Jason Chen and Ted Gagliano have spent years in the post-production and visual effects industry watching budgets balloon amid increasingly wasteful practices. The two are finally doing something about it with their newest venture, Desert Eclipse.
Los Angeles-based Desert Eclipse is a creative production company that embraces motion capture, gaming engine technology and, yes, a little bit of artificial intelligence that it believes will streamline the big productions, with the startup first tackling animation with the lofty goal of halving both the budgets and production time for a project. And at a time when budgets are getting scrutinized and there’s less money for projects that aren’t well-established IP, being able to produce faster and with a smaller budget is more important than ever.
Chen met Gagliano on the production of “Avatar” more than a decade and a half ago, and boast illustrious careers in Hollywood. Gagliano was the longtime head of post production at 20th Century Fox, and whose filmography includes the original “Star Wars” trilogy (His ties with Fox is why they get to operate out of the studio’s Century City lot in the heart of Los Angeles). Chen, who serves as CEO, got his start as a production assistant on “Avatar” and worked his way up on productions, from MCU films like “Thor: Ragnarok” to running VFX on “Jojo Rabbit.” It’s that experience that gives them confidence that they can reinvent the workflows and technology around film production while preserving the core creative spirit.
Desert Eclipse’s work was most recently seen in an episode of “The Simpson,” which featured a fictitious KPop group, “The Kneesock Dolls,” performing choreographed dance moves enabled by Desert Eclipse’s real-time motion-capture setup, something audiences got to see if they stuck around during the episode’s credits.
Read on for the full interview, edited for length and clarity, in TheWrap’s latest installment of Office With a View.
Can you talk about your start and how you got together?
Ted Gagliano: I’ve spent most of my career at 20th Century Fox running post production as president of post production, and I met Jason on the first Avatar film.
Jason Chen: I come from a background of live action visual effects stemming from the first Avatar where I met Ted. I was a lowly PA and Ted was the big boss, you know, from the studio, always intimidating and scary (laughs). I was lucky enough to be surrounded by such amazingly talented producers and directors. One of our great mentors is Jim Cameron, he’s one of the best people that we’ve learned a lot from, and really, this company kind of stems from a lot of the lessons that he’s taught us along the hard road to building the first Avatar. And what we’re really doing is taking a lot of those lessons and continuing the journey of technology intersecting with creativity and allowing us to create a runway for any type of creative to utilize performance and really enhance the human experience of entertainment for creatives.
What was the catalyst for Desert Eclipse?
Chen: Ted and I have been in contact over the last 20 or so years since the first Avatar. I had gone off in a visual effects on-set role. I was responsible for making sure that there were camera measurements to relay back to the hundreds of VFX artists from on set. So I was a data wrangler, and then slowly worked my way up over this series of 35 films to VFX supervise on “Jojo Rabbit,” where it really kind of tested the limitations of what we could do.
But it also showed me that you don’t need to spend 100 million-plus dollars to tell a strong story. We had around sub-$20 million to create such a fantastic movie. It really showed me that true collaboration with directors and the heads of department still allowed you to tell great stories. You just have to work together and use technology to help streamline a lot of the processes and achieve the goal of making a seamless experience for an audience.
Ted, and I have always seen eye to eye that there’s been a ton of waste in the industry just as the filmmaking process got more inflated. Why do we repeat things time and time again from sequels to asset creation? And we always felt that there was some kind of imbalance from what you were paying for in the early phases and what ended up on the screen. A lot of people noticed through the pandemic and the strikes that prices needed to come down, and quality still needs to remain high. But we also need to figure out how to open up the door to creativity for emerging filmmakers and talents, not just filmmakers as well, but creative producers, heads of department and a lot of the artisans that have a legacy and careers built on cinematic film history and bringing that kind of experience into the future.
Gagliano: The fact that we are located on Stage One at 20th Century Fox and that our performance capture stage is under the esteemed Zanuck Theater speaks to our love of tradition and history, but with an embrace of the latest technology that will fuel creativity.
How does Desert Eclipse stand out from the other production companies that are out there?
Chen: All we’re doing is actually taking the idea of a creative production company and supercharging it with technology. Other production companies are actor-driven, but we’re using technology to open up the field for creatives to come to us and we help them co-produce projects that a lot of folks never thought could be made in the animation space.
