Meet Digital Fusion

We recently caught up with Tim Wilcox and Hugh Milstein to explore some projects at Digital Fusion that blend CGI with traditional photography / re-touching. Based in Culver City, California, Digital Fusion (DF) is situated within the heart of the production community. They are a full service digital photographic services company specializing in state-of-the-art studio and location digital capture, equipment rental and sales, retouching, CGI, printing, scanning, fine art and archival digital capture, digital processing, online editing (DF Studio), digital archiving and graphic design services. Tim Wilcox is the Creative Director of CGI and Hugh Milstein is the owner.

Let’s jump into the shot that really jumped out at me – the one of Eminem. Please tell us about that project.

Hugh: We were approached by Complex Magazine with this idea of working on the Eminem cover that had its roots and inspiration from the feature film I AM LEGEND. They had seen our CG work and felt that it was a good opportunity to marry editorial content with CGI.

Were you guys advisors on the photo shoot, to make sure you had what you needed to get the CG elements to work?

Tim: Absolutely. We had multiple conference calls and screen shares to nail down the look and feel of what this was going to look like well before the shoot took place. Matt Doyle, the photographer, also shot a great deal of supplemental footage giving us a mine, of sorts, of textures to pull from.

Is this a typical project for DF? Please tell us about the services you all offer.

Hugh: Our projects run the gamut from simple retouching to sophisticated image synthesis depending on our client’s need. Being in business for the past decade as a cutting edge facility, we have always had to anticipate the curve and flow of what our clients will need and as you well know, being able to use CG to satisfy these needs has become a priority.

Tim, you have known Brad and others at Luxology since the NewTek days. Please describe your role at DF and how you got the gig.

Tim: Hugh and I have known each other for 25 years back to our film school days at USC. We always chatted and shared whatever cool projects that each of us had going on. About a year or so ago Hugh rang me up and suggested that it was time to finally come full circle and implement my 18 years in the film biz with his in photography and just go for it.

I have noticed that a couple of your CG projects involve new product designs. Let’s discuss the Callaway project. Did you all have access to CAD for that or did you model the club from a photo/design drawings?

Tim: Man it would’ve been fun to model the club, but with our time constraints, that was not something we could do. The agency on the gig, Eleven Inc., provided us with all the files of the clubs. We brought them into modo and with some cleanup and massaging we were rolling.

The ZillionTV project got a huge amount of press. I saw it in Wired, in the LA Times, Gizmodo, Endgadet – pretty high profile stuff. Tell us a little about that project.

Tim: Well this was one of those fun projects that I had going on at the same time Hugh and I were ramping up here at DF. I was brought on to it by David Dozoretz to do concept work on it as he and I had worked together on a couple of films and thought I would be perfect to handle it. It turned into a much bigger gig than that with seeing the whole thing through from concept to tooling to product renders and packaging design. Modo was integral to my process and workflow with the engineering and marketing teams in the breadth of things we could do and show and keep within a digital world.

What is the most challenging aspect of your work? I mean in terms of things like meeting customer expectations, dealing with technology, dealing with crazy deadlines...

Hugh: The most challenging part is that anything is possible now. So what we really excel at is bring creatives together, as individuals or teams, to produce amazing results.

Tim: For me, aside from that broader aspect, it is really important to plan well and try to have all your ducks in a row so that when the client asks for something, we can quickly go down that path with them and explore those ideas.

Tell us, do your customers come in asking for CG up front or generally do you simply employ CG as needed to “get the job done”? I am trying to get a sense of how the business is skewing these days (photography vs CG vs blend).

Hugh: From the inception of Digital Fusion, it has been all about educating our clients and photographers to options that they may not know exist, while at the same time keeping their creative integrity intact. As a full service post facility, sometime we can offer solutions on the fly that were not part of the original path of the creative process. CGI is starting to play more of a role here because it affords us a way to meet those needs, but in an environment that is comfortable and familiar to a photographer.

Tim, you have used a lot of 3D packages. Where does modo fit into your pipeline?

Tim: It is such a flexible tool that has become very comfortable for me to work in. For me it allows me to work very rapidly whether I am designing something or taking assets and geometry from a client and bringing them to life.

Everybody uses modo for different reasons. Can you put your finger (so to speak) on what causes you to fire up modo as opposed to say Maya or 3ds max?

Tim: Because I can bug you guys directly when I need something? Just kidding. I think for me it is that I have been working with you guys all the way back to the early 90’s with LightWave. Over the years as I have pushed and bent the various versions of the software from LW to modo the dev team has been very receptive to expanding and implementing tools to fit needs that weren’t necessarily thought of in the beginning. modo is a perfect example of all of it coming together and growing into a better and stronger package.

You have been involved in beta testing modo in the past. Where do you personally hope modo is headed in terms of its evolution over time?

Tim: I can’t confirm or deny that (at least that was what the piece of paper I signed said!). More seriously, we end up getting assets all over the board in many flavors of 3D and currently sometimes there is a great deal of voodoo that has to go on to get things perfect for us to work with in modo. I would like to see development continue on the playing nice with others mantra that has made modo the “go to” tool in our toolbag.

Thank you Digital Fusion!