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AFR Let's talk about the advertising market a bit. Do you see more and more ads being created with 3D? And is this growth--if indeed there is growth--driven by creativity or economics? In other words, are people saying "look I can do anything with CG" or is it just cheaper to do than film on location? LE That is an excellent question, and hard to answer completely. You see, the realities of the economics involved can vary from job to job, and have also shifted as 3D has matured over the past decade. The simplistic answer is if you can easily shoot something in real life, then it will be cheaper to do that then it would be to create it in CG. A client just this month needed a CG talking head and asked me if it would be more expensive than a live action solution. I laughed and told him that even though we could come in at a very low price, it would certainly be cheaper to hire some out of work actress to stand up and recite a few lines than to have us create a custom model rigged for full lipsynch animation. They ended up choosing live action, and that is fine, but the real decision maker should have been one of art: do you want CG or live action? The two usually have very different aesthetics.
Most of the time 3D and other CG effects are used when you simply could not get something accomplished in live action, at least not in a reasonable fashion. Then there are all of the commercials done where the aesthetics are almost all about CG's "better than real" look. You can think of the famous Listerine commercials or similar projects where you see a perfect blemish-free world that is a hybrid between real and cartoon. What is really happening now is that 3D and CG tools have become very polished and come so far down in cost that they are now available to almost all levels of artists. In theory this means the industry can now accomplish more things easier and choose from a larger pool of competent artists. The reality is still not quite that rosy as real talent is always hard to find. The result is that the proliferation of the technology simply means more compromised talents gets pressed into service much of the time. This is no different than any other profession...there are only so many expert tailors in any given city, so some of us live in cuffed Gap jeans instead...same idea (laughs...).
AFR Being in New York and being so close to the advertising world, would you say that New York has become the center of 3D and visual effects outside of the Hollywood world? And where do you see 3D going in the New York scene? Is it growing or consolidating in New York or are forces taking 3D skills to other locales? LE The very real advantage California has is that their art form--movies--is long-form compared to the NY advertising community that lives in 15 second bursts. This has given them big studios and research budgets. NY has certainly caught up in the past years and I rarely hear about NY ad agencies going west for CG work any more. This was common in the 90's. Once the economy turns around, I think we will really see NYC come into its own in the 3d community. AFR What is Graphlink Studio's future? Where would you like the company to go from here? LE We will simply continue to seek out clients that know the difference in quality and appreciate what a certain level of experience can add to the mix. The funny thing is that does not mean we are much more expensive than other shops, and in reality we can often be less. When you know how to do something well it can be produced faster and more efficiently. We have also branched out to extensive web related services over the past few years. We have set up a team that handles back-end web programming and e-commerce technology. We provide these services to clients, and also use them for our own subsidiary projects, like our 3DNY publishing group. We host our Linux servers in-house which gives us a big advantage when deploying new web technology.
AFR You got involved in forming a non-profit organization for New York's 3D artists community. When did you form that group and why did you do it? LE It's funny to think what a rich history the computer culture has already. There had been an Electric Image user group earlier in the mid 90's, a time when EIAS largely dominated the professional desktop animation market. By the end of the 90's the group had disbanded and I was missing the social, networking and other benefits to having a professional association. By the way I never much cared for the term "user group" as anyone outside the computer industry assumes members of such groups are ex drug users from the 60's, and look at you funny from there on out. I think "Professional Group" is much more appropriate, but this may just be my personal uphill battle (laughs...). At any rate, I kept asking former members to resurrect the group. After a few months of no takers I came to the conclusion that I should stop asking others and just do it myself. So I sat down and tried to figure out what would make the best mix for such a group circa 2000. One thing I realized was that in the early days of user groups we all needed each others help with application specific snafus. By the year 2000 most software was far more stable, the community had become more capable, and there were broader topics of interest that could and should be discussed. There was also much more diversity of software use by this time. We had people using Lighwave, Cinema4D, Electric Image, Maya, and other applications. I did not think there was much need anymore for a group to discuss one particular application, and this turned out to be very true. Making it a general 3D group allowed us much more freedom as it moved forward. We also realized that as the group got larger the intimacy we had with our 10-20 person meetings would be hard to maintain. We saw the need to run the meetings more like seminars with a planned list of topics.
AFR So how did the group end up at Apple? LE I approached Apple's Marketing Center here in Manhattan and broached the idea. They had long since stopped letting professional groups meet at their offices, but liked the concept so much they decided to break their own rule and give us space. In fact they were very generous and we could not have launched the group without their help. Groups of the past had always been small assemblies of 20, or 30 people max. We were expecting this to go up and hoping for 50 people to show up. We were completely surprised when our first meeting drew over 300 people responding to "reserve a seat"--this was twice the capacity of Apple's largest space. For the next two years every single meeting was a standing room only event, except for the end of year event that followed 9/11. AFR Tell us a little about those events? LE We have hosted every single major developer in the industry, many of them flying in just to present at our seminars, like the developers of Lighwave, form-Z, Maya, Viewpoint and dozens of others. We even hosted the very first showing of Maya for the Mac seen on the East coast. People have come from all over the East coast to attend these seminars. We later began offering a range of Educational Training Seminars--intense 2 and 3 day courses. These were very well received and many sold out over the next two seasons.
AFR Initially the group's name was Mac-centric but you changed that, why? LE As the group kicked off we called it Mac3DNY. But it quickly became obvious that at least half of the people that wanted to come were people using PCs. We would get calls asking if they were “allowed to come! (laughs..) We got such a laugh over it and told them of course, everyone was welcome. AFR Ah... see people don't realize that Mac users are actually pretty tolerant (laughs...) So... LE So, the premise of the group revolved around 3D, not Electric Image or the Mac. So we felt that we did not want to have a name that would alienate anyone, we didn't want to be exclusionary. AFR And this in turn actually helped Macs? Explain why. LE As it turned out, the folks at Apple Marketing didn't mind that we dropped the "Mac" from the name at all, and in fact they were very happy with what we were doing. They told us we brought more PC users into Apple Marketing than anyone else they could remember. That gave them a chance to show off Macs to a whole new audience--a number of which actually did decide to make the switch right in front of our eyes.
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