Voyager Visual Effects Houses News
By ChristianApril 29, 2000 - 5:19 PM
Over in the startrek.expertforum.ricksternbach newsgroup on the official StarTrek.com servers, Daniel Henderson recently posted a message containing news regarding two of the visual effects companies currently working on 'Star Trek: Voyager': Foundation Imaging and Digital Muse.
In the first place, he quoted a report from the web site of Rich Suchy, which I unfortunately couldn't find myself. Suchy, who used to work as a character modeler at Foundation, apparently updated his site with the following message on the 14th of April:
With 10 minutes of notice the modeling staff at Foundation Imaging was layed
off today. There was little time to feel apprehension as we were called in
for a last second meeting. Afterwords was rife with tension as we all packed
our stuff, said farewells, and made sure to trade contact information.
Animators have been kept on to finish what they have been working on but
will soon be jobless as well.
Suchy was one of the modelers working on 'Roughnecks - Starship Troopers Chronicles', the CGI animation series based on the 'Starship Troopers' film that was being produced by Foundation. The series has never had a fortunate history, ever since its first season started airing in late Summer last year with only five episodes completed. For a daily series, this was obviously disastrous, and since then new episodes have been added to the rotation as they were completed, making it very hard for viewers to follow the storyline. A few weeks, reports surfaced on Ain't It Cool News that the show was in strong danger of not being renewed for the second season. In addition, Roughneck Chronicles, a fan site for the series, reported on the 15th of April that a large group of animators had been layed off at Foundation.
Though this is obviously bad news for Foundation, it does not seem likely that this will in any way have an effect on the company's ability to produce Voyager's visual effects next season. Foundation has been providing visual effects for DS9 and Voyager since before they ever started on 'Rougnecks', and there is no reason to assume that their apparent loss of 'Roughnecks' will have repercussions for their work on 'Voyager'.
In other news, industry news site VFXPro recently reported that Entertainment Boulevard Inc., a provider of streaming entertainment-related media and encoding services, recently announced it will be acquiring Digital Muse, another company providing Voyager's visual effects. The acquisition is scheduled to close on the 1st of May, after which Digital Muse will also be providing its services to Entertainment Boulevard to create original content programming along with commercials specifically designed to be broadcast over the Web.
Thanks go out to Darryl Tam for this!
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