Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

00 Feb 2001

Luminetik Interview

Background

AFR How did Luminetik get started?

AA It actually started as a collaboration between Kevin, I and two animators in the beginning. Basically Keven has a background in architecture for the last tweny years and...Mark and Sean are character animators that collaborated with Kevin on some architecture projects. And they saw that there was much more in their architectural skill base so they expanded.

AFR How long ago was that?

AA Three years ago.

AFR Now your background is a little different. Can you talk about and how you came into Luminetik?

AA I came into Luminetik when I realized that visual effects, animation or even architectural renderings require someone who understands the technical side of the business. And I ran a technial consulting business both on the Macitnosh and PC side for four years. So I understood the mraket, the technoclaoy and the consmer base and how technology is changing on the cutting edge. So basically I was able to bring new technology into Luminetik and adn change the pipeline so we could be more cost effective.

AFR Was your background in terms of your consulting bix focused on 3D firms?

AA yes, I had quite a few of those, special effects adn ad agencies background. Ad agencies also use 3D and 2D software.

AFR Now you also have Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) in your background. Can you talk about that or you bound by an NDA or something like that?

AA No. I know I can't really talk about that.

Types of Projects

AFR OK. Let's shift gears a bit. What types of projects lauched the firm three years ago?

AA Well, Kevin was stil doing architecture [3D} but he was adding, like, his little flair like having character animators design little characters for his architecture scenes, and he started collaboring with the character animators and using his visual layout skills==and architecture becomes a layout in the cumputer animatin, and combining the two skills to give realistic looking environments.

And as time went by the collaborated on a few animated shorts, they worked on a few projects related to designing games. And they worked on a 3D interactive Web page for Hewlett-Packard

AFR Was there a particular project that really gave you the sense that Luminetik was going to really take off?

AA Well...basically I learned a couple of things working at Luminetik. You know when we first started there was only four of us, and with just four people there was very limited work that we could do, But several companies were calling us like Nickalodean, HBO, TIme-Warner, VH1...and they were asking us, you know, to work on projects that we didn't hvae the personell to do. So we realized at that time that we eitehr had to grow as a company so we could take on this type of work, or we couldn't do it.

And so, as far as a business plan, it didn't make any sense not to grow because we wanted to be in a financially better area.

AFR Sure.

AA So...what we did is put out an ad and started recruiting and found some of the best animators, ,modeliers, people in architecture and started interview them. And we went through 400 people...

AFR Wow

AA And we came out with the top 10 percent. And once we put together the teams were also putting together the real and we were looking at everybody's work. And when we saw taht, this database of work, we realized that there was a huge oportunity here in New York City. Because for a long time advertising agencies, film companies, broadcast people have beein going to LA, because they like LA pipeline. They like the way LA does the work, they like the way LA does the business.

And we wanted to give New York--the East coast-- an LA like pipeline. Where they could talk to somebody here who had that type of experience, taht type of way of dealing with clients, and also an understanding of the technology, the busins and the amrekt.

AFR Isn't New York a growing community of digital specialist?

AA I would say yes but a lot of peple put a lot of emphasis on the Internet, and it turned out to be a big mistake, because if you walk around Chelsey right now where most of Silicon Alley was based, all it is is empy buildings. And I think that a lot of people who were getting int the technology business..you know, the Itnernet companies paid outrageous salaries but couldn't afford to pay those salaries and people who had Flash animation skills all of a sudden thought they were animators and had this ability to do high-end stuff and the reality is they couldn't. And when the market fell out, all of a sudden there were $90 an hour people who were unemployeed who were looking for animation jobs but these people were like Flash animators.

AFR Sure...

AA As far as like 3D, 3D in New York has always been very very hobbled...there hasn't been a lot of real 3D emphasis in New York. There really isn many companies here that do it. I would say that BlueSky Studios in White Plains is sort of Pixar-like, and they recently doing a Twentieth Centerur Fox film called IceAge and tehy do really really beautiful work and they jsut won an Oscar for a little short called Bunny.

CuriousPictures at one time did a lot of animation work but the quality of thier work has actualy gown down. And basically becaus they hire Interns rather than realy experienced adn talented teams they don't get the quality of work that you should do. Other companes spend so much on overhead and offices that they can't hire the talent.

