Tools

(Music playing) Michael Lebowitz: We can sort of just quickly look into our studio. This is the area of the spaceship that's not necessarily the most trafficked but one of the most important. It's the area where we do things that aren't digital. We do things that are dirty, like glue guns, ink spatters, paper crafts of all different kinds, anything that we need to do, plus we have our green screen wall, so we can do small video and photo shoots and we do some sound work in here as well. Zander Brimijoin: Some things that we do in this room are paint textures for Photoshop, Brush Libraries and so we will come in and basically spend a couple days making tons of textures. And the reason why we do this is so that we don't have to rely on downloading other people's work and we can create our own assets. Jason Hart: It's created by hand. Usually, it will look a lot more realistic than trying to duplicate something on a machine. It gives you a nice quality. Phil Sierzega: It's just a quality you can get when you start on the computer. Zander: And this way, no one will recognize a certain brush pattern that everybody has downloaded. So, even if they look similar, it will at least be somewhat different from what's going on. If we need a specific piece of artwork, like for Corona, we had a sand drawing application. So we had to actually got sand in here and - Jason: I mean there are certain things that you just actually can't do on a computer. Drawing in the sand is one of them. It's really difficult to try and comp that up in Photoshop, or do anything like that. So, sometimes going to the real thing is the easiest approach. Zander: The main use for this space is using this big green screen wall. This way, we can shoot video, and still shots, and key people out of it. So, we will get actors in here, most of the actors are - we just grab people from their chairs and dress them up in coats, whatnot, and call them doctors. Michael: We make available to the staff pretty much anything they think they can make use of in some way. We bought a smoke machine the other day because they wanted to create real smoke, not particle generated smoke. We have a lot of fake blood around the office. We have paints and X-ACTO knives. We also have all of the Adobe suite, CS3. We work really closely with Adobe, so we are on all the pre-release programs for everything and working closely with them. We have digital video cameras. We have anything that might be helpful to somebody. We have got this really neat Wacom tablets that have LCD's built into them and are incredibly touch sensitive, for a couple of our Illustrators, because they work more naturally with a pen. What's great about this business is the equipment is really cheap, overall. I mean, it's not like you need to buy a $50,000 machine to produce the work that we do. I mean it's not inexpensive, but I mean we are talking about standard desktop and laptop machines and some software that goes with it. It's more that people need to stay on top of what's available to them and then they bring to us their desires and needs and we do our best to fulfill them as quickly as possible.