Visual Effects: Ollin Studios - Mexico Director: Rigoberto Castañeda Production: Kilómetro 31 - Feature Film Production Company: Lemon Film Ollin Studios, Mexico, is at the forefront of a new wave of Digital Intermediate facilities within South America and has recently completed work on new feature, Kilometro 31 for Lemon Films, using recently acquired, complimentary DI workflow enhancements, PFClean and NorthLight film scanner with BaseLight colour grading system from UK based FilmLight Technology. Alejandro Diego, founder and CEO of Ollin Studios suggests, "There is a perception that Mexico is not up-to-date" when it comes to state of the art Digital Intermediate technology, and insists "But its quite the contrary." Indeed Diego considers that the recent acquisition of PFClean and FilmLight Technology was essential for Ollin Studios. Carlos Iturriaga, Managing Director of Ollin goes further by saying that "the installation of The Pixel Farms PFClean together with FilmLight technology represents such a substantial upgrade to Ollins DI workflow that, we are now the most capable post-production facility in Latin America for 2k work". Ollin, which means constant movement in Nahuati, a local dialect, certainly havent been standing still either. Since winning both gold and bronze awards for Visual Effects earlier this year at the Ibero-American Festival of Publicity in Buenos Aires they have expanded from Mexico to L.A. with the opening of a new office there, and supplied VFX and DI solutions to numerous film projects and commercial spots. Not least of these is Kilometro 31 for award winning Lemon Films, whose last feature was Mexicos biggest grossing movie of the year. Other films include "Fuera Del Cielo", "La ltima Mirada", and "La Leche y el Agua". Kilometro 31 is a kind of supernatural horror/mystery and tells the story of twin sisters who develop a special psychic way to communicate after the trauma of their mothers death. A mysterious accident at the 31st kilometro of the highway leaves one of the twins in a coma, while the other seeks to discover what really happened, prompted by apparent supernatural messages from her unconscious sister, leading to shocking revelations. Click Images to enlarge Starting out with 2k Super 35mm the film project was scanned with a NorthLight scanner then cleaned and QCd using The Pixel Farms state of the art PFClean application. Production Director, Charlie Iturriago explains, "The PFClean team receive the movie rolls of 1000ft to the computer and remove scratches and dust, cleaning the film frame by frame, in a fast and automated process. Then the final frames go to output servers for deliveries and archival. So, the entire movie is QCd with PFClean in 2k for a completely clean delivery." So impressed with both the very high quality results and remarkable timesavings of PFClean that Ollin consider it as one of the selling points as they expand and offer DI services to the US market. Indeed PFCleans abilities are significant and substantial, offering a high quality workflow enhancement while avoiding artifacting, which can occur with other automated clean up processes. PFClean features a comprehensive set of resolution independent tools to clean up and prepare plates, working as a fully automatic, hybrid system or manual system. The user is able to define frames and the type of anomalies to be fixed in a non-destructive environment. All fixes, whether applied automatically or manually, are executed via a per frame meta data map. This provides total control over any image modification and effectively provides the user with an unlimited number of non-sequential undos. Ollins Production Director, Charlie Iturriago insists, "PFClean has been a great asset in the pipeline, giving us an easy to use, affordable way of doing QC, giving us a perfectly clean master for different deliveries". In addition to this he states "We had great support from The Pixel Farm, since our evaluation period to final acquisition and current operation of the system. The setup and installation, as well as licensing process were flawless". The Pixel Farm have now released PFClean Film Restoration pack. This is a set of additional tools that considerably extend PFCleans core functionality, addressing problems found in very damaged film and with archive restoration projects. The tools have been designed to fit seamlessly into the PFClean environment and operate using the benefits of the PFClean's non-destructive workflow. To see the movie trailer click here. www.ollinstudios.com.mx Words: Martin Southwood