AFR Right.

AA We wanted to form a different type of business model where we would try to keep the overhead down, we would look at every type of technology that we could so that we coulld find someting that we can use and not have to use or develop proprietary software for we could save money for the client.

And wanted to streamline the pipeline so that we didn't have 15 copies of Maya and also 15 copies of Softimage and only one person using them. And we also wanted a smaller boutique style house because in many of the special effects houses people don't communicate very well and...you know you've got one team working something, and you have another team workign on something, but there's not somebody in the middle really communicating the ideas well, and so when tehy come together with their shots tehy don't match.

AFR Right, I understand that well from the architecture field too.

AA And we found thing that was very interesting, in that there is always six people--you know with usually about $300,000 in salaries--doing a job. So we decided that we wanted to create a new super-animator who can do all those things. And rather than paying six guys each at $50,000 we wanted to pay another guy $75,000-$100,000 who can do all of it. And also streamline our pipeline while doing it.

AFR. So your firm is quite unique then. Now can you tell me a little bit about the market in NY. What types of clients are you going after?

AA We are doing a lot of things. We decided that doing films, for example is not a great money maker. People who are doing film work are running at a loss or breaking even. So we decided were going to be a 3D company.

People that do Photoshop do Photoshop for everything, right?

AFR Right.

AA There's not this, 'oh, you do photoshop for advertising, you do photoshop for film', they do photoshop. So we decided we have Maya, Lightwave 2D/3D artist, and they are not just people who can wrok on one medium. So we decided that we would explore the marekt of gaems, web 3D...as it grows, commecials, and films.

But we don't want to do 300 shots of a film because we cna't see how a company makes money doing 300 shots, We just want to do five. Becuse if you do five shots you can make more money then if you are doing 300.

AFR. Is that also a factor of just small or large a firm is?

AA Yes, but its also overhead doing all those shots, because it becomes a bigger headache, it becomes an assembly line. And if you think about at some point the shots are not worth $50,000 a person. That type of overhead is a little crazy.

AFR Let's move on to some of the people of Luminetik.

AFR Is Gaming the most lucrative market out right now for 3D?

AA I would say commercials and games. Quite a few architects end up working at special effects houses because of the fact that it pays well. And thier experience is actualy used more expensively than in architecture, and it provides them a creative avenue more than an engineering avenue I would say.

AFR Now you started with architecture, obvioulsy Kevin's experience started with that side, are yous till open to and exceptign those types of commissions?

AA Oh yah, yes we are.. We are totally interested and we would like to take architecture into the next thing, the future, even find new technologie to do new thigns with the field. including things on the web and gaming. In fact, we hve a technical staff that actually supports architects, including Mike Boyle, Kevin, and myself.

AFR, Now you have one famous architect clients, Maya Lin. What kinds of things have you done with here?

AA Let's have Kevin talk about that one.

AFR Sure.

KC We were just actually doing previous ones. That were related to landscape architecture and it was more for a visualization of lighting design.

AFR I see.

KC I do a lot of renderings in Lightscape. In that case we actually wound up building a physical model as well. They were more hands on. It was the Grand Rapids Michagan Pavilion. That was about two years ago.

She had this idea of taking the midnight sky on the Millenium and placing it in the ground, using fiber optics under the ice, so the concept required us to find a software -- which we actually used Starry Night, to calcuate the star calculation of the sky, put that into ArchiCAD, and then map into onto workign drawings so that they could actually build it that way.

AFR Wow,

KC, Which is a little unusual...(laugher). It was kind of like usign a Pict image then tracing it as a Vector drawing and turning into a schematic design to actually construct it.

KC the image we sent you is actually a kind f a conceptual design of what the lightfall would be, the feel that she was looking for.

Background questions

AFR How well did an architectural education prepare you for your job as a 3D specialiist?

KC Umm, actually really well. When I was in school== I went to Temple in Philadelphia==we had the first computer design studio, which I think was in 86', Although not all of the teachers really excepted it at the time. It was supported by certain teachers and we were doing full blown 3D, animations and lighting, the whole deal.

