Zoic is a dynamic visual effects studio founded in Los Angeles in 2002. Independently owned and operated, the company is well known for their cutting-edge R&D, mixed reality visualizations, strong characters, and compelling narratives. Their work caters to a diverse range of entertainment and commercial clients. The Zoic team has used Evercast continuously since 2020, working on high-profile productions including The Boys, Generation V, 9-1-1, Star Trek, The Sympathizer, and House of the Dragon.

We chatted with Zoic Studios co-founder Andy Orloff about the tech evolution of VFX work and how remote work has changed the game.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

‍Tell me a bit about Zoic Studios

Zoic Studios was founded in 2002. I was one of the original founders and still work as a creative visual effects supervisor. Visual effects for episodic television has been our bread and butter, what we’re best known for since the beginning. We started out with Buffy, Angel, Firefly, CSI,  a lot of broadcast work, and then right into streaming with A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Boys… we worked on tons of other streamers from the very beginning of the streaming process. We specialize in high quality, fast-turnaround work, just because of the broadcast nature of what we do. We do film work also, but most of what we do now is for streamers. Most of the heavy visual effects work, as you probably know, has moved over into the streaming space. We also do commercial work. There’s a Super Bowl spot that Zoic did this year for CrowdStrike; it had a lot of CG in it, so we did a lot of Evercast reviews. 

But we’re known for having a more boutique feel. Zoic is one of the few companies that is owner-run and operated with no outside investment or studio connection to any of the streamers or any external companies. Our brand is about creative service and creative connection with our clients, so a tool like Evercast is really important for us. We’re technically hybrid, but most of the visual effects employees really look at work-from-home as a necessity now. We’ve incorporated that into our workflow, and our main way of communicating with clients is through Evercast.

What are some of the projects that you’ve worked on using Evercast?

I’m trying to think of where to start! In the episodic space, we worked on Superman & Lois, The Boys, Generation V (which was the spinoff), 9-1-1, Star Trek… We did The Sympathizer and House of the Dragon for HBO recently. We’re working on a horror film for A24. We did all of the seasons of Sweet Tooth using Evercast as our review tool. We’ve done commercial work for CrowdStrike. We’ve done design work and virtual set work for Fox Sports. I’m probably missing a million things, but we’re all over that television and streaming space.

How did you start using Evercast?

I’m a visual effects supervisor at Zoic, and I’ve been doing that for 22 years. We had been doing remote reviews before the pandemic, especially since we were in Vancouver. We were doing sometimes as many as 16 different shows with a bunch of different clients—everything from kickoffs and bidding reviews to shot reviews. We’d have to download the material in two different places and use software to synchronize playback, which was not a very time efficient way to do it. Inevitably, the person wouldn’t have the correct media or wasn’t able to locate the media, but we made it work for the clients who were a bit more technically advanced or had the infrastructure or assistance to help them download the material.

So then COVID comes along, and suddenly everyone is in remote review. We ended up doing a lot of screen sharing at first, just because people didn’t have the time or wherewithal to download all of the material. The stability was iffy, and the video playback quality on platforms like Teams and Zoom was not sufficient to actually approve shots—too much compression, no real-time playback. So I personally went on a search and did a lot of research. Evercast won in terms of the ease of use, stability, interactivity tools like drawing and note-taking, and particularly the ability to broadcast either from our machines or directly from the edit rooms. I only do reviews on Evercast. Zoom could be fine for an animatic, it could be fine for other things, but as far as scrubbing and getting that fidelity goes, the quality on Evercast is enough to approve shots for final. When you’re talking to the stakeholders—the directors, the DPs, the editors—we can get them to sign off on the shots and then we can do the technical approval basically on our own. It’s been amazing. 

The fact that it’s got a standalone app is also really good. It’s really easy to control; you can turn off the video for everyone if you need to get more bandwidth. I didn’t notice how much time we were spending in our other solutions just getting everything together to start the session. Evercast is really great. A lot of the work I do is supervisor-to-supervisor, so there will be a vendor and a main supervisor on the project. The ability just to call them and say, “Hey, can you jump on Evercast to approve this shot?” is so nice. The friction is so low with Evercast and the ability to get material to another person is so easy. I mean, it’s got the quality of having your media locally with the usability of a much larger platform like Zoom, so everybody is kind of familiar with how it works. It doesn’t take much training. We used to spend a lot of time putting all the work together, putting out the Quicktimes so they were downloadable and playable on Mac and PC, and then making sure the download was there. Oftentimes, we would wait and review many shots at once. Now, if we have time, and the creative has time, and there’s something we need to discuss, we just jump on and go. 

We can also use all of our tools with Evercast. There are things that we just couldn’t do before because it was all Quicktime-based, but now if I’m doing some live storyboarding in Krita or doing a sketch, I can share that; it doesn’t have to be a shot. I’ve done sessions with Unreal Engine, where we’re doing pre-vis/post-vis, and it will move the camera around and change the lights in the shot with a supervisor just there. So, not only is it easy to use, it’s also the range. We’ve been doing stuff with AI workflows—I can show and step through the workflow, even individual nodes and a Nuke script, or settings for a 3D file. The ability to broadcast your entire screen without having to go through any prep is really powerful. 

I recommend Evercast a lot, and I’ve noticed that there’s a heavy adoption rate. People who don’t use Evercast or have never used it before, they use it and then the next time you see them, they have their own license. The word of mouth is very strong. It’s hard to go back—to see a chunky Teams playback that you can’t draw on and you can’t really scrub—and then you go to Evercast and it’s crystal clear and looks like your monitor. It’s a whole different ball game.

