Welcome to Vancouver! We’ve got quite a great film scene happening… among other things. But despite all the flaws that I supposedly hinted about without being too specific, Vancouver is awesome in regards to film work. It’s how I formed this website, got some work experience, and eventually became something of a local due to how frequently I come out there. According to Ingo Lou, everyone knows me. You’d think as the guy with the website, but according to several people, I’m the guy with the hat. (No, not John Reviewer)
But back to the film industry, it’s happening here and it’s incredible. So incredible that most times people from the United States come up to do film work here. Sometimes they move or expand their companies here. Recently, a company called Foxtrot X-Ray has arrived, and they’re settling in well here because they already have connections in Vancouver, which is handy to find work to get started. Foxtrot X-Ray is already getting some work with another company who has treated them like true team members. The project is currently being made as you read this, but I’ll have more to say on it later. Or rather, Paul DeNigris will.
I got to know our new neighbours by asking Paul questions about the plan and what’s happening currently. Get comfortable and read on. These folks are pretty comfortable already.
HNMAG: So you’ve recently established an office in Vancouver. Why did you choose to move here?
Paul DeNigris: Well, because we (over the last 5 years operating) have really made a good number of repeat clients in Vancouver. The film industry is vibrant, always growing, and it’s been great. We have a post-production facility there that we’ve developed a really good relationship with, and they refer a number of their clients to us for visual effects work. It just made sense for us to provide visual effects services to Vancouver clients, as a local entity instead of a foreign entity so that our Vancouver clients can continue to qualify for their post-production incentives and things like that. We’re providing a service and already have folks in that neck of the woods that like us, so we might as well make it easier for them to hire us.
HNMAG: You must have a lot of business partners in this country as well, are any of them going to work alongside you from now on?
Paul DeNigris: Yeah, we’ve been partnered with a production company called Helpful Hands Productions out of Vancouver. A lot of the Vancouver work has kind of cycled through them to us. We’re going to be continuing our relationship with them and our hope is that by having our own entity as well as Helpful Hands representing us, we’ll be able to reach even more clients and work on even more cool projects. That strategic relationship is going to be more important.
HNMAG: Will Foxtrot X-Ray be expanded to other provinces as well?
Paul DeNigris: Right now the plan was basically for British Columbia, because of the film and tv industry there. I love Toronto, I lived in Buffalo NY for almost 10 years and was always going to Toronto. LOVED Toronto, have a great collaborator that lives in Toronto now and she used to live in Nova Scotia. Eventually expansion to Ontario seems like a no-brainer but we’re going to see how the Vancouver operation develops before we commit to that. I have a regular freelance compositor who I work with who lives in Quebec, so he’ll continue to be part of our operation in Canada even though he’s not in Vancouver. I have a number of compositors in Vancouver who I’ve hired in a year or so. I feel like I have good in-roads to the Canadian Visual Effects labour pool that’s there and it’ll continue to grow.
HNMAG: There’s also an opportunity of delivering exceptional results to clients as well, can you expand on how that will be done?
Paul DeNigris: Yeah, I’m an Indie filmmaker by heart, I’m a kind-of filmmaker who basically came up having very little money/resources and always had to find creative solutions to things. It was technology or elbow-grease or being smart about them, leveraging the resources we had. That’s kind of the model that Foxtrot X-Ray has been operating on, trying to do more with less, so we don’t have physical offices. All of us work at our own places, we’re always learning and growing, I’m always sending my team we’re training and things like that. We’re always looking for things about AI and machine learning tools and stuff like that. They really are sort of becoming the big boogie-men in the VFX industry like people are saying. They’re afraid AI is going to eliminate jobs and my feeling is AI is not going to eliminate jobs and AI is going to make the jobs easier, faster, more efficient, more economical. To me, it’s all about keeping the team small, but keeping them always growing in terms o skillset and embracing tech and using that mindset of how can we get every last ounce of production value out of the budget to bring it up on screen.
HNMAG: You said you have a small team. What will your facilities consist of?
Paul DeNigris: In Vancouver right now I’ve got one full-time employee, who will be representing us as an on-set visual effects supervisor and compositor. Like I said, I’m keeping overhead real small, so we’re sort of a guerilla unit. We’re not a giant army like you might expect from bigger visual effects companies, and so just by keeping that overhead low is how we’re going to be able to provide those exceptional results with economic savings in mind. For now, it’s just one employee, and then it’s going to be freelancers as productions ramp up, then the team will ramp up. The size of the team will always be dependent on the work that’s there, the clients that come to us, the number of jobs we have going at any given time. Eventually down the road, there will be more people that come on full-time and eventually if the company grows and it makes sense, then we’d open a facility.
