Vancouver and its rich film industry. We have lots of productions being filmed here, and lots of productions also often mean lots of visual effects. That’s why it’s always important to have Visual Effects Artists who are able to make all the cool stuff and process it through some long render times. A lot of VFX artists work at home, and others come together in big communities. Recently, a new company from the US branched out here in Vancouver in hopes of expanding and bringing some more work opportunities to this town. I got an interview opportunity with some of the guys in charge of this great new addition to the film industry.
Michael Porterfield has been involved in the VFX industry in Vancouversince 1988 and has discovered Vancouver has grown in terms of film work. After some time in LA, he moved back to Vancouver with his wife and daughter to establish good work. Just a year ago, he got hired by Alkemy X and is now in charge of their new Vancouver branch. Mark Miller has worked with Alkemy X for years and was the reason Michael got hired. Together, the two dwelled on Alkemy X’s origins and what this new addition will mean for Vancouver. We had a long worthwhile conversation that I wish could’ve lasted even longer. As someone who doesn’t work much on visual effects, I really felt a connection with these two men. Anyways, here’s our discussion. Now would be a good time to render a file if you’re doing any VFX at the moment…
HNMAG: With a new expansion in Vancouver, what opportunities do you hope to bring to the VFX community?
Mark Miller: My brief overview of why we’re going there is our growth has been slow over the years. Our 30-year-old company rebranded itself into Alkemy X 5 years ago. We expanded into Los Angeles when I was added as EP for the company, and then we’ve been that way for 3 1/2 years. Then the time was right to incentivize and look at all the regions to expand in. Vancouver has become a hotspot for Hollywood-based for both feature films and episodic television work, which Michael’s been involved with for many years. With that, we weren’t really set up to do work yet in Canada, we’re moving forward with staffing at this point, and we will staff further. The opportunity for us is that growth has been rampant in this business for the last year, specifically with smaller companies combining to become giant companies. That has changed the market, so we need to be in other regions instead of just New York or LA because being in multiple places picks up the slack.
Michael Porterfield:
Since ’98 I’ve watched Vancouver grow the story of Hollywood North and it’s a story of building piece-by-piece, artist-by-artist, an incredible labour pool out here. When I first came onto Alkemy X, and met with Mark we talked about how obviously COVID has opened up new avenues to streaming and the demand for long and short format streaming has never been higher.. We realized Vancouver’s potential for this work, and since I am a dual US/Canadian citizen living in Vancouver, we could utilize the market and create a more artist-centric shop. Our Creative Director Jep Hill and I are friends, we work well together, and we try to keep the creative control and focus with the artists.I think that there’s also a rush for some mid-sized companies to kind of join up and go to a rapid-global expansion, but I don’t think that’s quite on our plate just yet. We’re really just going to focus more on a boutique feel, making sure that artists feel like they’re listened to and make sure that the artists are taken care of. We want to avoid using overtime as a part of the business role. So we are accessing the labour pool, making sure artists are being taken care of and growing our business with very experienced long-term veterans from the industry.
HNMAG: What are some of the advantages and benefits employees will get when joining Alkemy X?
Michael Porterfield: Being small, we’re able to have a tight-knit team of comp supervisors, we’re going to try really hard not to over-extend ourselves. I have heard from quite a few artists in the VFX industry noticing that VFX shops used to operate with gaps in time between projects. Soon, projects were lined back-to-back, and now companies book overlapping projects. So, sometimes you’d be working on two to three projects on top of one another. We are focused on avoiding that, and keeping our people fresh and ready for the challenge. I think that’s kind of the attractiveness of working at Alkemy X.
HNMAG: Will Alkemy X have a stage for motion capture and other resources? If so, what do you offer?
Michael Porterfield: We have resources on the US side, with our headquarters in Philadelphia, and perform quite a bit of production work in New York City. The work we’ve been doing in Philly and NYC consists of on-set production of commercials, episodics, and longer form work.. There’s such a history that we can offer, this isn’t just something we started from scratch. Our parent company has been doing this for decades, so we offer that real-world experience. We have a lot of history and resources to make sure what we’re creating here has legs and can go for the long run.
Mark Miller: We are a full-service company. We do commercial work, and have a post-production operation in Philadelphia, we also have a live-action group that does commercials all around the world, basically. These are things we have that we can offer that a lot of the other VFX companies simply can’t offer. We’ve been developing our company into an arena where some of our other services are applicable to what we do. We need B-Unit shooting, we have teams that can do that. If somebody needs editorial suites, we can do that. There are advantages to us and that won’t be in the Canadian market yet. We’re looking at all those services to go forward.
