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darkroom.tv's Bruce Ferguson
Friday, 05 March 2010
The Onyas’ awards attendees were wowed at Webstock. As was I. At the Onyas, someone said this was the work of someone from Pitch Black. It was awesome, and stunned everyone.
I had to know more – but I was lucky. There was more of a story than I even knew, because the people responsible turned out to be not far from me in Auckland, and better still, belong to a little Mac-based enterprise.
NZer Bruce Ferguson lives in London these days but turned out to be in Auckland when I found him. I met him close to the Newton office of globe-spanning darkroom.tv
http://www.thedarkroom.tv/.
Ferguson set the company up as the darkroom in 2004, after a couple of years of sole trading. Before that, he’d been working as part of the independent Kog Transmissions record and multimedia label, which is how he got into doing video at the various events Kog was involved with.
After Kog disintegrated, Bruce got more involved with video, and did the Louis Vuitton 150th Anniversary Parties with Inside Up Productions, involving Mike Hodgson of Pitch Black.
Webstock
Bruce Ferguson: “For this [Webstock] job we brought in Mike to produce the show, because I’m actually based in London and for it to happen we needed someone here on the ground. Mike and I have a good understanding.”
Bruce worked with Mike on the Louis Vuitton job. “I’m a content creator. We grew our businesses, me as the content creator with darkroom, and I moved away from setting up projectors and all that, allowing Mike to take care of that.”
Mike set up the Dub Module which handles the production, installation and performance side of the business, and Bruce set up the darkroom to create content.
macnz: How do you do what you do?
Bruce Ferguson: “It’s a pretty simple concept. We basically projected the Town Hall back onto itself. We took a photograph of the back wall from where the projectors sit, and then projected that photograph back onto itself. And once you can get that, then you can do anything you want, using that photo template.
It gets a bit trickier when you have multiple projectors, blends, curved surfaces and stuff. For that job it was Mike’s idea to bring in the Addict Media Server, which is this piece of kit these guys the Pixel Addicts in London designed.
“Basically it has a 3D model of the building inside the server and you can assign video to different parts of the model at your whim, and you can also control the lights. You have a complete environment. It’s like WYSIWYG – you can see the whole thing before you even get to the venue, and when you do get there, you can plug in the projectors and lights and off you go, and you can do all your tweaking at that stage.
“It was a combination of that and taking a photograph, as we wanted to do something slightly different to what the Addict Server is designed do. The Addict Server is very good at taking a room and mapping video so it’s square no matter where you look, but we wanted to create a show that was a bit of a perspective illusion from down in the audience. To do that we made all our content from a low camera angle, to make it look like the whole end of the hall disappeared from part of the show.”
(Indeed, at one point it looked like a huge tank filling up with water.)
macnz: How long did it take to create the Webstock show?
Bruce Ferguson: “The animation crew of four took about ten days, but there was a lot of preproduction [before that]. The testing was down to the wire, as it is with these shows. You can’t really do much of a test until you’re there. We just had the night before the show. We go on our experience and what we know from other jobs about what it takes to make the illusions work. So the more jobs we do, the better we get at that.
“I’m really interested in creating an entertaining 10 minutes. And that requires sound as well as visual, and sometimes a performance. That’s why we had Module there. I think this kind of idea works really well as one element to a greater show.
“The preproduction involved storyboarding. The team is studio manager Mike Dean, head animator Shaun Madgwick, and production person Emma Wolf, who works with me in the UK. And she’s also my wife. We’re actually an animator down at the moment. We’re looking for a new animator. Shaun and I did most of the work, and we had an intern come in and help out a bit, and also we had Chris MacMillan, who did some 3D work for us.
“But Shaun and I basically nailed that show. Once Shaun and I had that idea storyboarded, we knew exactly how we were going to execute them on computer. The last thing we got was the photograph. Once we got that image locked down, to make everything to, we just went for it. Every day, we just chewed through so much work. So we actually finished quite a few days out, and then I started changing things, and suddenly it was time to get on the plane to Wellington. And it was just finishing rendering.
“We tend go a little bit beyond people’s expectations, but it’s not worth it if you’re not going to make it a ‘wow’ sort of show. But once you have those templates, you really can do anything in those last few days, and some really good stuff comes out at the last minute and we just incorporate that into the show.”
macnz: It sounds like the way you work is really collaborative.
Bruce Ferguson: “It is collaborative to an extent. We will all come up with different ideas, we draw up a sketching template, in this case a line drawing of the organ and walls, and we doodle and sketch, and then we put all our ideas together and each decide who’s going to take care of those animations.
“And from there on, it’s actually a fairly individual process. Shaun has enough experience and talent to run with his ideas and take of them, I take care of my lot, and Chris had his work cut out with the 3D stuff.
“I really like to work that way with people, as then they can take ownership of the footage they create. I think it’s counterproductive if I stand over their shoulders and say ‘Can you change that?’.
“I try to empower my staff as much as possible. So I don’t need to hold their hands. The best thing is then I can give them a whole project, and they’ll produce something the clients will find acceptable.”
macnz: Where do your staff gain their experience?
Bruce Ferguson: “They come out of motion graphic design courses. Media Design School in Auckland – both Shaun and Mike came out of that course, and Sky before then. But it’s very oriented towards broadcast, so I like to take people straight out of the courses before they get corrupted by the broadcast industry.
Because what we do is make stuff that’s a lot bigger, much higher resolution and with durations a lot longer than, for example, a 30-second ad.”
macnz: What about hardware and software?
