LAUNCH featured in AWN
The Rapidly Growing World of Indie Previs
Tara DiLullo reports on the burgeoning previs industry by interviewing six leading indie companies.
LAUNCH
Located in New York City, and the sister company to the successful Charlex, a NY commercial agency, LAUNCH was specifically created to take the “rough” look out of the animatic process when pitching TV ad campaigns to focus groups. Joseph Weil, LAUNCH’s exec creative director, explains their unique purpose. “Companies are forcing agencies to stick with the previs of a spot, so we are trying to offer a much more robust creative experience for the agency in the testing stage. We help the agency show the idea in the sensitive stage, in a fully fleshed out way that has all the energy and its not just storyboards. So we have a really particular niche that we are trying to expand, particularly in TV commercials, and not in prevising effects, but prevising the entire commercial. We have these normal animatics that we do, but we pioneered this new way of doing it — a fully 3D, fully animated way of planning out the spot.
“It’s not just the basic scenes, but it goes much further into it, with camera angles, camera movements, lighting ideas and even casting,” he continues. “We’ve invested a lot of energy, time and money into improving and expanding it. We are building a motion capture studio now so we do all of these commercial previs with MoCap for a really quick turnaround. We use Maya and MotionBuilder for certain things but they are connected by proprietary software we’ve written to make it all work together. We have a library of characters and sets and we can make things very quickly and turnout these animations very fast with a lot of creative flexibility for the client during that process.”
LAUNCH made a large investment in R&D that is now seeing fiscal success. It offers a motion capture studio and a library of characters and sets for a quick turnaround time. Courtesy of Launch (previs) and Charlex Inc. (full-up).
With R&D for their system in development for sometime, Weil says it’s been a process of large investment that is now seeing fiscal success for LAUNCH. “Some clients have really been able to do very elaborate jobs and we’ve made some successful relationships that have helped finance a lot of development. So now we are able to roll out these new tools that make it cheaper for us to do the normal spots. We are now in the phase where we can do these very full service jobs, very quickly and for the standard rate of an animatic. There is a lot of investment, but we do many other types of work that takes care of each other.”
LAUNCH’s niche is one that is so beneficial to the industry, Weil is sure competition will grow swiftly. “We always knew we would provide this kind of service, just not this way. Like we’ve found out that motion capture is an incredibly efficient solution to getting a basic idea across. We’ve learned a lot as we’ve been going. We always want to stay ahead and I’m certain others will start going in this direction. We are in the process of blazing a trail right now. I got into this thinking that is was all going 3D, and a lot are, but there are still going to be old school test spots and we want to do both. I think there will be a lot of growth and more of the traditional way of doing it.”
Read full article on AWN.
