Mouse of Babes : Digital Firm That Made a Pig Talk Is Hot Stuff--Now Others Want at the Trough
Rhythm & Hues is the digital effects company that made Babe the pig talk and did it so well that one of its owners won an Academy Award in March.
Those Coke-swilling polar bears are theirs. And every time Eddie Murphy in “The Nutty Professor” goes from fat to thin or back again on screen, that’s Rhythm & Hues’ handiwork on display.
Rhythm & Hues is a hot company in the hot industry of creating pictures in a computer for movies, television, commercials, music videos, video games and even theme park rides. The West Los Angeles company is up to its computer keyboards in work, and competition for employees is so fierce that working conditions are downright cushy (if you don’t count the extremely long hours).
But trouble looms on its storyboard.
It seems that several major studios are developing departments of their own that will provide serious competition to the 9-year-old firm in an industry in which profit margins are thinner than a silicon chip.
“That’s going to change the dynamics of the industry,” said John Hughes, Rhythm & Hues president. “It will be interesting to see how that shakes out.”
For the last few years, the shaking has been in Rhythm & Hues’ direction. Movie makers, among others, have become addicted to the computer as a way to produce images and sounds that were previously impossible to create.
“Rhythm & Hues really challenges . . . the industry with the best, most innovative work,” said Sarah Baisley, editor of Animation Magazine, a monthly publication based in Agoura Hills.
“They put character and emotion in everything they do . . . as opposed to just creating a lot of spectacular effects,” Baisley said. “A lot of digital animators get carried away with their tools instead of remembering to communicate something.”
The folks at Rhythm & Hues say part of their competitive advantage comes from being a pioneer. The company was founded in 1987 in Hughes’ apartment before it graduated to the basement of a Culver City dentist’s office.
The company now employs more than 200 and is quickly filling a 70,000-square-foot facility in the Playa Vista area, where DreamWorks will be locating.
“We’ve spent many years building a studio in which we can do high-quality work,” said Charles Gibson, executive vice president of Rhythm & Hues and, as the team leader on the “Babe” project, one of those who shared the Oscar for best visual effects.
“We have been able to hold out and hone our skills, and the industry has caught up to buying the kind of work we do,” said Gibson, who is also one of the owners of the company. “The audiences keep wanting more, and we just happen to have a group of people who are challenged enough to keep ahead of the audience.”
At Rhythm & Hues, most work begins not at the computer keyboard, but at the drawing board.
“We start with design, and design is always done on paper,” Hughes said.
One current project, for example, is a Star Trek motion simulator ride for a Las Vegas hotel. A space creature that will fly past the ride’s audience is first drawn in great detail. Then it is modeled in clay (actually a material called Super Sculpey), and lines are drawn on the finished model. The model is then “digitized,” or placed into the computer by running a special wand along the lines.
The resulting image is then manipulated, animated, lighted, even given a personality--all inside the computer.
The process is far from cheap. Rhythm & Hues’ work costs between $1 million and $1.5 million per minute of screen time. But makers of movies, commercials and theme park rides are lining up to get it.
Mario Kamberg of Paramount Pictures, who is designing and directing the Star Trek ride, said the company selected Rhythm & Hues because “they do deliver what they say they are going to deliver. They deliver on price and on time.”
To grow while maintaining its high standards, Rhythm & Hues spends about $40,000 a person to recruit and train employees from around the world. About half its young work force comes from about 35 foreign countries.
“It’s very difficult to find people who have both the technical skills and the aesthetic skills. So we search all over the world,” Hughes said.
“We want somebody who can breathe life into these characters,” he said. “We don’t care at all about their computer skills. We can train them.”
The other challenge is keeping those people once you find them, and Rhythm & Hues expends considerable effort to keep industry poachers at bay.
There is good pay (“I had to give two raises last year,” Hughes said), which starts at about $40,000 a year for an animator but can hit $160,000 in rapid fashion. Add liberal vacation time, an eight-week sabbatical every five years, a well-stocked kitchen, a chef and a $750 annual education allowance “for them to use in some kind of instruction.”
He added: “I think we have created the best working environment for our people. We keep people simply by treating them with respect. You have to. They are the lifeblood of our company.”
But the payroll and computers and electricity and designer coffee make it an expensive business. The company has gone through layoffs three times, most recently in April, when 24 people, primarily support staff and artist assistants, were let go. (That does not count the continuing cycle of hiring and firing in the company’s live-action operations, which is fed by a large pool of talent that is always moving from job to job.)
“A visual effects company is not a big moneymaking company. The margins are very, very low,” Hughes said. Company revenue was about $25 million last year, he said.
The situation can only become more complicated as major studios, including Sony, DreamWorks, Disney and Warner Bros. work on plans to create their own visual effects operations with staffs of 400 to 600 people each, Hughes said.
“It’s very difficult,” Hughes said. “But we were never founded to make money. We’re not typical entrepreneurs. We’re here because this is what we love to do. As long as we’re not losing money, we’re OK.”