All of the tools, the same toolset crosses over to 3D animation really. Animators are much looser than architecture people so you wind up being more detail oriented or more lighting oriented, which is good because the animator people are more organic orented, which is good because it makes for a good combination. It helps keep the detail up.

AFR You started your career as an architect. How has that transtion been for you? What has that been like crossing over to 3D from traditional architecture practice?

KC Its been weird because I took a transition and did some 3D renderings and then because of these 3D renderings mostly on the architectural side, I wound up getting desgin work working for designers on the architectural side, and now back into the high-end 3D side. It kind of flip flopps

It's not that we are just doing just animations, we are doing high-end design too, because the tools are so easy to visualize these designs. I just got project where an architect said, give ma a 17 story high rise conceptually, because he saw what we could do and we respected his design, I think, and we came up with something without any opinion from him at all....

AFR I see.

KC which is nice, and so we were basiciallytaking a designers ideas and putting them into 3D so they could see them.

AFR With Lumentik, where do you want to go with architectural 3D?

KC Uhm, we're trying to give architects the ability to have the full blown animated techniques that you can go with film and broadcast for the architectural projects. The typical architectural walkthroughs are typically very low end compared to the CG effects world, but we could bring them up to the film level, giving them the ability to have real interactive-animated parts of the building and people walking and full blown effects than just cardboard cutouts kind of stuck inside a montage of PHotoshop. Which has kind of been the standard now.

For us we are trying to stay above the curve. So we are going ot make things more realistic, like if its a bridge, we use animated water with running cars moving across it.

AFR Right, kind of otherwise bring these otherwise static images to life?

KC Right. Which totally changes...when you move and see this transition over time, or the sun changing or things like the it totally changes your perception of the space.

AFR What kind of tools will you be using to do that kind of work?

KC We have a pipeline of a bunch of things. On the CAD side we defintely use ArchiCAD, that's are main stay, which we use on the Macintosh. We have Lightwave on the Mac, we have, other than the PC, ArchiCAD goes into to Lightscape very well, as far as rendering.

The animation side really comes more from Lightwave and Maya. Then we wind up compositing effects together in a post situtation...

AFR I see..

KC So which is actually Final Cut now.

AFR So you have moved to Final Cut Pro?

KC Ya, basically its awesome!

AFR What were you using before for these compositing effects?

KC After Effects and Premier [Adobe products]

AFR I see...

KC Which are still good, I know them better than Final Cut, but with Final Cut we just got a Matrox MT Card for the Mac...it's what you can do for a $10,000 system for $1000 now.

AFR Wow.

KC It's awesom! Its a breakout box, you can put it to you DV tapes, put it on your monitor. It's amazing what you can do with it.

AFR Do you find that more of your architectural clients are intersted in that type of dynamic rendering jobs?

KC We were asked about a week ago to do on the Web, a rotablel island with all the buildings built on to it, so you cna zoom around the isalnd and see this world...but the tools to do that are really pushhing thte enveleope. Just to calculate that stuff before was insane.

That's the kind of stuff that people are starting to ask for. They see this stuff in the films and they automatically assume you can do that on the desktop. So we are tying ot meet the need as best as possible, but a lot of it is educating the client about time and budget.

AFR Sure. That makes a lot of sense. Let's talk a bit about your process now. When you get a typical CG project, what the the major steps involved?

KC On the architectural side?

AFR No, on the non architectural side. Let's take the non-architectural side because most I think most Architosh readers, or half of them at least, understnad the architecural side very well.

KC Ok.

AFR Can you talk about the non-architectural project. How do you begin? What are the key steps invovled?

KC Nine times out of ten there is large amounts of photography involved. Because you either need texture maps, large backgrounds or actual physical objects depending on what you are doing.

Then we try to story-board the project. If it is an animation we wil sketch out some kind of sequence of key shots, key frames, so along the way we have some sense of what the animation will look like.

Then model it, take the those textures from the photogrpahy process, overlay them on the models, and test different paths in the animation. And usually the client gets involved very early..and alot of times the client is designing a long he way.

So there is always this dynamic along the way between teh deign the and the end project. Which is good and bad, from the design side good, but it tends to slow the production along the way.

Then we do the rendering, which is very time consuming and then the compositing and post-production work.

AFR Now do you guys do you own photography in the initial steps?

