New York Innovators Series: How One New York Company Brings Hollywood To The Empire State | WIRED Brand Lab

[Narrator] Historically, creative industries,

especially film and television,

have been clustered in major metropolitan cities

like New York or LA,

however, in 2018, eight counties in upstate New York,

known collectively as the capital region,

employed nearly 50 thousand people

and generated over 1.4 billion dollars in revenue

entirely within the creative sector.

There's an ecosystem forming up here

that has been growing rather rapidly,

so now you have the ability to create an entire film,

shooting it to editing it

to doing the visual effects for it all up here.

[Narrator] This growing ecosystem in the capital region

is known as the creative economy and is made up

of individuals producing creative content

in segments like visual and performing arts,

design, new media in film and television.

It includes everyone from an orchestra conductor

to a film production accountant.

Albany, New York is a key creative player in this region

and home to Branch VFX, a visual effects company

who is both an active contributor

to this creative economy and integral

to some of Hollywood's biggest film and TV shows.

You don't normally think about Albany as being that place

where visual effects can thrive.

Branch VFX ended up in the capital district

of Albany, New York for a number of different reasons.

New York state has provided

some really wonderful tax rebates

in order to incentivize production

and post production to happen here.

Secondarily, Albany, New York has a much lower overhead

for business costs than New York City or Los Angeles.

[Narrator] In addition to these economic benefits,

Branch VFX partners with the University at Albany

and other local colleges to offer students

training programs, hands on experience,

and insights into the creative possibilities

within the entertainment landscape.

What you're doing is you're building an ecosystem

that allows for you to employ more

and to grow the business

and hopefully stretch the boundaries

of what's perceived as the industries

that exist in this area.

[Narrator] Albany, New York might not be the first place

that comes to mind when you think of big Hollywood TV

and movies but Branch's work tells a different story.

As a company that does foundational visual effects,

their work is often the backbone

of some of the industry's most complex visuals.

Between film and television today,

there's a lot more visual effects than you would think

in just an everyday scene.

All invisible at the end of it,

but it's all a tremendous amount of work.

[Narrator] In this clip from Hulu's original series,

The First, Branch's 2D supervisor and compositing supervisor

break down the seemingly simple act of replacing

a building's exterior.

We were tasked with doing rotoscoping and 3D tracking

in order to replace the building's face

with a new shinier futuristic approach.

So right here you see all this purple mesh.

This is called a light are, and this makes it possible

for us to get just a general representation

of what the building face looks like in 3D space.

[Narrator] After 3D tracking is done,

the VFX team moves to a process called rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is generally tracing an object

in order to pull it into the foreground.

So we wanna create something called a mat.

These little black figures that you see

all across the screen and that allows us

to extract these objects out of scene

in order to place the new background.

[Narrator] After the rotoscoping and tracking

on this clip was finished at Branch VFX,

it was sent to their sister company,

Shade VFX for the final composite.

The Branch VFX team was able to execute this project

for a major Hollywood studio while enjoying

the quality of life found in Albany, New York.

I moved up here specifically to engage

in the New York City pace of work

but have a way better life for my family.

For a long time, I wasn't able to work

on the types of projects that I wanted to

in the rural area, I always had to go to a major city.

Albany, New York is a beacon of how you can work

on top tier film and television

and yet also live in a place where you can go out

and live a relaxed existence.

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