OSNews

1. What's the history of The Orphanage?

Kevin Baille: Basically three former ILM employees figured that it was time for them to start a new venture that was their own thing. So that they could be creative on their own products.

2. What's the work process for a visual artist?

Kevin Baille: The Orphanage is a creative haven. Here the artist does everything on shot. It's not a production line mentality where an artist is restricted to one function and then passes the product on to the next person. Here the artist will do animation, rendering, and composition. It's very well rounded.

3. How is the company organized?

Kevin Baille: We have round 15 to 20 employees. Our model has three main divisions. The Visual Effects team will generate special effects for feature films and television. The Services Divisions offers technical services to customers. For example, video to film conversion. Making sure that something that a customer has produced on video translates perfectly to 24 frame-per-second film stock. And the Production side offers complete film and video production services. We can write, produce and shoot commercials, music videos and short films in-house.

4.What's the technical heritage of The Orphanage?

Kevin Baille: Most of the staff comes from the "rebel unit" at ILM. This group had been assigned to do all of their production with off the shelf software and non proprietary hardware.

We were completely Mac based until recently. And that's because some of the extremely high-end video cards don't have Mac drivers yet. Really, as soon as those graphics cards come out on a Mac, that's what we're waiting for.

We also have a small render farm of eight G4s. We'd love Apple to come out with a specific rack mount machine for this task.

5. All Mac applications and no Maya?

Kevin Baille: We were the first beta testers of Maya on OSX. We had never really laid hands on Maya before. Other companies may have spent years creating their pipeline and had been using Maya on NT or Irix. We'd never really had experience with Maya before this. We didn't have a PC pipeline that it would fit in.

6. What were your first impressions?

Kevin Baille: Our initial worry was - it's been on Irix and NT for so long would it offer anything particularly Mac. But Alias | Wavefront did it wonderfully. Maya has all sorts of features Mac specific features, especially the full QuickTime integration.

The workflow on a Mac is it's strong point and OSX easily makes it better. There are probably a lot of production houses waiting for Maya to come out on OSX to try it.

Maya fits into a another specifically Mac experience, the Apple Cinema Display. You get a lot of screen real estate.

7. What was the talk around the office?

Kevin Baille: As soon as it was announced, people's immediate reaction was "That's awesome." Everybody was excited by it, just like with the announcement of OSX. Stuff like QT integration isn't available on a PC.

8. And working with OSX full time?

Kevin Baille: OSX offers a lot. It's a Unix based high-end with excellent 3D software apps, like Maya. You have all the scripting ability to control your environment and the option of a terminal and it's all within a Mac Interface, so that's great.

9. Maya on OSX fit your needs?

Kevin Baille: The guys at Alias | Wavefront did a great job and were super responsive. We've had nothing but good experiences with them and their company. Everybody's really psyched about using Maya. Sometimes you might go back to using some old program for some reason, and you can't believe you'd ever want to go back to using full time. You can't wait to get back to Maya.

Maya was a really welcome change.