Visual effects – the advanced graphics that turn summer movies into blockbusters and make video games pop off your screen – are usually associated with California. Yet unbeknownst to most Rhode Islanders, one of the world’s leading 3-D animation studios is located here in Providence: Treanor Brothers Animation.

Todd Treanor, who co-founded the 13-year-old studio with his brother Paul, will discuss their work at tonight’s Providence Geeks dinner, which will be held from 5:30 to 9 p.m. at AS220, 115 Empire St. in Providence. Treanor talked with Providence Business News recently about how two guys from the East Bay became animators, the 3-D process, and how Rhode Island can grow its film community.

PBN: You and your brother grew up in Barrington. How did you wind up becoming animators?

TREANOR: In high school, we had the opportunity to do some Claymation in art class – Paul and I were in the same class, and we actually did a piece called “Mutant World,” which won a Cox Cable award. It’s funny – this was in 1984 – and because we won, it aired [on TV]. Our Claymation piece which was just a bunch of G.I. Joe dolls animated.

So that was kind of our first initial love of animation, but we grew up watching a lot of Japanese animation – Spectraman, Ultraman, a lot of Godzilla movies – so we were really into monsters.

Then, basically, I focused more on film – I wound up going to school at Columbia College in Chicago, which is like a vocational film school. So I went there and I was studying cinematography. Paul went to SVA - the School of Visual Arts in New York - and he was studying fine arts at the time. But he had always been an über-dork. He was always on the computer – flight [simulation], the works – when we were in high school. So he wound up [working with] the first versions of Photoshop when they came out – he actually used to rent time at a Kinko’s or one of those copy places, because Photoshop was really expensive [when it first came out]. He would rent an hour at a time and do that.

Then, when we left school, we actually were both in Chicago for a spell, and I was doing grip work at a production company there – that was the start of the digital revolution there, in Chicago, at the time, like DVision Software, which was one of the first non-linear systems.

So right there the light bulbs went off. That was kind of our moment. We did some work for this company Runandgun in Chicago – amazingly freakish, weird stuff. Awesome company. They’re defunct now, but great times.

So we started in Chicago, and that was 1994. … We decided [eventually] that San Francisco was the place to be at the time. In Chicago, there wasn’t all that much of a need for that at the time – San Francisco was exploding. So we just packed up the van and moved there and started a couple studios in a storefront. And then the Playstation 2 came out and all of a sudden there was a lot of work – Electronic Arts was there, Pixar had started doing “Toy Story” at the same time across the bridge there, so we were at the right place at the right time.

Then Paul, a couple years later, got married and got a job at RDW and moved back [to the East Coast]. … But then video games got firmly rooted in culture. I had been in touch with Paul to start a studio up, but it wasn’t really the right time. Two-and-a-half or three years ago, Paul said, “Now’s the time.” And Paul moved ahead, secured our location, left his job at RWD and started a studio out here. In July 2007, I moved out with my family. We still have a great studio in San Francisco – all we use it for is live-action [work]. … Typically, four to five times a year we’ll be out there doing a live-action place.

PBN: How does 3-D animation work, anyway?

TREANOR: Typically, you start with a design phase, which is all on paper – [though] it could be done digitally, on Photoshop. From there we try to draw orthographic views – dead-on from the front, and then from the side – and then you start building your wireframe, or mesh. And from there, a skeleton is created – it’s just like a normal human skeleton unless you’re building an animal or an alien – and that skeleton gets bound to the mesh. Those wireframes, the models that you build, are then deformed by the binds that are underneath the skin. It’s skin, mesh and model.

And thus, from there, comes the animation process. Typically we do a lot of hand-keyed animation, where you key each motion, and then as it plays through the timeline [of motion] it animates. So you just lay the key frames – from this pose to that pose – and then when you hit play, it fills in from one pose to the other. You have to still do every move, but you don’t have to do every frame. …

We’re [also] using motion capture – it’s infrared tracking, and it tracks the points on the body, and then we use those points that we capture to drive our bones. Then you have a real actor and you’re driving the animation with that, as opposed to doing it hand-keyed.

PBN: What have been the most interesting projects you’ve worked on?

TREANOR: Recently, definitely the “Iron Man” Web site we did for LG Phones. They had bought the product placement in the movie, and their phone is throughout the movie, and we got the [model] from ILM [Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s visual effects company]. And we created, in 3-D, Tony Stark’s lab on their Web site.

And then we did the opening of the “Speed Racer” video game, where we got to collaborate with the Wachowski brothers. … They did “The Matrix,” and it was nice to be able to collaborate with them.

PBN: What projects and new initiatives are you working on now?

TREANOR: We’re doing some really cool stuff – it’s all under a big [non-disclosure agreement], though. It’s definitely a movie property – a robot that we all know.

But our pipeline and our motion capture [system] are the two buzzwords right now for us. We are developing our pipeline – Paul DiPierro, the studio’s technical director, is going to talk about that at the Geeks dinner – working on our whole workflow and process. As a small shop, our philosophy is really that we think of ourselves as “3-D attack surgeons” or the “Green Berets of 3-D.” It’s small teams. We get a lot more done with four professionals than with 12 hobbyists. … You really have to work smart.

PBN: How would you characterize the state of the Rhode Island film industry?

TREANOR: I think what the [Rhode Island Film and Television Office] is doing is great. … The Film Office is doing a great job of bringing big films in, though it’s obviously going to be hard to do that with the cap they’ve put on.

Also, we – meaning us and a few other companies in town – have started a grass roots effort and have started the Rhode Island Production Coalition, which goes by the term RIPRO. We have a Web site going up in about a month. It’s basically Rhode Island [film] professionals – we’re trying to gather the professional companies in town, because there are a lot of groups out there but there are a lot of hobbyists involved. This is going to be a group of just the professionals in the state, where we can collaborate and share resources, as well as work on legislative issues.

I think a lot more can be done to grow the industry in town. We have people who are staying here, working here, and our goal is to keep a few students here every year if we can, and I think if we can do that – if you can just plug the dam, and get 2 percent more students who, instead of waiting tables for a few years, are actually compositing or using their computer science background to build some pipeline tools for us – that’s our goal and I think if you can do that, you’ll look back seven years from now and even if it’s just 65 or 70 people in the state, you’ll have more startups and boutique shops like us doing creative work. That’s my take – that’s my 2 cents. •