RAVE is a boutique digital post-production house based in Columbus, Ohio. Its founders, Tobias Roediger and Jared Vorkavich create visual effects and provide compositing, motion graphics, animation, editing and 3D animation for films, television and the web.

Tobias and Jared are at the forefront of an emerging trend in post-production: expert artisans providing visual effects work to clients located all over the world. I caught up with Tobias and Jared recently to learn more about RAVE and get their views on decentralized post-production.

How did you and Jared decide to form RAVE?

JARED: Tobias and I went to college together at Ohio University. After we graduated, we had day jobs, but freelanced regularly as well. It turned out that we were routinely hiring each other on freelance gigs. After passing a few checks back and forth, we realized that it was silly to keep hiring each other for every project we did.

TOBIAS: Jared and I talked about working together for almost four years. I finally told Jared that I was going to start up one way or another, though preferably with him. He thought about it for less than a day, and RAVE was born.

What would you say were your biggest early successes?

JARED: We really built RAVE on a lot of little successes. We’ve built really strong relationships with our clients and the freelancers we work with. In the end, we have to deliver a stellar product, but our clients tell us time and time again that they keep coming back because they like working with us.

You guys have been involved in the Aidan 5 project, right? How did you get involved in that?

JARED: We competed against the Aidan 5 team in the 2008 48-Hour Film Project in Columbus, Ohio. Shortly after the competition we all met for lunch just to talk about the experience and get to know each other. We’ve kept in touch since then, and when the web series started production, we started talking together about how we could help.

TOBIAS: Yeah, Initially we were talking about working on some really complex shots, which we can’t talk about yet, that are coming up in later episodes. When the main compositor had a family emergency days before the premiere at Gen Con we jumped in to complete the last 40 shots of episode one in 4 days.

“We were brought in to the Aidan 5 web series project on episode 101 to do compositing, visual effects and color grading work. With a very tight deadline right before Gen Con, we were able to pull off just under 40 shots in four days. ShotRunner was the only way we could all stay on the same page.”

How has working on a highly distributed project like Aidan 5 affected communications with the team? What problems have you encountered?

TOBIAS: Aidan 5 is an ongoing series with only the first of fifteen episodes released so in a lot of ways we are just scratching the surface of the project. It is a fast paced project with tight deadlines and minimal budget which means that we have to come up with creative solutions to issues that arise. The post team for the first episode was pretty small with a matte keyer, three compositors, two illustrators, an editor, director, producer, sound designer and composer that all needed to be on the same page. Because the pace was so frenzied we needed a clear and concise way to determine who was doing what on which shots. The biggest challenge was the crunch at the end where files and information needed to be accessed and moved around very quickly. Oh, and the fact that we had never met half the team before starting in on the project—still haven’t in fact.

What solutions did you employ on Aidan 5 to overcome the issues?

JARED: ShotRunner gave us a way to organize things so that everyone could see at a glance where each shot stood. Everyone could also be clear about their individual assignments, and they could post to ShotRunner when they needed feedback or review. When you’re 14 hours from delivery, it’s really nice to pop into the shots tab and find out exactly where things stand. It makes it really easy to prioritize and change assignments as needed.

Do you see the emergence of distributed/virtual studios as a trend in the industry?

JARED: Well, we’ve always worked with clients in other locations, and recently we’ve been working more and more with people all over the world. For Aidan 5, the entire team is in central Ohio, but we all work at different offices with different schedules. I see the limitations of geography diminishing every day. There’s no reason visual effects artists and post houses all over the world can’t work together on the same project, and we’re seeing this become a trend in the industry.

Any advise for other distributed/virtual studios?

JARED: Get a handle on your workflow before things get busy. Tobias and I are workflow junkies. It’s easy to believe you can just figure it out when the project starts, but the truth is you need to have the systems in place before you ever get the contract. If we hadn’t already had our project set-up in ShotRunner and our post-workflow sorted out before we got the call to help finish the first episode of Aidan 5, we never would have made it on time.

TOBIAS: The folks at fxphd.com deserve some credit in this too. This is our ninth term at fxphd, and we’ve learned so much from them over the years. In particular, their work on the Red Dwarf miniseries really inspired us to explore working on remote teams. Their ShotRunner-based workflow on Red Dwarf laid the foundation for the workflow we developed for Aidan 5.

To learn more about RAVE, visit their website at http://ravevfx.com/