However, our hearts have always been in live action, but for this first iteration of the company, we’re focusing on the animation because we feel like we can make the most strides towards democratizing the entry point for animation through technology, and helping speed up that process. Traditional animation timelines take anywhere from three to four years. What we’re trying to do is match live action timelines of 12 to 18 months.
Gagliano: The mantra is half the cost of a traditional animated film and done twice as fast. We’re entering the golden age of independent animation. The company has three lanes. One is the service lane for projects like “The Simpsons.” The second is for the passion projects that co-producers bring to us that they haven’t been able to to achieve and create, traditionally, because of the costs. And there’s also all those live-action directors that have that animated film in their mind that they haven’t wanted to take four years out of their career to do. And then there’s our own library of IP that we’re developing, that we own from a graphic novel library and plus ideas that have come to us each day.
What’s your sales pitch to the artists and directors out there? What are you bringing to the table?
Chen: We come from visual effects. In the VFX paradigm, you’re only really a service provider, even though these VFX companies and animation companies produce some of the most outstanding sequences and action sequences throughout cinematic history. What we’re doing is, allowing creatives to come in and utilize a tool set, we’re actually providing them creative guidance by co-producing with them and walking them through the process as creative partners along the journey.
On top of the foundational technology, we’re actually helping directors cast appropriate folks. We’re casting motion capture actors that come from the James Cameron school of filmmaking. So we’re doing a lot more than just a normal animation or VFX vendor would do, and that’s where we really stand out because of our experience within the studio ecosystems. We’ve been able to see and understand how projects go from words on a page to how they get delivered in the theater.
And I think that is something that is incredibly valuable that we hold to heart, because 50% of the company is technology, but the other 50% is experience.
Gagliano: I would add to it that what’s unique about the company is it’s based on the mantra of efficiency and elimination of redundancy. Jason and I have spent years redoing pre-vis for a director that is not shootable. By integrating the visuals and making sure that what we create on a performance capture stage are usable both as world assets and character assets that can only be improved and manifested in the final film, as opposed to something that’s segmented by departments and pre-production being separate from production and post-production. What we’re basically doing is throwing that out the window and saying let’s do more in this visualization, performance capture area that can be your foundation for the film, the true foundation.
Chen: And walk away with data that’s actually usable in the final product. What we’re trying to do is create a digital library so that when creatives come in, we have a foundational layer. A lot of people think that creating something in CG is easy. It’s all CG, grass, whatever. But in reality, creating something that’s fully CG in a frame is actually 10 times more complex, more difficult than it is in real life.
Because in real life, if you’re going to build a home you can go to Home Depot. You can get the type of wood you want, the nails. You can get the paint. You can pick out whatever you want. But in CG, you are literally Neo stepping into a white void. You have to understand, as you’re building a CG environment, what kind of dirt do I want on the ground? What kind of rocks do I want? What kind of color, how many rocks do I want? Do I want boulders? And then you have to go in and be like, I want this scaffolding and lumber. You have to create a CG version of lumber. And then you have to tell it what kind of wood grain goes on, the texture, what color.
And only after you’ve created your essential, what we call a CG kit, a kit of assets, then you can start building foundational (shots) and that’s where it gets sped up. But you know, you have to create every single micro asset in your CG world before it goes into a computer generated environment. So what we’re doing is we’re saying, we will build all these kits. We will provide you the lumber, the wood, the nails, your virtual Home Depot. We can provide you with the building blocks and of how you can put together your world.
We got to see some of your work in a recent episode of “The Simpsons.” How did that collaboration come about?
Gagliano: I’ve been a fan of “The Simpsons” for years, since I worked on the first “Simpsons Movie,” and I love these people. I showed (“The Simpsons” producer) Richard Sakai a little bit of what we were doing, and a light bulb went off about what he needed for a particular episode. And that’s when Jason came in and we showed him what we were doing.
Chen: It started out with just Richard Sakai and (“The Simpsons” producer) Richard Chung walking through and then it turned into the larger Gracie group, which was around 15 people, and then it turned into a larger group trying to understand what we were doing. And then finally, as the lovely “Simpsons” crew does, they popped in our office. We got invited to one of their lovely table reads. And then we just started talking as if it was already happening, because little did we know, it was already in the works.