KC Yes.

AFR You do it in-house?

KC We were doing it out-of house, but the thing about 3D is that you have to be very specific about how you photograph things. so by the time you communicate this to the photographer -- and with the cots of digital cameras we have now, knowing how to photogprah is half the battle. So a lot of times its better to have the perosn actually doing the mCG work to take the pictures.

AFR Now are your 3D people proficient at Final Cut Pro or do you have specialists for post-production work?

KC We have two kinds that are doing most of the editing, while everyone else is stickin to the 3D side. But we try to make sure everyone knows a little bit aobut everything, but they have one or two little specialty.

KC But again, animation is so different than post, or video editing, its better to have some animated background person doing the post, because tehe is so many different veariables, like compression, or frame rates which are so much different than video.

AFR What is the yellow tower project?

KC That is an art installation in a 10,000 car parking garage

Technology at Luminetik

AFR Why is Luminetik primarily a Mac-based studio?

AA It's cost effective, they are easy to use, they are esasy to configure...uhm, as far s in teh pipeline they save us money. The clients can actually use the m easily, for example, if they have to send us something over the Internet and they are workign on something elses, they are easier to work with other people with it.

Mike Boyle

AFR

MB The Mac suits are needs for getting teh job done quickly and easily. I mean, that's one reason. We use whatever we need to get the job done, its just that with ArchiCAD and some of the other 3D things that we do, run wel on the Mac, and the Mac is much easier to maintain and support.

AFR IS really then economics that are driving the whole issue or is there more to it than that?

MB I don't know if it is economics...its more of just ease of support. For us, on the Mac there is not the level of driver issues and support nightmares that there are on teh PC, it's just so much more transparent in terms of plug-and-play. You put something in there and it works. There is nothing to load...you know. The number of issues we have on teh Macs is drastically less than we have on the PC's.

AFR I see.

MB Especially with these higher end apps like Lightwave and everything else...

AFR Now you are using Unix, NT and the Mac OS. How would you rank these platforms in terms of being up for you when they need them.

MB Well....ah, Unix is 99% of the time is always there, Very very rarily do we have problems with those machines, which they are mostly the servers which we don't do much on. In terms of worksstations, the Macs are defintely...up times are much higher than the PC's. It's alwyas something crazy with the PC's, weather its a video card or a network card that is nonstandard. We try to stay with standard configurations as much as possible to ease that. But boy, I will tell that we just have many less problems with the Macs in than the PCs in terms of uptime, long term.

AFR Right, Now you have some Unix servers, how are you guys configured to store you files while you work and then archiving them later?

MB Well...actually a couple of Mac servers primarily.

AFR Really?

MB Ya (laughter)...Once again, they are maintenancewise they are very easy, and they support all the major platforms in terms of clients, uhm. adn they are really easy, there is no downtime in terms of those.

In terms of archiving we use all kinds of stuff. it realy depends on the proejct. If it is video we will archive it to multipel DV or somethignwe will use DVD-RAM for archiving. A lot of CD-R archiving too. And DLT tapes as well. It really depends on the jobs.

AFR So what are you using Unix machines for?

MB Well, web server.

AFR OK, That makes sense.

MB Just Linux stuff on Intel hardware, well actually its AMD, Web server stuff with Apache. Pretty standard things. We don't erally use it for the file sharing thing.

We are also starting to look at the render farm stuff. And we will probably end up with Unix on that end as well.

AFR As a render farm?

MB Ya, just because the hardware is so cheap.If the performance is good.

AFR I wanted to ask why the 3D world has become so dominated by NT when teh Mac was originally a very strong player along with Unix before NT wasn't even around. Why do you think NT came up so fast?

MB Well...in terms of the bleeding edge, NT is still the only way to go. In fact, there are some Wildcat cards, soem really really high-end OpenGL cards that are only for NT. You know, IF that is what you are doing all day long, I can understand why somonee would want to go that route, performance wise NT still eclipses teh Mac for some things,

but in terms of actually being productive with teh Machines though, We just found that people with the Mac tend to get more work done. It's not a question of the performanc e of the machien but performance of the person. We've got Lightwave and some other stuff running ont eh Macs that just work. We just really don't have issues with it.

