Athenian CG studio Yafka breathes life into
Greek history for History Channel.
CGSociety : Studio Profile
By Paul Hellard, 11 September 2008
Greek roots
Back in 1999, a film project was produced about the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek computer. That was part of Producer Antonios Kotzias’ postgraduate research at Glasgow School of Arts in Scotland. Wild Dream Films, a production company in the UK, saw a story reporting his project and contacted him to buy part of the footage.
Since then, director Stuart Clarke and he became good business partners and they’ve always done work together. Big projects for History Channel arrived around 2005, after Antonio had been working in other companies, as Junior CG artist to studio supervisor.Since then, Yafka has done animation for 20 episodes of ‘Ancient Discoveries 3’ (over 100 subjects) and signed for several more.
Yafka
Antonio Kotzias found Athens had the best of both worlds as far as production facilities are concerned. “I had the choice to build it anywhere in the world but after 11 years living abroad I wanted to be based in the place I grew up,” he describes. “We have designed our own machines from off-the-shelf parts. HAC computers, a small company here in Athens assembled the machines and set up the network. After a lot of trial and error we now have a 60-node render farm and the average workstation is based on Windows XP Pro x64 Edition, with 4GB RAM, GeForce 8800 Ultra, Intel Quad 2.66GHz.”
Team
Yafka has a small team that expands dynamically every time a project requires it. “There are people who frequently work with us, like animation supervisor, Marco Carpagnano,” says Kotzias, “whom I met while I was a studio supervisor in London. His credits include ‘Casino Royal’, ‘The Legend of Zorro’, ‘10,000 B.C’, ‘The Brothers Grimm’, ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’. Also there's Orash Rahnema who I meet while working for ‘Happy Feet’. He also worked on ‘Lord of the Rings’, doing a lot of the modeling and texturing. I’m also blessed to have some amazingly talented locals working with me like Andrew Helmis, Antonis Nikolaou and Stavros Mitropoulos. We also work with Nick Deligaris, responsible for character work. All of them have worked in films, TV, and Games. We’re always looking for talented artists, my preference at this point is for generalist LightWave artists."
Software
The main software the Yafka studio uses is NewTek LightWave, and Adobe After Effects for post work. For more complex character animation and rigging they use Autodesk Maya. “We really wanted to use LightWave’s 64-bit capabilities but we were afraid of stability issues,” explains Antonis Kotzias. “In fact, LightWave 64 and Windows 64 worked perfectly together and we saw an increase in performance and stability much better than we have hoped in the beginning. Our humble experience made sure that we couldn’t have done it differently.”
Training “From all the years abroad I came in touch with some greatly talented people,” explains Antonis. “Very often we would talk about Greece and how nice would it be if they would come and work for a while in Athens. I have been recruiting since then, I’m very fortunate to be in position to bring people for Master classes here in Athens.”
“Once a week we bring people that worked on ‘Star Wars’, ‘Lord of the Rings’, ‘Matrix’, ‘Spider-Man’ etc, to give two day courses in their area. Specialists in modeling, animation, texturing, post-production, and generally across the board of digital film-making. Courses are also open to the public.”