Bruce Ferguson: “I started with PCs back at Kog, but that’s because Pete and Chris who started Kog were pretty computer literate, which I wasn’t. But I gravitated to Macs for video editing, with Final Cut Pro back in 2000.
“I don’t think it would have been possible to go off and build my own company using PCs. The Macs had enough, and really good, online support. The Mac community made it possible for a person with only a few years computer experience set up a network and stuff like that.
“Generally, all the computers on our network render things at different times because people tend to render their own projects. We have a dedicated render machine, too, so we don’t render all together in like a render farm.
But we do run into problems with network clogging. We’d like to put in a fibre system, when money allows. Until then, it’s better to render on individual machines. We’re making do with what we’ve got.”
Software
Bruce Ferguson: “We don’t really use Final Cut much. We mainly use Adobe CS4 – After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop, plus Cinema 4D for the 3D stuff, bringing it all in and editing it in After Effects. Then we render it and bring it into Final Cut, cut up the show and put a soundtrack on it.
“What we’d like to do ideally is to have a scale 3D model of the building we’re projecting onto. But it’s not always feasible. We’re doing a show at the moment for the Gadget Show Live, in the UK, and we’re doing a similar sort of show on their stage design, and it’s quite simple so we might build a model to project onto in the studio. Even if it’s just for inspirational purposes. It’s really good to play around with projections while you’re working. The experimentations are really important.
London and New Zealand
Bruce Ferguson: “I moved over there with Emma to start a European office, because we weren’t getting any work over there. we were getting NZ work, and Australia and Asia, and a little bit in the US.
“Mike Hodgson and I had built up these relationships over the last eight years or so, and they keep trucking along, but I wanted to get over there and work in that time zone, base myself in the middle of London, see what happens. See how high the ceiling is in this kind of stuff. Because here, the budgets kind of stop at a certain point, because they’re one-off events and that’s it.
“Of course, we got over there just as the recession kicked in. So last year was really slow, but we’re building relationships the whole time. Now people know who we are. We did a really successful mapping projection in the [UK] last year, which you can see on YouTube. It’s had over 600,000 hits so that’s created a whole lot of interest, mostly in London but also in Auckland.
“So we’ve got a lot of other projects in pitch stage, over there.
“The idea is to farm the work back to New Zealand to get made, until we get our process sorted out. We started using Google Apps to collaborate online, after trying a few other systems. Google Apps seem quite reliable, and not so glitchy.
“We’re completely at different sides of the world. There is a cost benefit to working in New Zealand, and the time difference can be a benefit, but it can also be a real disadvantage, if you time it wrong – someone might go to bed just as you’re about to contact them, for example.
“It’s a bit hard to set up a company in New Zealand and then step away from it, but Mike Dean is doing a really great job, as is Shaun. It’s probably been good for them not to have me hovering around. They’ve really grown in their roles.
Hardware
Bruce Ferguson: “We have six Mac Pros, a couple of which are G5s. Mike’s just replaced his G5 tower with a 27-inch Intel iMac. That G5 we had for seven years – they’re good, they just keep going.
“Files … we try to use FTP as much as possible. We are with Orcon, and we had really good download-upload speeds, but our connection has really slowed down of late, so we’re looking at that.
“We’re looking at new systems, one that apparently ‘plugs straight into the internet’ or something, I don’t know the name of it, but it gives crazy speeds.
That file for Webstock was only about 3GBs, because we rendered it in photo JPEG format … but we’re pushing it, with compression. We don’t generally deal with uncompressed or high data rate codecs because we need to transfer it around – even just copying onto a drive to take to the airport, you know? You don’t want to miss your taxi … And we’ve been using image sequencers and my God, I don’t know why, but it just takes forever sometimes. Maybe because every frame has a file extension. Maybe the names are just too long or something. But we’re trying to figure out how to speed this up.
“We tend to Zip our image sequences and then transfer and unzip them. It seems to be much faster than just copying a folder over.
“We had two big Barco 16K projectors in Wellington, supplied by Multimedia, the AV company in Wellington, which also does all the AV for the Town Hall anyway. Simon from Multimedia was really good. Mike Hodgson couldn’t be there so he got Tim Kong in, who used to DJ for the Chemical Brothers and other acts in the UK. We’ve worked with Tim quite a bit over the years. He was really good at making sure everyone got what they needed from everyone else. Everyone went a little bit beyond their job descriptions, which is definitely one of the great things about working with Kiwis. There seems to be more of a vested interest in the final result. I think Kiwis are a bit different – we have a can-do attitude of figuring out how to make things work. So do other nations, sure, but not to the same extent, that I’ve noticed.
“People seem to get excited about the creative side of the project over here. That’s what drives the energy. It’s not like ‘oh, I’ve got to go to work now’.”
What next?
macnz: At Webstock, most of the crowd was wowed by what they saw.
Bruce Ferguson: “Yeah, but it’s getting more common. There’s a lot of people doing this kind of mapping stuff in Europe. We are looking at how move it on. I like the idea of using performers as well as backdrops, and to tell more of a story. A lot of the mapping you see is a bit of a disjointed narrative – it’s more of a journey than a story, and there’s a gimmick aspect as well.”
The darkroom team played up to the gimmick aspect at Webstock because they figured that’s what they would like, and it paid off.
For myself, I’m looking forward to seeing more, that’s for sure.
(The shortened version of this interview was published on the NZ Herald)
