In Broadcast - March 2013 - 76

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 17 - MARCH 2013

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Post Asylum Centres On Smoke
Multi-boutique facility streamlines post-production operations with Autodesk Smoke…

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ost Asylum is a Dallas, Texasbased facility comprising three
high-end, award-winning creative
post boutiques: PA Editorial; Pure
Evil Music and Sound Design;
and PA Motion Design/VFX. Each
boutique is dedicated to not only
satisfying, but exceeding client
needs and expectations.
With a client list that includes the
likes of American Airlines, HP, Adams
Golf, York Heating & Air Conditioning
and Papa John’s Pizza, there is
rarely a dull moment in any of the
boutiques and a seamless workﬂow
is a necessity. As the company’s
work became increasingly popular,
not only in Dallas but across the
nation, Post Asylum began looking
for the best way to streamline its
creative toolset for visual effects,
compositing, ﬁnishing and more.
The company already had a
supremely talented and popular VFX,
3D animation, and motion design
artist in industry and military veteran
Michael ‘Pants’ Sands. Post Asylum
decided to build a powerful new suite
that would highlight Pants’ talents
with Autodesk Smoke software
at its centre.
“Pants is a visual effects artist, 3D
animator and editor, and he is wellknown here in Dallas,” says Graham
Hagood, Post Asylum Executive
Producer. “We wanted to build a
high-end suite that would match the
level of work we’ve become known
for. Autodesk Smoke came out on
the Mac, and we’d been watching it
getting faster and more feature rich.
Pretty soon, Autodesk Smoke was
an obvious solution for us. Pants
had been using a variety of software
packages before, but Smoke
provided a much more elegant way
to provide him with more powerful
tools in one package.”
Since Pants started using Smoke,
Post Asylum has been more in

Michael Sands aka 'Pants' Visual
Effects Artist and 3D Animator

demand than ever. In just a few
short months, PA Motion Design/
VFX has performed ﬁnish and VFX
work on several national spots for
CenturyLink, Papa John’s, Hasbro
and more. Post Asylum’s editors
perform creative ofﬂine editorial in
four Avid Symphony suites, then
export their work to Smoke in
Advanced Authoring Format (AAF)
for conforming and finishing.
As a visual effects artist with
editorial chops, Pants has also used
Smoke to cut some 30 second spots
down to 15 second versions when
necessary. “We’re now finishing
almost all of our broadcast work
with Smoke,” he explained. “And
traditional ﬁnish is just part of what
we can do. Since we got the Smoke
suite up and running, it’s just been
one project after another.”
One of those jobs was for toy
and board game maker Hasbro,
who came to Post Asylum through
youth and family marketing agency
UPROAR! Hasbro and UPROAR!
were looking to create both national
and international spots for Rubik’s
Race, a board game based on the
Rubik’s Cube. While live action
footage of kids playing the game
had already been shot, UPROAR!
tapped Post Asylum to design and
create 3D animated elements to

surround the footage and mimic the
movement of the multi-coloured tiles
featured in the game.
After receiving 3D models from
PA’s in-house animation team,
Pants seamlessly transferred them
to Smoke using Autodesk FBX 3D
data interchange technology. “Being
able to bring 3D objects into the true
3D space in Smoke was fantastic,”
he expressed. “We can texture,
light, add reﬂections, 3D shadows,
ambient occlusion and so much more
in real-time. We can import a single
3D object as reference, then use that
object to create multiple versions,
which saves a lot of rendering time.
Smoke is also capable of handling
polygon amounts that would choke
other systems.”
“The Rubik’s Race spot is a perfect
example of how valuable Smoke
is for Post Asylum,” said Hagood.
“Since Pants is a 3D animator as
well as a ﬁnishing artist, we were
able to use Smoke to maximise
the 3D camera movement, and
make revisions right there, in realtime. It worked out perfectly for the
client, because we were able to use
Smoke not only as a ﬁnishing tool,
but also as a true compositing box,
a previsualisation tool, and more.”
Although the new Smoke system

has only been operating for a
few months, Hagood and Pants
are optimistic about the future of
Smoke at Post Asylum. Having
recently reviewed the latest
version of the software, Pants is
particularly enthusiastic about the
inclusion of ConnectFX node-based
compositing environment.
Pants concludes: “The integration
of the ConnectFX into Smoke is
amazing. If I want to add motion blur
to a picture-in-picture, I’d normally
have to save the axis, go back into
Action, load the axis back up, then
render it out and put it back on my
time-line. With ConnectFX, all the
effects are right there; I don’t have
to render and go back into Action.
I can do it all in one, which saves a
lot of time.”

The Autodesk Smoke suite at Post Asylum in Dallas

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