NEW YORK—In its fourth year in business, New York-based rhinofx has expansion plans on the horizon. The visual effects house, which currently works on commercial, film, TV and video games projects, is now offering 3-D pre-visualization services to agency clients. Additionally, in response to a 40 percent growth in workflow since opening, the company is taking over the entire floor of its midtown space, which should total roughly 5,000 square feet when completed. Construction is expected to begin next month and finish in the early summer.
"Pre-vis is a rapidly growing field," said rhinofx executive producer Camille Pirolo Geier. "The pre-vis can show lensing, angles, timing, rough animation, camera movement and editorial, and works out all kinds of creative and logistical problems in advance of the shoot or commencement of CG work."
"We have actually been doing pre-vis work since we opened," related rhinofx partner/executive producer Rick Wagonheim. "We use it to demonstrate our vision to potential clients. But the directors, the agencies and the agency clients all find it invaluable for making production go more smoothly. It eliminates the unknowns and the guesswork, and involves the client at the earliest stages of pre-production and production."
Wagonheim added that pre-vis will be offered with the company’s existing tools and talent "as a service to help a director sell his vision to the agency when pitching a job, to aid an agency in selling a concept to a client, or to plan the visual effects portion of an awarded job." He said that there would always be creative director leadership for quality control on these projects.
Recent jobs for which rhinofx did the pre-vis include Cadillac’s "Magic" via Chemistri, Troy, Mich., directed by Nick Piper of Backyard Productions, Venice, Calif.; and Lugz’s "Shadow Flex" out of Avrett, Free & Ginsberg, New York, a fully CG spot directed by rhinofx creative director Harry Dorrington.
The new space will be used for growth and creating a more comfortable environment for clients; it is currently occupied by sister shop Rhinoceros, which is acquiring additional space on another floor in the building. Likely, the staff size will also expand.
The toolset is expected to total roughly 27 seats, including primary 3-D package Alias’ Maya, as well as Softimage XSI, Adobe’s After Effects, and Discreet’s Inferno and Combustion.
The company is also upgrading its server and network to accommodate growth. "We purchased four 3Com 3824 Gigabit switches for us to upgrade from a 100mb network to a Gigabit environment," reported Geier. "In addition, we purchased a Maximum Throughput Sledgehammer NAS server with 2 Terabytes of storage to expand our throughput and storage capacity. We also upgraded our artists’ workstations from dual Pentium 3s to dual Xeons with BOXX 3DBOXX S series workstations."
