Ten Years of The Orphanage

Today I had the heart-wrenching task of joining my co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart in announcing that The Orphanage will be suspending operations indefinitely. We started the company ten years ago, tripled in size each year for our first three years, and worked on some of the biggest and best effects movies made. We produced shorts and even features, we spawned a commercial division and an animation company, and we hung out in the halls with Frank Miller, Ethan Hawke, and M.C. Hammer. We did DI before it was called DI, we gave birth to Magic Bullet, and we did really, really good work.

But that's not what matters the most.

It's no accident that our company's name described a place for people, people who may be thrown together, but who ultimately create their own destinies. Scott once described his vision of an orphanage as "a hundred success stories waiting to happen," and that is exactly what came to pass inside our offices. We have had the privilege of working with many "Orphans" over the years, and watching them grow and take on new responsibilities has been the single greatest part of coming to work every day.

A message to the visual effects industry: You will never find a better employee than a former Orphan.

And to the Orphans: It has been a privilege and an honor to work with you.

Spirit Press: Film & Video

If you haven't heard enough about how I finally got to do that thing I was talking about, Debra Kaufman has written an excellent article for Film & Video called The Spirit Closes the Distance Between VFX and the DI.

The Spirit, directed by Frank Miller and based on the Will Eisner comic book series, points the way toward a new integration of digital production and post. That’s thanks to The Orphanage, a VFX/production company in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and its co-founder Stu Maschwitz, the movie’s second unit director and visual effects supervisor. “Every movie is a collaboration between visual effects artists and the DI artist, but they never meet and they never see each other’s work,” said Maschwitz. “They get approved in a vacuum. The colorist doesn’t get to pass any wisdom back to the VFX artist, and the VFX artist thinks, ‘We’ll color this in post.’ It’s an important collaboration that’s broken. We’re still scheduling the DI at the end of the process, approving visual effects shots before we’ve thought much about the digital intermediate."

With The Spirit, Maschwitz saw an opportunity. “I thought, here’s a chance to put my money where my mouth is,” he said. “Because of its principle creative, the movie is going to be a visual feast. I wanted to put into practice some ideas about how to better integrate those two really important processes: visual effects and DI.”

Spirit Press: Screen Daily

Are you sick of these yet? Here's an article on Screen Daily about, er, "The VFX genius behind The Spirit."

As for himself, meanwhile, Maschwitz, who is also an experienced commercials director, is developing his own screenplays and hoping for the chance to direct a feature. Making his second-unit directing debut on The Spirit, he enthuses, "was about as much fun as one can have within the confines of the law".

Spirit Press: Current TV

Gabriel Macht plays The Spirit. His brother Ari is a producer at Current TV. They decided to team up and interview me for a Current Tech piece on The Spirit's visual effects.

As the film's Second Unit Director, I would occasionally get to work with Gabriel, especially when stunts were involved. This meant that for the first few weeks of shooting, Gabriel came to associate me with being covered in mud, strapped into a harness, hung from wires, and slammed in the crotch with a giant wrench.

This video, I believe, is his revenge.