HNMAG: To keep up with the ever-increasing changes and updates in VFX software, how does Alkemy X stay up to date?
Michael Porterfield: We can change our technology more quickly. We’re going to take a quantum leap forward and leave our current pipeline behind. We are able to nimbly drop the old and bring in the new, and offer a VFX platform that only a handful of visual effects companies can offer right now. We’re working with our pipeline and the IT department has almost 100 years’ worth of experience now, and we’ve gathered a bunch of people we’ve recruited through SIGGRAPH, which was in Vancouver last fall. We’ve recruited some very special pipeline and engineering team members who are going to help us modernize our pipeline to compete with the bigger VFX companies.
Mark Miller: Exactly. We won’t delve on it too much on it at this point, but we will have announcements in the near future. Not only pipeline technology but the way that work is finished also. All that gives us another leg up and also a lot of the skilled and younger artists are attracted to that technology that makes their job easier. The smaller size is very helpful. I’ve run large Visual Effects companies and boutique ones, I had my own at one point so I kind of know where that split point is when you start getting above 150 artists. It’s hard to manage a company of that size, I’m not saying you can’t. Look around, there are hundreds of companies doing that but it becomes more difficult and your service to the clients becomes a little harder at times.
HNMAG: And how will you be able to benefit clients?
Mark Miller: Clients want companies to be fast, cheap, and good. They want to choose all three varieties of work and they can get that these days. That’s part of why we’re redesigning what we do. We can give them the opportunity to get their work done faster and give them more savings.
Michael Porterfield: The savings for us is that we’re going to get more work done remotely. We’re also not going to have to put money into the on-prem infrastructure that would be necessary with a more traditional system. In Vancouver’s market, I know that some of the shops are asking people to come back in. Our plan is obviously to stay remote with a robust infrastructure that’s only going to get better faster. It’s already pretty fast in my opinion, so artists will have something up to date which is very quick with the renders and very nimble and very clean. We’re not bringing a bunch of tech from pre-COVID with us. I think we’re pivoting at just the right time.
HNMAG: What future resources would you like Alkemy X will be able to provide in days to come?
Michael Porterfield: We’ve gone beyond pipelines and asked all the artists, “What did you like about your last workflow system at your previous job? What worked and what didn’t?” I think most in this profession are artists, even our tech people have an artistic flair. They like to see what they’re contributing to, so I think that’s something we can offer to the artists who come to work for us. We’re creating something with their input, they have a voice and a seat at the table,. We’re inclusive. We have already found several core members from the States and we’re about to sign up some Vancouver talent as well. It’s all moving forward and is all about the ability to voice your desires and concepts and ideas for a better working environment. We’re encouraging people to express.
Mark Miller: And to add to that, we’re also continually looking at current and future tech to decide what pieces that come out are able to do the incredible things. We look at virtual production, other areas of the projects, pre-vis, and those are things we will add as we go ahead. The way the pipeline has been designed now, integrating that becomes very easy.
Mark said the heads of Alkemy X are keeping a close eye on the development of tech now and on the horizon. AI is currently playing greatly into their desires and he says the reality is that AI has landed itself as a buzzword in many areas around the world. Michael added they’ve already got a client involved with higher streaming AI and from the sounds of it, it’s a pretty exciting project involving beauty and de-aging fixes. Now if only I could get something like that done on me in real life.
HNMAG: Aside from understanding VFX, what else does one need to qualify for a job at the new location?
Michael Porterfield: We’re a small company, and looking to get a range of voices. People who we have recently hired have been from all different areas, some from outside the United States.We are interested in people with multidisciplinary backgrounds. I think definitely for the pipeline and engineering departments, they’re still looking for people who have the special talent to be technical and artistic at the same time. 2D, we’re looking for people who have more experience in a longer format, as we do a lot of episodic work. We’re pursuing more longer format west-coast type of work, but at this point, we work on so many different things. We employ some Flame artists, we employ Houdini artists, we employ Maya, we’re rendering Arnold. There’s so much variety, so we’re looking for people who can bring experience and there’s SO much experience in Vancouver. We’d love to talk to people and just see how they can fit into our system.
Mark Miller: And we generally have our core group, those are made up of real industry veterans and we are still looking for them, whether they are producers, visual effects supervisors, leads, whatever they are. That is the core hire that we look at, and then we augment that with freelance and we bring in these people as we have them. They’re able to bring in the cream of the crop when it comes to freelancers.
