American Cinematographer - February 2008 - 66

Post Focus 66 February 2008 Images courtesy of West Post Digital/Elicit Effects. Above: A young emperor gives chase to a Honda Accord in a spot that received Elicit’s polish. Below: More before-andafter shots reveal the extent of Elicit’s work. Using Autodesk Flame 2008 for Linux, visualeffects supervisor and Flame artist Les Umberger transported the car from Vancouver, where the commercial was shot, to China’s Forbidden City. West Post Introduces Elicit Effects by Jon D. Witmer Just over a year ago, West Post Digital left its home of nine years to put down roots in a larger facility better suited to meeting its clients’ needs. The new location in Santa Monica fomented a desire to broaden the scope of the company’s services, and after barely settling into its new address, West Post joined forces with Emmy Award-winning visual-effects supervisor and Flame artist Les Umberger to hatch Elicit Effects, a visual-effects division that services the commercial and musicvideo markets. “We were looking to expand into effects and Les was looking for a new opportunity,” explains West Post CEO Todd Brown. “With Elicit, Les has been able to set up his own shop within West Post and take advantage of the infrastructure we already had in place.” West Post has traditionally targeted episodic television, providing finishing services for such shows as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County and Aliens of the Deep. Elicit’s focus on commercials and music videos “fits my background, and it’s also the arena [West Post] wanted to break into,” notes Umberger. “This is a true partnership that benefits us both.” West Post’s facility was previously occupied by Deluxe Media, though the space today bears little resemblance to the one Brown and West Post President Kenny Fields found. “We wanted to build from the ground up,” says Brown. “Consequently, we were really able to make this the type of facility we wanted it to be, particularly in terms of the design and layout of our editing bays and machine room.” Leading AC on a tour of the space, Brown and Umberger pause to illustrate the pains taken to establish an intelligent, ergonomic workflow throughout West Post and Elicit’s pipelines. The machine room runs the length of the hallway on one side and houses myriad editing systems, which are connected via Ethernet extenders to the editing bays that line the other side of the hallway. Essentially, this arrangement makes the bays a series of interchangeable monitoring stations, allowing a project to be moved quickly from one room to another. With that in mind, West Post has designed the bays to be as consistent as possible from one to the next, minimizing the learning curve between rooms, which also boast such amenities as satellite TV and Internet access. According to Brown, another

American Cinematographer - February 2008

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