Having created fantastical creatures for director Guillermo del Torro’s Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, visual effects facility CafeFX has launched a character animation division. In addition to adding more animators and specialized hardware and software, the long-term vision includes comprehensive in-house training. Animation supervisor James Straus has been brought on as the first hire.
Straus worked as an animation supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his contributions to Dragonheart. While at ILM, he also worked on Jumanji, Forrest Gump, The Flintstones and Jurassic Park. He later moved to Santa Barbara Studios, where he served as animation director and supervisor on An American Werewolf in Paris, Paulie and Star Trek: Insurrection, as well as the video game Parasite Eve. Straus was then hired by PDI as directing animator for Shrek and also served as an animator for the vfx pic Constantine while at visual effects company Escape. A graduate of the classical animation program at Sheridan College in Ontario, Canada, Straus has also created a procedural Maya-based forest generating software tool and has produced an independent sci-fi short film.
Straus’ first project at CafeFX will be character creation for The Mist, an adaptation of the Stephen King science fiction novella in which numerous species of horrific creatures emerge in a small town in Maine after a massive thunderstorm. According to the studio, director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) brought the project to CafeFX after seeing the company’s past animation work.
CafeFX’s new capabilities will extend through to production at Sententia Ent., the company’s feature film production division. The character animation pipeline will have Autodesk Maya at its core for animation and modeling, Softimage XSI for texturing and lighting, and Autodesk Mental Ray for rendering. The company’s production pipeline is also configured with cebas Thinking Particles, Sitrisati Fume FX, eyeon Digital Fusion, Autodesk Combustion, Massive, cebas finalRender Stage-2, 2d3 Boujou, Adobe After Effects and Apple Shake.
CafeFX recently completed effects on Evan Almighty, Fantastic Four: Rise of The Silver Surfer, Spider-Man 3 and Ghost Rider, among others. The company’s featurette A VFX Journey Through Pan’s Labyrinth with CafeFX was chosen for inclusion in the prestigious Electronic Theater at SIGGRAPH 2007. CafeFX will be recruiting for visual effects artists and animators at SIGGRAPH, taking place Aug. 5-9 in San Diego.