There are a lot of places that do use that higher end NT stuff, and they seem to get good results but we seem to being doing quite well.

AFR Is Lumentik's pipeline with Macs typical or a-typical of most 3D studios?

AA Most 3D studioes are not really using Macintosh right now. ANd the reason why they are not using Macintosh seems to be a lack of education. For example, when I was a other special effects house, another PC guys, who was a Lightwave guy actually told me that he did not realize that Elastic Reality ran on the Macitnosh. But it actually started on the Mac. So its primarily education.

We've managed to do a little bit of feedback to Apple Computer to make them aware of the the 3D market as far as its growth and potential because currently in the PC market or all hardware market and software, teh consumer and buisness markets are down adn so are the inernet markets, And evne the server market is really low except on the Linux side. The fastest growing market right now is defintely the workstation market.

Certain magazines and certain marketing reports confirm that the 3D market is the growing market in teh tech sector right now.

And the gaming market is going ot past film in revenue this year at $6.07 billion. 87% of teenagers play games, and 92% o boys play games. Teenagers control $20 billion dollars of spending money according to Licensing Magazine last month.

AFR So if it is an education issue, why are 3D pros not getting educated to the Mac and its ability?

AA Well, you know Apple suffers from a really bad publicity. The reality is that Apple has not made many contacts in this industry to try to educate people. If you have ever met an Apple sales person outside of Apple, a lot ofthem will talk to you for five minutes, not be very knowledge about their products, and

I think is partly Apple's fault and partly bad image. That hasn't been changed in awhile.

I think what Steve Jobs is doing right now is defintely a really wonderful thing. He is making a person effort to actually meet with some of those clients personally and help expand the growth of that the platform. Which i think is remarkable. You know he got two jobs, he's running Pixar too and the fact that is he taking the time to go to personally go to BlueSky Studios or ILM or Digital Domain and basicall get a feel for who is cient is and express his interest in pcking up the mac platform in their studios.

Bluesky, for examplek, who is in new York city, had avery difficult time getting support. And one of their lead animators who is a big Mac fan, bought the G4 when it came out, bought the whole Apple Cinema Display, even has a Ti PowerBook, bought the speakers the mouse, everything, but he couldn't find anybody to help him promote it at BlueSky. He was a believer, completely.

And plus he also said...he told me four years ago that OpenGL needed to run on the Mac, Maya needed to run on teh Mac. So we made a series of calls to provide that feedback to Apple that if you wnat 3D to run on the Mac this is what needs to happen.

AFR. Right. As a 3D professional, what else can Apple do to make your job even better?

AA I think that Apple has to think about diversity, because they are very limited about what is on the platform. For example, when you got a Macintosh about two years ago, you were stuck with an ATI Rage card. The ATI Rage card was very good for a consumer-based person , but it was not a professional person's card.

When you are dealing with a 3D software, and you are deaing with 3D rendering adn yuo are dealing with architecture, every package tells you to get the best 3d graphics card available, because even if it cost $4000, if it can save you on a project that last a year, four months, that's going to svae you a lot more than $4000.

And one of the things that we have noticed that has been missing on the Mac platform has been support for a variety of3d graphic cards, the softwrae is very very focused on certain pakcages, but as far as plugins...plugin support is just not there.

AFR What plugins are you talking about?

AA For example, Lightwave 3D right?

AFR yes.

AA There is probably a hundred plugins for the Mac and over 3000 plugins for the PC.

AFR I see. Yet another education downfall perhaps?

AA Well, its also because Apple's developer 3D section is pretty, and because I do know that the few 3D dvelopers at Apple are really really working hard, and tring to get and move slowly nad get things in action.

I think that the thing is is going to take a really aggressive bit of work from teh developers to get a lot of developers to really believe in Mac.

For exxxample, the strategy of X-Box, Microsofot had a very difficult time getting DirectX to game developers. SO MS develoepred XBox. XBox is going to be $200 for each console, but every softwre develoepr will not now being using DirectX to program because of XBox.

AFR. Right. And of course it only supports DirectX, not OpenGL? Is that correct?

AA Yes, it works iwth DreictX. ANd the thing is DirectX is possibly a really nice technology and OpenGL is sort of a dinasuar, its been around for a really long time.

