© DPS.

In a little more than a year-and-a-half, a company has come out of nowhere to be a major player in the animation business. Well, not exactly nowhere; Newark, New Jersey to be more precise.

Digital Production Solutions (DPS), a 2D and 3D animation studio backed by the deep pockets of IDT the company that probably sold you the telephone calling card sitting in your wallet has, among other projects — entered into a co-production with Jim Jinkins of Doug fame, acquired an unproduced pair of projects from Gene Roddenberry’s estate for in-house development and. most recently, has entered into a partnership agreement with John Williams’ and Neil Braun’s Vanguard Animation to co-produce and co-own all Vanguard properties, including features, direct-to-DVD and broadcast.

DPS has also dug into those deep pockets to acquire a controlling 51% interest in Film Roman, best known for producing The Simpsons and King of the Hill, as well as a slew of syndicated and Saturday morning properties. If you’ve never heard of DPS before, well, you’re not alone. The company has been keeping a low profile until now, teaming up on a co-production or two while developing a proprietary approach, setting up a virtual studio overlain on its telecom backbone. DPS thinks its approach is a GAS — the “Global Animation Studio.”

Morris Berger, IDT Media’s evp of business development and president of DPS, explains the process: “We developed a global protocol. It’s not outsourcing – it’s as if all these shops and animators are working together in the same building; we’re just using the world as our studio.

“We’re able to work with studios and independent animators based on different criteria: software, skill sets, pricing and so on. We can choose between freelancers sitting in their basement, small mom-and-pop shops or larger studios where there may be a few hundred guys, but only a handful that we would need on any given project. We now are in the process of aligning with major talent from around the globe.”

Morris Berger, IDT Media’s evp of business development and president of DPS. Photo courtesy of DPS.

GAS’ New Global Paradigm
As with any 3D production, each new project at DPS is broken down into digital objects: characters, backgrounds, props, locations, etc. But there the resemblance stops. DPS then digitally tags each object and puts them through a pipeline in which the software, relating to those tags, finds the absolutely best person/shop to do the task, finds the right price, predicts dependencies in the schedule, keeps perfect track of all notes and approvals on all levels, allows for aesthetic, managerial and fiscal oversight at all phases — in short: manages the production so that things cost a lot less and get done faster and better.

According to Berger, “From the very beginning of production, we use the protocol in a global fashion. We do just as much of the modeling and texturing of characters props and locations, even rigging, with our affiliates as we do in our hubs in Newark, Los Angeles and Israel. The real distinction is that the look and feel of the project is done in-house in order to give story-tellers/partners/creators, whether locally or over a network, the same kind of creative in-house environment and experience that they would have at Pixar, PDI or Blue Sky. We also package lots of meta-data with our digital objects to insure that our global collaboration is absolutely smoothed-out in turns of varying cultural, subjective and skill-set issues. The final stages — compositing, lighting and rendering — are done in our own shops to make the collaboration consistent and seamless.”

From its studio in IDT’s Newark headquarters, DPS has been seeking out small studios and independent 3D animators to join GAS; so far they’ve recruited personnel and facilities in some 30 countries, from North America through Australia, with stops in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia along the way.

Says Berger, “The key to the GAS protocol is maintaining quality and control while using different shops, because anybody can outsource. With our new paradigm, we deliver a product that looks completely homegrown. Other 3D companies haven’t been able to do that, because they don’t have the telecom infrastructure that we have.”