Having established itself as a mainstay commercial telecine/visual effects boutique, Santa Monica-based Company 3 is looking to extend its geographic reach in déjà vu style. "We plan on opening another boutique operation—much like we have on the West Coast—in New York," relates Company 3 founding partner/colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld, who estimates that the Manhattan launch will come to pass within the next five to six months, if not sooner.
For Sonnenfeld, the key descriptive term is "boutique," denoting a small, manageable operation that can offer personalized service and establish close working relationships with clientele. And somewhat paradoxically, that boutique approach has been fostered by virtue of Company 3 being part of the ever growing, publicly traded Liberty Livewire, which has assembled a collection of postproduction houses in the U.S. and abroad. One might expect a large entity like Liberty Livewire to be inherently contrary to the philosophy of a small, responsive boutique. But Sonnenfeld contends that the parent company’s economic clout, its technical resources, expertise and management philosophy have instead provided a culture that has nurtured Company 3.
For one, Liberty Livewire offers a financial conduit for Company 3 to tap into when needed, facilitating growth—yet keeping it, as Sonnenfeld prefers, within boutique confines. Besides the pending Company 3, New York, there’s the controlled expansion that recently took place on the West Coast. Company 3 moved into the former Santa Monica digs of Hollywood Digital West (HD West), a sister shop in the Liberty Livewire family. (Hollywood Digital continues to maintain its longstanding Hollywood facility.) In the process, Company 3 picked up additional space, telecine and Henry bays, as well as a pair of noted former HD West spot colorists: Steve Rodriguez and Rob Sciarratta. Rodriguez’s latest credits include commercials for such advertisers as Honda, Fox Family, CNBC, adidas, Saturn and Vidal Sassoon. He has most recently collaborated with directors like Noam Murro of Biscuit filmworks, Hollywood, Josh Taft of bicoastal/international Satellite, Neil Abramson of Los Angeles-based Palomar Pictures and Michael Patrick Jann of bicoastal HKM Productions.
Among Sciarratta’s latest endeavors are spots for e-Toys, directed by Kinka Usher from House of Usher, Santa Monica; Nike, helmed by Joe Pytka of Venice, Calif.-based PYTKA; Verizon, directed by Marcus Nispel of bicoastal Morton Jankel Zander; and Lexus, directed by Bruce Dowad of Bruce Dowad Associates, Hollywood. Sciarratta has enjoyed longstanding relationships with directors Nispel and Dowad. For the latter, Sciarratta served as colorist on the spots that helped Dowad earn the Directors Guild of America honor as best commercial director of 1997.
Both Sciarratta and Rodriguez cite the attraction of remaining in the Liberty Livewire family, with the extra Company 3 dimension of a soon-to-be New York foothold. "Having access to a full-service New York operation could open up some other doors for us as artists," reasons Rodriguez.
BUYING POWER
Additionally, due to its host of post studio holdings, Liberty Livewire has the clout to strike close-knit beta test relationships with equipment manufacturers. And Sonnenfeld notes that the collective buying power wielded by Liberty Livewire translates into Company 3 being able to get deals on hardware and software that it couldn’t have attained otherwise. Among the post houses under the Liberty Livewire umbrella are: R!OT, Santa Monica; Encore Hollywood; Hollywood Digital; Method, Santa Monica; Todd AO, Hollywood; 4MC, Burbank; Soundeluxe, Hollywood; 525 Studios, Santa Monica; Virgin Television de Mexico City; 4MC Asia, Singapore, and such London shops as Rushes, West One Television, SVC and Soho 601.
Liberty Livewire is also set to finalize its acquisition of Northvale, N.J.-headquartered Video Services Corporation (VSC), parent to such shops as Manhattan Transfer, New York; Manhattan Transfer-Miami; Northvale-based Audio Plus Video International; New York-based editorial house Cabana; bicoastal Video Rentals Inc.; and Northvale-based systems integration and engineering services company A.F. Associates (SHOOT, 8/25, p. 1).
Company 3’s upcoming New York launch is independent of VSC. According to Sonnenfeld, the Company 3 boutique in Manhattan has been planned for some time.
Shared accounting and backroom operations among Liberty Livewire shops also serve to reduce overhead, continues Sonnenfeld. But perhaps most importantly, the Liberty Livewire hierarchy enables Sonnenfeld and his colleagues to run Company 3 in the manner they see fit.
Robert Walston, president/COO of Liberty Livewire, notes that investing in companies means you invest in their people, allowing them to define themselves in the marketplace. "Company 3 is a great example," he assesses. "It’s a highly specialized film-to-tape and finishing operation geared to a targeted clientele. By being narrowly focused, it has attained excellence in the field. If you look at the post environment some years ago, you really didn’t have boutiques that had such a well-defined focus, because they needed diversity of business and revenue streams to support a lot of infrastructure and overhead. Corporately, we have that overhead spread across a number of companies, so that a Company 3 can hone in and simply focus on what it does best.
"Boutique operations can benefit from being part of a larger organization," Walston continues. "For instance, we have a staff of people at the corporate level who analyze directions of and movements in technology. We can offer guidance and direction in terms of technological trends. And through our overall relationships with major manufacturers, our companies get access to technology that some of their unaffiliated competitors can’t access as readily."
Liberty Livewire, part of the AT&T family, also has access to telecommunications resources. ("AT&T’s fiber infrastructure and its vision for a broadband-connected world gives us a leg up on most of the streaming media companies," says Walston.) Liberty Livewire additionally maintains strategic relationships with New York-based ACTV and other interactive television firms. "What this means for Company 3 and our other companies is they can be in on the ground floor of emerging forms of advertising," relates Walston. "Advertising could find itself imbedded in programming. The content in and of itself could be the advertising in a way. Models are changing. And along those lines, our companies—including Company 3—are becoming HDTV-enabled."
Sonnenfeld, co-founder/colorist Mike Pethel, and Walston—who was then CEO of Four Media Company (now under the Liberty Livewire umbrella)—launched Company 3 in ’98. Other key Company 3 artisans include director of visual effects Noel Castley-Wright, and colorists Dave Hussey and Billy Gabor.
Company 3 has evolved into a major spot player, a standing perhaps best illustrated by its Super Bowl track record of some 30 commercials, many scoring in the USA Today top 10 post-Super Sunday poll. Among the Super Bowl entries this year was a pair of spots that Sonnenfeld worked on for Mountain Dew out of BBDO New York: "Cheetah," helmed by Usher; and "Mock Opera," directed by Samuel Bayer of bicoastal Mars Media.
Besides the Super Bowl, other more recent Company 3 spot credits include Honda Odyssey’s "Sonogram," directed by Mark Pellington of bicoastal/international Propaganda Films via Rubin Postaer and Associates, Santa Monica; and Iomega’s "Pool," helmed by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal/international Partizan, out of Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco.
And Company 3 has started to make some significant forays into longform, as commercial directors cross over into features and look to bring some digital resources and talent from spots into the moviemaking arena. For example, Dominic Sena (repped for commercials via bicoastal Anonymous) brought in Sonnenfeld to help in the color-balancing act for the climatic car chase sequence in the feature Gone in 60 Seconds. Similarly, Sonnenfeld contributed to scenes in The Cell, directed by Tarsem (whose spot roost is bicoastal/international @radical. media). Tarsem and Sonnenfeld have had a longstanding spot relationship. Sonnenfeld was also involved in a number of shots for the Michael Bay-directed Pearl Harbor. Bay, who started out in spotmaking as well, recently exited Propaganda to form his own commercial house in conjunction with executive producer Scott Gardenhour (SHOOT, 9/22, p. 1).y