SGI and Microsoft got together about six or seven years ago and formed Fahrenheit which was supposed to be a collaboration between the two companies to to right a replacment for OpenGL. And I think that DriectX possibly uses all those tools from that collaboration.

AFR Are tehre some applications that don't run on the Mac that you would love to see?

AA I think some of them. I think I would like to see Houdini.

KC Defintely Lightscape. It was a Unix platform ten years ago, and it went ot NT, and it got bought up by Autodesk. But it would be sweet to have that in OS X.

KC Maya on the Mac is defintely something we are interested. But it is Maya Complete not Unlimited, which is a bad move on them.

Some good translators would be nice.

AFR you list is actually quite small.

KC, Yes, just Lightscape and some plugins and stuff. Everything compositing and Photoshop work we already do on the Mac anyway.

AFR Are tehre some PC graphics cards you would lik tos ee on the Mac?

KC Problably the Wilcat Card. The one we use the most. It is a great card, just blows away anyting else around. Some of the Nvidia cards are obviously catching up to it and the price points are less, but the graphic card support ont eh Mac has been weak at best.

Other people have told me that too bad Autocad didn't stay on the Mac. Because I know a lot of Autocad people that were usign it on the Mac ten or so years ago and when it didn't move forward on teh Mac they ended up switcing to the PC. ON the engineering and architecture side.

AFR Yes, Right. Well we are aware of that. We have collected well over 4000 petitions for that, and everybody knows, -- Apple and Autodesk -- that that is an important issue for many users.

AFR You have experience with the films in Industrial Lite Magic?

David No, no I used to work for Digital Domain.

AFR Can you talk about the big time films you have done and the tools you have used?

David I was involved in Dantes Peak, Tiatanic, and Mystic in various capacities. When you have such ???? projects you try to find the best tools for the task. My personal option is that you cant limit yourself to certain hardware and software solutions because there are very different tasks so you need different tools especially when hard and software are evolving so fast you have to watch for the best possible solution. So on all these projects basically the hardware and software was Utoys.

AFR What are the tools you are using now?

David I use a combinaton of Adobe applications and PC and Macitosh combinations. If you have to do Mac Painting I think the MacIntosh solution is the best because it is already entered for the graphic application in terms of the color and you be sure that what you see on the computer screen is going to see on your television screen. You can ??? scanning of new material to the final project. This is the only solution that you can do this type of task. If you compline sets from a color point of view it is better to use Macintosh solution.

AFR Is that because of color sinc or is it color sinc not such a big factor in video?

David You know the biggest ?? when you work in these environments with different monitors you need continutity between shots. If there are three people working on the different shots in the same sequence you have to make sure the shots look similiar and you mark the set to be color calibrated. Apple gives you the best tools to do this and the hardware is geared up to this task. It is very difficult to calibrate monitors so it is basically guess work. If you do 3D rendering ultimately your product is the image and if you are not really sure what you are looking at you can't deliever good quality. If you are talking about film there is an extra step you have to take from a recording the best optical solution is if you can control better all stages of the process.

AFR Have you used FileCut Pro?

David Yes. I have had a great experience. It is a great program. It allows you to do really sophisicated ????and there is a composite abilities I have found to be really useful.

AFR What was your role on Titanic?

David On Titanic I was on the team that pretty much did the second part of the production and Iwas doing alot of consulting types of things. During the first part of production I was supervisor on Dante's Peak. So on Titanic I was overseeing the weathering and water shots, people and things like that. I did some composing of some shots. I was involved alot in the intregration of live action movements. I was consulitng and overseeing this part of the film.

AFR Is your role as supervisor at Luminetiks is similiar role overseeing, setting the direction for these special effects?

David It is a little bit wider because visual effects provsion involves market producing computer generated elemants but actually in live action elemants essentially they always come up with a solution for producing certain imagery and whether it is live action c gel combination of the different techniques.

AFR That is definately a broader role.

David Visual Effects Director describes the position more.

AFR Akiko had explained to me that everyone does more of everything than is normally done in other studios.

David It just naturally happened like this. I have enjoyed it. I dont like the ????because it narrrows the ?? so you can't see the bigger picture and sometimes you miss alot.

