Meet John Carey, our Head of Production & Technology. He was a senior executive at a variety of studios within the industry including IMAX and Walt Disney Animation Studios. Known for his work in the industry, John walks us through what he does at Toonbox Entertainment.
- Can you tell us about yourself?
I am the Head of Production & Technology. My team and I have been working on developing a very flexible
and powerful pipeline as well as implementing new approaches production management for our feature films.
- How important is it to create a robust pipeline and how have we cultivated that into our culture at Toonbox Entertainment?
The pipeline affects the costs of what we do and cost impacts quality. Reducing the cost of what we do affects our projects’ schedules and quality and can be a competitive advantage. Essentially, we want to make more and better product with less effort, in less time and at a lesser cost. We believe that doing better work, faster and at a lower price point represents a great value proposition for our clients as well as providing a high level of professional satisfaction for our employees.
- How is the pipeline different from a year ago?
It’s very different. We’ve replaced all of our monolithic production tools with modular counterparts. In addition, we only write things that doesn’t exist. Our goal is to deploy best of breed solutions leveraging open source where possible and the best commercial options as required. If we make an investment of labor to write our own tools, we prefer to invest in innovation rather than duplication. These modular tools can be assembled in different ways, like Lego blocks, to produce different pipelines out of a set of common components built on top of a foundation infrastructure. We are already able to produce faster and better than we could just two years ago and when the new tool set and production management process are in place the efficiencies will be even more significant.
- Does the pipeline work well for co-productions and third party projects?
I would say yes. We’re constantly looking for ways to make that process smooth as much as possible. Rather than proprietary data formats, we’re embracing established data interchange standards that should make it fairly simple for us to share data with other studios.
- Does the pipeline work well for feature films and television projects?
Yes. The pipeline we used to have was monolithic. We couldn’t leave part of a process out. It goes in on one end and must go out the other end. Now with our modular components, we can construct a pipline that is appropriate for pretty much any scale or type of project. We can have a lightweight process for a shorter project; and a more robust process for a longer project.
- Anything else to add?
The modular pipeline really benefits everyone from the artists through to co-production partners. The amazing part about this is that we are making the process considerably more efficient and at the same time, decreasing unnecessary wasted effort. All the way through the process, an artist, the director, supervisors and pretty much everyone can see work in final shot context, meaning that we can make better decisions earlier in the process because we are seeing more complete work faster. One example would be that during our last production, we would see shots in black and white for months. But now, we can see colour and at least set lighting within about a week of the start of the shot planning process. Seeing things in more of a finished context much earlier in the process helps everyone to make more informed, better decisions about the work.