Bay, the director of the Transformers trilogy, Sony Pictures Imageworks and Weta Digital by Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord of the Rings.

Burton said that the rapidly changing technology and increasing demand for bigger and better pictures, while production budgets and schedules get tighter are also pushing the VFX industry to seek ways to remain competitive.

The U.S. studio, to this end, has opted to expand globally to maintain its operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

After establishing its studios in India and Malaysia, it is set to build another one in Taiwan this year.

And R&H is not ruling out setting up an additional studio in Korea.

“We have been talking recently with representatives from Korea,” she said, adding that it is looking at criteria that can benefit both sides.

She added that the acquisition of local VFX studios is not something R&H usually does, but it can “absolutely consider joint ventures” to enter markets.

“Our basic strategy is to build from ground up, though,” she noted.

Some of the criteria the company considers are tax incentives and whether it can contribute to developing local effects industries with the governments.

Such global establishments also help R&H, which is currently working on nine motion pictures including the sequel to Percy Jackson and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, efficiently work on various Hollywood projects concurrently via virtual platforms.

R&H is known especially for creating photo-real digital animal characters such as Aslan the lion, voiced by Liam Neeson, from The Chronicles of Narnia, which was nominated for an Academy Award in visual effects.

Burton said the fantasy movie, for which she served as the VFX producer, was the most challenging and gratifying production experience of her career.

“It was complex as we had to create a lion that talked, and use crowd animating software for the epic battle sequence, and do motion capture for the first time,” she said. “I had so many things in my mind then when there was a lot of financial demand on that project, which made it very stressful, and our company started to expand in India.”

R&H, which has some 1,400 employees and uses proprietary software, also worked on Alvin and the Chipmunks and Oscar-winning The Golden Compass.

By Park Hyong-ki (hkp@heraldcorp.com)