Kevin Cooper, vp of feature film development, was brought into D2 to shepherd the company into producing its own features.

You don’t have to go too far back to recall the great Hollywood studio days, when major studio players such as MGM and Paramount Pictures, among others, ran a tight reign on movies of the early to mid-1900s by keeping all their development and production needs from writers to actors to directors under exclusive contracts. Entire projects were kept within tight studio control, with every aspect of the production under their purview.

Even today, there’s no denying the simple efficiency of such a scheme: For a single entity to have creative and production control over a project from start to finish. This decidedly positive aspect of the old Hollywood studio system comes to mind with the expansion of two established vfx houses: Digital Domain and Stan Winston Studios.

Digital Domain (D2), with the production and subsequent release of Secondhand Lions earlier this year, showed its hand in the realm of feature film development, adding to its existing role as one of the dominant forces in visual effects. Originally started in 1999, D2 began its feature film development division to take on such projects as a long-lived goal of D2’s helmsman Scott Ross.

Kevin Cooper, vp of feature film development, came to D2 with a singular focus to “serve the picture a whole.” Seeing the great potential for solid collaboration with a highly skilled team already under the Digital Domain banner, moving into feature films seemed a logical role for D2 to take on. “We create an environment where storytellers have some security,” Cooper enthused.

D2’s Secondhand Lions was the company’s first foray into feature filmmaking. It purposely chose a story-oriented project void of shiny robots and massive explosions.

“Studios [are sometimes] fighting each other, which can marginalize the story,” Cooper offered. By having the story develop and progress through the care of one facility, helps keep the intentions intact, and the story true to itself.

With all this coming from a vfx house that creates the glitz and bang of action-packed films, one wonders if we will see D2 features developing just more of the same visual effects-dependent, shallow films? Well, judging from D2’s first offering, Secondhand Lions, a warm-hearted character drama starring Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment, the answer is “not really.”

With Secondhand Lions, D2 saw a wonderful opportunity to tell a solid story and make a point: that good films are based on character and story. And although the profitable film received somewhat lukewarm reaction from journalists and critics, it did offer a light CG touch that didn’t get in the way of telling its story. There were no massive explosions or shiny robots to be found.