Threat, a new digital studio providing editing, visual effects, animation and compositing services, has launched in Santa Monica. The company has established itself in a new $5.5 million facility to provide end-to-end post services for commercials, entertainment television, feature films, music videos and new-media. "We've built a great facility, we have gathered a fantastic team of artists, and we intend to succeed by working harder, being more determined and doing things a little differently than other post houses," said the company's 20-year-old founder and managing director Griffin Guess. Threat's 6,000-square-foot facility offers a full complement of the latest digital production technology in an environment that is part techno-wonderland, part tropical art museum. Primitive masks, weapons, tapestries and objets d'art from Africa, Indonesia and Malaysia adorn the walls along with large, flat-screen displays offering round-the-clock movie screenings. The studio's technological features include Discreet flame and inferno suites, Avid off-line and on-line editing systems and Media 100 editing platforms. Its animation department features SGI Octane 2 workstations running Alias|Wavefront Maya animation software, five seats of Lightwave and Combustion, and a variety of tools for visual effects and rendering. Guess also founded Machete in 1999 in Torrance, Calif., which recently closed with the launch of Threat. Threat's staff includes director of editorial Gene Gilbert, lead flame artist Cully Bunker, head of graphics Dave Leverson, chief engineer Dennis Doran, creative producers Jessica Farrell and Tony Vu and operations manager Sara Garcia Sauer.