We continued to chat with all of them and started just prepping it as if we’re a live-action shoot. They gave us songs. We had a lot of creative conversations and a lot of technical conversations and started breaking down the specific needs of this particular episode. And this was all very familiar territory for Ted and I, because we come from the live-action realm, and we’re used to breaking down scripts, and it just fell into place. We had kickoff calls with the coordinator and then we ended up just kind of helping plan through the specific steps of the shoot day, and what they needed throughout the episode every single time the Kneesock Dolls came on screen.
And one of the things that we always do is we bring our performers, and that’s one of the other things that we bring to the table. We help you cast the specific roles for the specific people or creatures, because we have so much experience in those realms. We have a huge network of martial artists, gymnasts, creature performers, but fundamentally, really great actors. Once we did that, you know, once we brought everything in, it was just clockwork. We shot for an eight-hour day with an hour lunch. And I think we were able to churn through something upwards of like 100 setups of performance on that day, which was pretty insane.
You talk about Desert Eclipse as a tech-powered production company. You can’t talk about technology without AI. And curious how AI is part of the workflow, or is it a part of the workflow?
Chen: We would be naive to think that AI is not going to change the ecosystem and or has already started changing the ecosystem of the entertainment industry. We are keeping a watchful eye. Our stance on it is to keep a watchful eye on how things progress, but also how we can embolden traditional artisans and artists, actors, directors, cinematographers, embolden them with technology and that’s really what we’re trying to do.
AI is a blanket term, but it’s really broken down into generative components, tool sets and future productivity enhancements. So while generative is the hot topic, and that’s what people mostly see, there’s a whole sea of AI-driven tools that will ultimately help us speed up production timelines and help creators hit those goals of trying to iterate things quicker than normal.
When, for example, if you give a note on a specific version of a shot, using our technology and a real-time (game engine) approach, you can have one shot of a camera move and then change that specific camera move in animation in real time.
Gagliano: The key is to focus on a nimble game engine pipeline that allows each artist to layer on productivity AI tools to get rid of the drudgery and to enhance creativity. But the key is the game engine and being nimble enough to work in real time, to iterate in real time and use some AI spices on top of it.
Chen: There’s been a century’s worth of industry standards, from deliverables, from different technical film backs. Do I think AI will be able to get to an image that is of the standard of what we built over the past 100 years? Eventually, yes. Do I think it’s there now? No.
Gagliano: It’s about traditional processes and standards being maintained so that the AI wild west actually learns the methodology.
Lastly, you talked about efficiencies, removing some of the redundancies. There’s obviously a lot of trepidation about jobs in Hollywood. With the new approach you’re introducing, what does that mean for jobs?
Chen: That question does come up, and what we say is it’s still artist-driven. Artists still touch every single frame of the deliverables we put out. But guess what? They actually get to work on more projects than they would on a particular show. Because we’re streamlining the front-end process, the artists now get to focus on the fun stuff. So what we’re actually seeing is a boost in morale, a boost of productivity and a pride of authorship when instead of just putting one movie out every four years, we’re able to push out, you know, a Simpsons episode, two car commercials, a feature film or maybe two in the same amount of time.
So we’re actually finding a really positive response to the efficiencies that we bring in, because a lot of the efficiencies and gaps that we see in our traditional pipelines, we’re actually slimming those down because they’re the more labor intensive and not ideal job parts of the process that artists flock to, you know. So it’s all about having fun.
Gagliano: We’re in LA and our goal is to make our process and our pipeline efficient enough so that we can do as much work as possible in LA. We don’t want redundancy. We want efficiency so people can still afford to live in LA and work in LA.
Chen: And the one thing I’ll add to that is when we talk about animation, we are always trying to actually create more jobs, especially with collaborators like SAG-AFTRA. We’re actually pushing to bring in more performance capture actors into the fold of the animation space, when generally it was just towards voiceover sessions. What we’re saying is, let’s create more jobs in new realms that traditionally wouldn’t see physical actors in the animation space, just outside of voiceover. So we’re really working a lot with the powers that be in the entertainment ecosystem that we know so well from a lot of the blood, sweat and tears throughout the decades, and making sure that we’re respecting the talented folks that really put a lot into these shows and bring them to life.