HNMAG: Alkemy X is mainly located in areas of the United States. Why was it decided to move to a new location in Canada?
Mark Miller: As clients relocate, we’re not always chasing them but without question, a lot of the clients we’re shooting in Atlanta, and if you go to Canada it’s full of clients as well. If there’s no place to shoot, there’s no place to post so that was always the case with Vancouver and then there was a shift to the East coast and now they’ve come back. We see that opportunity, and an expansion in Vancouver has always been significant and we have a big operation on the west coast as well. Regardless of where in the world things are happening, especially the episodic world, a lot of long-form, it originates still in Los Angeles so usually, the post is coming back here. Visual Effects can stay where they are, shooting stays where they are, Vancouver offers another great west-coast expansion where we probably would hold off on the east coast of Canada for now. That doesn’t mean we won’t go there as well, but it’s a pretty full marketplace right now.
HNMAG: Will there be more Canadian expansions? Possibly in Toronto or Montreal?
Michael Porterfield: Always looking at Montreal, but for now that’s just something that we’re looking at. All of those things are on our radar, but only once we’re established and know that that makes sense to expand there.
HNMAG: Do you find that you establish healthy relationships with clients?
Mark Miller: Absolutely. The company as a whole, we definitely do. We have clients that date back years and rarely think about going anyplace else so that I think our base has been growing pretty rapidly over the last few years.
Michael Porterfield: A company like this doesn’t last 30+ years by not learning lessons about how clients wish to be served and I think the fact is I’ve seen plenty of small companies start up and blow up and disappear. Even companies I’ve worked with before have had implosions at the upper management level that were just unforeseen and unbelievable and then the company’s gone. We know the pitfalls and such, so we try to keep the clients centre of our focus and do everything we can to meet their needs as well as meet our artist’s needs. We’re not a big faceless corporation, we get to know and see each other as much as possible, even in the era of COVID. That’s one of the more bigger challenges of having a remote network of people, you don’t have an opportunity to get together, stand at someone’s desk and discuss a shot in person. This remote workflow has certainly unlocked the artists and that’s certainly one of the great things about Vancouver is there already were a huge amount of artists who have great experience in this labour pool and we are able to offer them more work.
Mark Miller: One of the things that we do is that we try to partner up with our clients very early on in the process and quite often we’re not order takers. Our visual effects supervisors, Michael and everyone else in the organization has a tremendous breath of creative knowledge so when we bring a project in, they will quite often turn to us and ask us about best approaches. They’re not telling us how to do it and often we do what they tell us. We’re trying to be collaborative with them, and help them sometimes even from the script stage.
Michael Porterfield:
My experience of Alkemy X is that a lot of collaborationflows from the commercial side. Because the shoots are smaller, they’re more intimate, shorter time span, the visual effects companies can go into the production and partner with the creation of the idea when it’s in script form. That sort of flows through the visual effects department as well. We want to be talking to them about what’s the best way to do this, and offer to do some tests for them so I think that’s an advantage of having a company around for a while and having a production arc. Those lessons really flow right through us.
HNMAG: And have you managed to get some Canadian clients as of yet?
Mark Miller: No, this is our first foray into it, but we’ve had quite a bit of interest and the work will flow up there pretty quickly. We’ve got one project right now that will be done there.
HNMAG: And what kind of projects do you hope will come out of this new expansion?
Mark Miller: It’ll be a mix of episodic, and long-form, but many of the movies that are done today are purely for shooting at the end of the day so we’re working on a few of those now.
Michael Porterfield: There’s an interesting change in terminology that’s been going on. In the past, you think episodics, it’s going to be shown on one of the three big major networks in the US. Now an episodic can be streaming with Marvel content. It’s basically a Marvel film broken into 8 pieces. Quality levels do not change, and I’ve worked on plenty of Marvel in my time and respect their adherence to quality and any of these are not really traditional episodics as we had thought of them in the past. The game has changed and we entered the Canadian market to change with the game to try and broaden what we can bring to our company and to new markets and our clients who are also looking for those same advantages.
Did you learn a lot from that interview? Do you want to see what else Alkemy X has been up to? Well guess what, there’s a website that showcases a whole lot of their best accomplishments. But all you VFX people, be prepared as well. There just might be a job for you over there, and all you folks looking for some professionals should consider hiring this great new company in Vancouver for all your VFX needs. Speaking of VFX, has that file finished rendering by now?
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