Siggraph

Why does a visual effects company sell plug ins? Frantic Films made their reputation with the huge bullet-time shot on Swordfish and their Emmy-nominated work on Storm of the Century. More recently: the VES-nominated Superman Returns and Poseidon, and currently Eric Brevig‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

From the start, says Bond, Frantic was conceived as a collaborative company both internally among their three offices and in their relationships with industry peers. To that end, they wanted to share the fruits of their painstaking R&D.

“A lot of companies keep the stuff proprietary. But for us, there‘s nothing to gain from being closed.” he says. But as it turned out, sharing wasn‘t so easy. At first, Frantic simply gave code from their products away for free. But the purpose-built code didn‘t translate one-to-one into new situations.

A new approach came with Frantic‘s Deadline network queuing/renderfarm mangement product. Blizzard software bought it and together with Frantic refined it in beta. Same with Café †X. So the revenue paid for the development it took to productize the R&D code.

So the lightbulb went on and a business model was born. Customers became collaborators fund pure research. This is partly why the 110-person Frantic has 15 developers. There’s product companies out there that can’t fund more than 10% of their staff as developers.

Bond’s dreams run in many directions: he’s working on ways to use the visualization code in Frantic’s new Krakatoa to improve MRI research. Frantic has their own film now–Lucid (not an effects film). “Not an ILM or a Pixar,” he says when he tries to picture a role model…maybe more like a small Lucasfilm.

New from Frantic at Siggraph:

-Krakatoa Particle plug in (high volume partical renderer for Autodesk 3ds Max)

-Awake plug-in pack for Eyeon Fusion 5 (includes tools for lens distort, stereo image stacking, frequency blur, spherical distort, and digital camera noise)

-Flood:Surf (a simulation software suite for realistic water, foam, oil, rubber and lava–basically anything you can surf on).

Also: Deadline 3.0 adds support for Linux and Mac OSX.