A major telecine commitment is being made in San Francisco, a market where the norm has been for ad agency producers and creatives to shuttle to Los Angeles and other cities for high-end film-to-tape transfer. Designed to keep more of that Bay Area agency work at home is Retina, a telecine/ finishing house slated to formally open later this month. The facility is nestled in San Francisco’s South Beach area, one block from Pacific Bell Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.
The new $2.8 million studio represents a significant investment in hardware and talent—the lead artisan being senior colorist Dave Pickett, who built his reputation at such shops as R!OT and POP, both in Santa Monica, then returned to his native Atlanta in 1999 to join Crawford Communications. The hiring of Pickett caps Retina’s exhaustive search for a marquee colorist, a position critical to the company’s viability.
Credits for Pickett while in Santa Monica included spots for such clients as Infiniti, Gatorade, Carta Blanca Beer, Coors Light, Visa, Budweiser and HBO work promoting The Sopranos. During his Crawford tenure, Pickett continued to work on spots, while getting the opportunity to gain experience in high definition (HD). He won a ’01 Monitor Award for best color correction in documentaries on the strength of an HD project, the Treasure Seekers: Tibet’s Hidden Kingdoms episode of the National Geographic television series. Pickett worked on all 13 episodes of the Treasure Seekers series.
Among his other endeavors at Crawford were a Cingular Wireless spot, "Rude Cell Phone Guy" for BBDO Atlanta, which called for 1080 24P transfer for theatrical release; and a Coca-Cola commercial, "Generations," out of McCann-Erickson, New York, which entailed 1080 24P transfer as part of worldwide distribution in NTSC, PAL and HD. Pickett additionally worked on spots for Volvo, the U.S. Marines, Toyota, ESPN and AT&T Broadband.
Among the factors drawing Pickett to Retina is "the chance to be involved in a business that’s being built from the ground up, in a market where high caliber agency clients are looking for A-1 imagery."
technical prowess
Pickett’s mix of extensive experience in spots and HD dovetails nicely with the technical resources at Retina. The company’s transfer suite is home to Thomson’s Spirit Telecine equipped with both standard and HD output capability. The color corrector is a da Vinci 2k Plus with multiple power windows and defocus.
The studio also features a Quantel iQ HD finishing and compositing suite. Retina is the first company in Northern California to acquire the iQ, which offers what Quantel describes as "resolution co-existence" technology. This feature means that no matter what format and resolution the source material is in (SD, HD, computer files, 2k, etc.), the system can work with it on the same timeline, in real time.
"There is no need to convert or compress, so there is never any loss of quality," contends Eric Thorne, VP of sales for Quantel, which is headquartered in Newbury, U.K. "The iQ also makes versioning transparent and exceedingly fast. It also excels at both the production of the 24P master and the creation of all the multiple versions on the fly, something Retina saw as an important function of its business model."
Per that business model, the telecine suite will, for example, be able to do traditional scene select transfers for output to digibeta in standard definition—and will also be stored in HD via the iQ; therefore, the material will always be available in HD for future needs. Retina’s management reasons that with the cost of consumer HD television sets continuing to drop, and advertising looking to new venues (i.e. movie theaters) for their ads, HD will become more desirable and affordable.
As SHOOT went to press, Retina was in the process of hiring an iQ artist. The studio has already secured a nighttime colorist, Chris Martin, who will work on a freelance basis. His last staff position was at Varitel Video, San Francisco, where he spent five years before exiting about a year ago. (Varitel’s San Francisco operation closed last November.)
During the past year, the San Francisco-based Martin has come down to Southern California to freelance at R!OT Santa Monica for several of his clients. Martin says that he may occasionally tap into that freelance relationship with R!OT on select projects for his clientele, but that the bulk of his time will be spent at Retina. Martin’s credits include national GMC spots directed by Marcus Stokes of Big Trout Pictures, San Francisco, for the Carol H. Williams Agency, Oakland, Calif., and music videos for The Donnas that have been featured on MTV.
Also coming aboard Retina is executive producer Rob Lazarus, who’s perhaps best known to the commercial community during his time at now defunct Fleet Street Pictures. While producing spots at that San Francisco shop, he also specialized in facilitating ads directed by ad agency personnel. Later, he segued into the technology sector. His coming aboard Retina marks his return to the Bay Area production/ post scene.
Agency feedback
Retina is the brainchild of owner Scott Williams, an industry veteran who’s well known as an editor/ designer/entrepreneur at Flipside Editorial, San Francisco. Retina is totally separate from Flipside, which also maintains a Santa Monica shop.
A little more than a year ago, those testing the industry waters for Retina asked San Francisco agency heads of production for their thoughts on the prospective launch of such a facility. The feedback was overwhelmingly favorable, particularly since longstanding post house Western Images had recently closed (SHOOT, 10/19/01, p. 1). At the time, Jim Bogner, executive producer/ director of broadcast production at DDB San Francisco, wrote in response: "I can express with a fair amount of certainty that my associates and I would welcome and utilize a high caliber telecine in San Francisco."
"The proposed system [Spirit], level of talent, high quality of design, and convenient location of the proposed facility are the elements that make such a facility desirable," wrote Rob Thomas, senior VP/senior producer, Foote, Cone & Belding, San Francisco. "Add to the lack of local facilities the current reticence to fly and inconvenience of air travel security delays, even merely to L.A., and it seems the time is ripe for a new film-to-tape facility in S.F."
Indeed, Retina’s Lazarus is bullish on the company’s future and its role in retaining as well as drawing business to the Bay Area. "With HD beginning to show up on the radar," relates Lazarus, "I expect Retina to not only keep telecine work from traveling south to L.A., but also to be able to attract the burgeoning HD community to come to San Francisco."