HNMAG: What kind of technology and software do you use?
Paul DeNigris: We are predominantly a Nuke compositing company, Nuke is a node-based compositor. It’s the industry standard for film and television compositing. Of course, we still use some After Effects, we do a lot of motion design and After Effects is really geared for that. Then I have In-House Cinema 4D animators and then as needed, I bring on more animators, and we use Unreal Engine for real time rendering, Pre-Vis, even some finishing shots. We recently delivered a bunch of Unreal Engine shots for several movies, and it’s becoming an indispensable tool for us, it’s predominantly a game engine but it’s really exceptional at creating film quality renders on stock desktop computers.
Paul also explained the reason for such a small amount of workers is because Foxtrot X-Ray operates on the COVID model where everyone works from home, as this business has been doing since they started in 2018. It worked so well in the US, and it seems to have worked so well if it stretched out to here, so they’re doing the right thing so far. But what about in the future? I asked him.
HNMAG: So you plan to have offices in Vancouver or are things okay as they are?
Paul DeNigris: I’m open to it, but it’s going to depend on how things grow. I could definitely see us at some point perhaps. Whether it’s the post-production business we partner with now, or another post-house I can see us doing something where we’re renting a bay in an established post-house. My goal is to not put the cart before the horse and set up a 40,000 square foot facility which I’ll then have to pay for. Because then the clients have to ultimately pay for that. The idea is build the clients base, keep the footprint small, live and flexible. Just grow as the market demands.
HNMAG: What kind of people will you be taking on to hire to your team?
Paul DeNigris: For right now, it would be Nuke compositors, and Unreal Engine layout animation artists and probably depending on the projects that come, probably 3D modellers and animators who are kind of software agnostic. Somebody uses Blender, great. Somebody uses 4D, great. We don’t really have a dedicated pipeline that says we have to use one or the other. We’re very flexible that way.
HNMAG: You already have a project ready to go called “Cry From the Sea”. Can you tell us more about it?
Paul DeNigris: Cry From the Sea is an Irish-Canadian co-production, it’s going before cameras in the next few weeks in Ireland. I am remote VFX supervisor on that with Sepia Films, we’ve worked on a number of projects with them in the past. When normally we don’t start work with them until post-production, but because we’ve already established a relationship with them, this is a project they knew they wanted to get VFX input before they shot so that they would know what we’re capable of bringing to the project, and what they are capable of essentially pushing into post-production. This project has to do with a lighthouse keeper and it takes place in a turn-of-century in Ireland, the lighthouse that they’re using, that they like has been modernized. We’re going to sort of dial it back to the way it was 100 years ago. It’s not super close to the village that they want to shoot in, so we’ll be doing some matte paintings that bind the lighthouse and village in one shot that helps the audience understand the geography. We’re having to create the film’s reality, so it was very smart of them to say “We need VFX right up front at the script stage before we go to the cameras.”
Paul says his team is really excited and even mentioned how the director is a multi-award winning filmmaker visionary and all around great guy. Pretty soon, Foxtrot X-Ray will be doing all the post-production out here.
HNMAG: Are you hoping for lots more projects to come in even with the strike that is going on?
Paul DeNigris: Yeah, of course. The two strikes, the SAG strike and the Writer’s Guild strike have been hurting my American operation. Canadian operation is… we do a lot of Hallmark Christmas movies for the Vancouver market, and so far the Christmas movies are starting on time so we’re actually in post on the first one of the season: Mistletoe Connection. We do 6-8 Christmas movies for the Vancouver market, between now and the end of November so I’m anticipating we’ll have similar demand there. Those aren’t really affected by the strikes.
HNMAG: What other kinds of projects are coming in currently due to the strike? Are you seeing a lot of commercials?
Paul DeNigris: We tend to be more focused on film and television projects. Commercials come up occasionally, my operation here in Arizona is working on a commercial project for the Arizona State Government now. But those are sort of few and far between, we have a few marketing clients that we do animation for. That’s not super relevant to the operation in Vancouver.
HNMAG: What projects do you hope to take on in the future?
Paul DeNigris: I’m a massive sci-fi fan, in fact I have the logo for Stargate SG1 tattooed on my arm, which is a sci-fi show filmed in Vancouver for a long time. I would love to land one of those sci-fi franchises that’s filmed there. Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, any one of those because science fiction is my life blood and what I watch and consume in entertainment. We’ll take our Vancouver Christmas movies for now and hope to grow that out to serve more clients and work on more and more cool projects.
Go ahead, check out their site. Maybe even consider them for future work. You’ll have a smooth business relationship with them.