AFR Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Mark Hello.

AFR What is your role there at Luminetiks?

Mark My role is 3 D animator and 3 D graphics producer. I do a large portion of 3D models, animation, ideas and excution of the 3D. I do not do composing 3D O. I do alot of product modeling, character and develop.

AFR Are you a FileCut Pro user?

Mark Yes.

AFR How well can you do animation with FileCut Pro. I mean I know you dont do animation with the application but in terms being an Animator how does FileCut Pro work out for you?

Mark As an editor it is very nice. I actually use it frequently for laying out a bunch of my shots from agamatics?????, to lay out reels,from going over sound. It is a really good editor for my animations after the 3D is done.

AFR What is your main animation application?

Mark I use a couple. I use LightWave on the Mac for ??? modeling and I use Maya on the PC because Maya has extra tools that LightWave can't handle. LightWave has things that Maya can't do. Those are the main packages I use for 3D.

AFR Can you describe to me the complete process of animation? What are the steps and tools you are using?

Mark Once you have ideas you use drawings to finalize what you are going to do. After you have those you make an automatic. An automatic is a very early edited version of the final piece done with all drawings.

AFR Is this with wireframes?

Mark No this is all done with hand drawings. It is a story boards, comic book version but you put it in a final cut and add sound. Then you finalize thnt you know exactly what you are going to do. If you go into animation without knowing exactly what you are going to do you spend twice as long executing it because you dont know what you are doing. After you have the story board layed out you go to 3D design which you design everything that you are going to make exactly. You model them, texture them and then you prepare them for animation which means for a character after you sculpt the character you have build a skeleton inside them so they can actually move with bones, muscles, facial expressions which you create. Then you hve the animation part. After you have the short segments created you go back to your story board, the final cut, and you drop in each segments after it is created so you watch it evolves from a story board to your final piece. After you put in all the parts in you put in the sound and then extra editing it and thats it in a whole.

AFR As an aminator do you think the Mac platform is suitable for animation? Do you have all the tools you need?

Mark Mac has a small user set for 3D. I am disappointed because I love my Mac. Personally speaking I think it is a better operating system than windows. It is easier to deal with and just more friendly. I would rather do anything on a Mac over a PC if I had a choice.

AFR Can you complete a project solely on a Mac?

Mark I have many times.

AFR Could I talk with Kevin one more time?

Kevin Hi

AFR I have plenty of material here to use so I am going to rap it up. Could you give me one last statement.

Kevin Okay

AFR Did we cover everything that you wanted to cover?

Kevin We covered the majority of it.

AFR As the CEO of Limentik, where do you see your firm in 5 years?

Kevin Basicallly we are heading to trying to take the tools for 3D and apply it comercial work as far as t.v. spots, gaming, film and special effects. So we are in talks with a couple gaming companies so we are branching into that division as far as being able to do open sequences and actually some of the tools that we have been using for online objects now apply to the online gaming tools. We will use this as a stepping stone to do online games which is a whole new market which hasnt been established yet. As far as making a name for ourselves, Luminetiks get recognition from the film but as profitablity we will probably get it out of the gaming market. We are trying to keep ourselves afloat with the gaming.

AFR Do you think there is an oscar in the horizon?

Kevin Who knows. That would be awesome but I think it will take us a few years to get there.

AFR I am sure you will get there at some point. I just have one more question for Akiko and then we can rap it up. Where would you like to see Apple in the 3D market in five years?

Akiko I would like to see Apple in the 3D market where it is not the 2D market in five years where it is with Photoshop, with the support of Adobe, software for print press and print.

AFR How do you think they can get there?

Akiko I think that they are going to have to get aggressive pursuing the clients in that business especially the high end clients which in this case are the visual effects ?? , the advertising agencies, because many of the advertising agencies in New York are moving from 2D to 3D and most of the commercial work that is done is done by ?????. We see that there is a relationship between the print work and the commercial because they are often tied in because of the campaign. So we would like to see Apple provide a total solution rather than just part of the solution. Many people migrated to the PC because they were able to get the total solution from the PC. We are looking forward to MacWorld and Apple in the last three years provided us with surprises and we are looking forward to spending some money there.