Postproduction digital lab Spy Post, San Francisco, has added Smoke/ Flame artist Joe Wenkoff and lead designer Nancy Narimatsu. Wenkoff comes over from Bob ‘n Sheila’s Edit World, San Francisco, where he worked on spots for such clients as Nike, Budweiser, Yahoo and ZDTV. He also designed Web pages, with an emphasis on broadband entertainment for nichemusic. com and Star Media.
Narimatsu had been freelancing regularly for Spy Post. Now she comes on board as a staffer. Her expertise in product, graphic and digital design has been utilized by assorted companies and clients, including San Francisco-based animation studio Wild Brain. Spy Post, which had been based within the Wild Brain building, has moved to its own permanent studio space, also in the multimedia gulch area of San Francisco.
Marc Hochman, Spy Post’s executive producer/COO, related that "the time we spent under Wild Brain’s roof was invaluable. It not only allowed Spy Post to forge a deep friendship with the Wild Brain crew, but let us cut our teeth on some very complicated and high profile spots. But it was clear that, if we were to grow as a company, we needed to find our own identity."
Spy Post, however, plans to continue to work on projects out of Wild Brain as well as other shops. Most recently in collaboration with Wild Brain, Spy Post provided compositing and color correction for the opening sequence of Universal Pictures recently released The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and compositing for "Pass it On," a three-spot campaign for Sony Music Entertainment, airing exclusively on MTV. In the past year, Spy Post has finished a mix of commercial, corporate and e-commerce work. Spy Post’s spot clients have included Nike and Hershey’s. Besides Wild Brain, the post shop has collaborated with such San Francisco-area companies as editorial house FilmCore and production house kaboom.
Spy Post was founded in ’98 by editor Darren Orr and industry veteran Eric Hanson. While both continue to work closely on the creative and technical aspects of their clients’ projects, Orr serves as Spy Post’s chief creative/technical officer and Hanson is CEO/president. The company offers a complete postproduction pipeline, including offline editing with Avid’s Media Composer, visual effects with Jaleo HD and Discreet Logic’s Flint, and online finishing using both Jaleo and Smoke.
