SANTA MONICA—Second Street Productions—the in-house production unit of ad agency Rubin Postaer and Associates (RPA), Santa Monica—has moved into a new state-of-the-art facility designed by Chernoff Touber Associates, the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based consulting firm founded by industry veterans Larry Chernoff and Joshua Touber.
Previously, the unit had two standalone Avid Media Composers, as well as a retired linear bay. The new space occupies three floors totaling in excess of 200,000 square feet. The two Media Composers will be networked to an Avid Adrenaline, all using Avid’s Unity network. The new central machine room includes duplication capabilities for all standard-definition formats, including DVD, as well as a 64×64 port HD-ready router and AES audio routing capabilities. The facility also offers a Digidesign ProTools suite with a voiceover booth, a stage with greenscreen capabilities, and roughly 20 various-sized conference rooms, all networked to enable a shared CCTV experience, as well as video conferencing with RPA satellite offices in Atlanta; Boston; Chicago; Dallas; Denver; Portland, Ore.; and Morristown, N.J.
The immediate goal is to offer a state-of-the-art environment that is convenient and price competitive for current clients who use the facility primarily for animatics and corporate presentations, according to Jack Hetherington, senior VP/manager of creative business affairs at RPA. With the new facility, RPA expects to keep more of that work in-house. Additionally, the company hopes to begin doing radio spots in the audio suite, and expand its in-house duplication business.
"We wanted a state-of-the-art facility that would be state of the art for at least five years, so we went to the men [Chernoff and Touber] who built the state-of-the-art facility," said Hetherington. "Like any agency today, our clients are extremely sophisticated in their expectations of all media presentation, so we needed an in-house facility that could generate content that would live harmoniously side by side with other materials from our high-end external facility vendors. … Is it over-engineered? Maybe initially, but we are building [for the future]."
"Any advertising company, which is simply a modern media company, has to have some form of facility whether it’s for the ultimate exploitation of the commercial or the preparation of the creative," Chernoff observed. "As a media company, they need to have capabilities beyond the written word. The creation of advertising today, which used to be done in a very simple animatic form on a written storyboard, is no longer sufficient to the task, considering that you have Internet media, published media, motion picture media—all that has to live inside an integrated facility in a modern agency. We are trying to help agencies facilitate that process."
Chernoff also noted that from preliminary consultation to design and construction, the Second Street facility was created with RPA’s specific goals in mind. "[RPA’s] large extra commercial activities outside of the production of their commercial spots [notably corporate work from Honda and Acura] have ancillary requirements that need to be responded to very quickly," he said. "[The new facility] is not designed to replace the creative community’s work; it is meant to be a supplement to the creative community’s work and the utilitarian work that needs to be filled on an immediate basis."
"RPA’s seen so many post houses retool every three to five years," added Touber. "One of the key requests was to build a facility that would last five years minimum, hopefully ten. We built [the place] with HD-ready capabilities, streaming Internet options, and an eye toward asset management."
RPA is archiving its analog spot library by digitizing it (using 2:1 compression) into a new server, which will be supported by the Unity system. Phase two is implementing a digital asset management (DAM) system, where all spots can be retrieved on the desktop of all employees, as well as in conference rooms, furthering the efficiency of the agency. The DAM services, with proper security, will be made available to clients worldwide, and will be accessible in any of RPA’s satellite offices.
Second Street manager Joseph Barnes noted that he hopes to move all reel creation to DVD in the coming months. Second Street continues to operate with four in-house editors: Steve Bao, Terry Cross, Tony Leifheit and Jenny Valladares.
Chernoff Touber Associates was created in 2003 as a consulting firm to entertainment studios, advertising agencies, broadcasters, and commercial/promo edit houses. Its offerings include consulting for digital asset management, video and data convergence and facility management software. Chernoff, a founder of FilmCore, Encore, and R!OT, served as president of creative services for Santa Monica-headquartered Ascent Media Group from ’98 to ’02, after the sale of the aforementioned facilities to Ascent. In January ’03, he was named chairman of Ascent Media Creative Services as part of a transition to his new role as an industry consultant. Touber most recently served as COO of Ascent Media Creative Services; earlier he was managing director of Encore Hollywood.