So, tell me a bit about your technical workflow on Evercast.

Oftentimes on a film, when we’re working directly with editorial, they’ll be on NDI, so they’ll have their Avid streaming directly into the scene so we can view in context. Then the editor can play with the edit and move stuff around, move sound around. And then there’s the more work-in-progress stuff—full shots, maybe they’re playblasts or animatics of dynamic simulations, so at that point we’re broadcasting an RV playlist directly from our machines using EBS. The thing I love about Evercast is that you can very simply just share your screen. You don’t need playlist functionality. If I’m looking at animation and the client says, “There was something I like about the last version; can we put them up next to each other? I can leverage RV to do that and  just share it in. 

We’re usually working from an RV playlist because we get 4K real time, uncompressed playback from there and just broadcast that window. We have a program we call Studio Manager that takes the database from Autodesk Flow (formerly ShotGrid) and reformats it so we can add notes to it. It’s kind of our own proprietary frontend for internal presentations, and it’s way easier to navigate because we don’t have to go folder-diving to drop files in. They’re also very large EXR sequences, so we don’t make playable Quicktimes of them unless we have to. 

And because we work from home, we’re remote accessing our VPN into our machines that are in one of our various co-locations in North America, and sharing that screen. It’s all set up already for those machines to have really good playback and play real-time off of our server clusters and our RAID.

What value props would you say Evercast brings to the table—from a business perspective as well as from a creative perspective?

The biggest issue for a visual effects company is always going to be labor because it’s a fixed-bid industry where we bid based on the scope of work, and we hold ourselves and our clients accountable for staying in the realm of costs that we bid originally. So controlling labor is a big deal for us to stay profitable, and also to have good relations with clients because we don’t want things to take forever, and we don’t like doing things over and over again. So what that means is trying to minimize the number of creative revisions that we do. We want to get something in there early, get the notes, have the supervisors understand what needs to be done, execute, and deliver the shot. And then maybe there are some technical notes here and there, but if every shot has hundreds of versions, we’ve spent way too much time delivering. 

One of the biggest things that affects efficiency is creative communication. Before we were able to just jump on Evercast and do it, we would send the material and then wait for notes to come back via email, and maybe emails from several different producers. This is a visual medium, and having a verbal description of what’s not working and trying to address that is tough. The phone may be a little bit better, but nothing really compares to looking at it all together, being able to draw over the top of it, and discuss how it might be better and how it might work. In the case that you’re working in something like Unreal Engine, you could actually make the changes right there and say, “Is this what you were thinking?” So, that ability to compress the notes cycle is probably one of the most important tools that we have to increase profitability and also our customers’ experience—the feeling that there’s momentum going. Visual effects can be a frustrating process; it’s a lot of detail. Getting clarity on what needs to be done to a shot to get it to final is a lot easier when you’re interacting with the material at full resolution.

Makes a lot of sense. Do you feel that as a company, you’ve been able to take on more jobs that you potentially wouldn’t have otherwise? Maybe global opportunities?

I’m not a “more jobs equals better” kind of a guy. What Evercast does, which is even more important than volume, is it leaves everybody feeling that the visual effects process was productive, collaborative, and added to the art that they’re trying to do—which means return business from that client, which is the biggest deal. It’s about building on that brand as a creative partner, and when you help someone achieve their vision through visual effects, it just reinforces that. It does broaden the type of client that we can take though, and you’re seeing that industry-wide. When we first started Zoic in 2002, you had to have the Digi-beta decks and all of this expensive stuff. The barrier to entry was way higher. With tools like Evercast now, it’s affordable and we can use it a lot. When clients say things like “Well, I’m in New Zealand. How are we going to review material?” We say, “All we have to do is figure out the time zone.” Back when we were sending files, we had a much larger editorial infrastructure. When we were delivering on tape or digital, Digi-beta, the QC was a lot heavier. We’d have to watch the material lay down, then watch it again to make sure that no errors had occurred. So there’s a lot of time savings. 

Evercast allows us to take on more work in the sense that the type of work we can take is kind of infinite. There’s no infrastructure issues at all with getting a job awarded. And we’re also able to run a lot faster and leaner with technology like this. We don’t have to hold the type of editorial staff that we used to, and we can repurpose those people. A lot of them have moved into the artists’ space and done work that’s a little bit more rewarding for them rather than just converting files all day. 

So, do you see a strong future for remote work when it comes to visual effects and for the post-house business model?

I think remote work has been a huge benefit to visual effects. Visual effects artists need periods of uninterrupted concentration. They need large parts of their day to focus. I’ve heard a lot of “Oh no, we’ve lost the serendipitous ‘Hey, what’s that on your screen?’ type of interaction.” Well, I’m coming into my 30^th year as a visual effects professional, 22 years of it being deeply embedded in the facility culture, and I will say that there are constant interruptions in the office—meetings, people you tapping on the shoulder, like, “Hey, do you want to go out to lunch?” Although there’s a social cohesion and a team cohesion that might have been lost, the amount of focus that you can have has been a great benefit to us.

We’re very selective in our hiring; we don’t hire the type of people that you need to check on all the time. It’s actually a benefit. They’re able to strike a great work-life balance, and it’s brought more people to us too—people who may not have had the ability to come to a facility every day, based on location or childcare or medical accommodations, but are extremely talented people. I come from a background as a visual effects artist where I was constantly locking my door and putting on headphones to drown out the distractions of a busy bullpen type of situation. I think that the productivity loss is more of an emotional loss than an actual productivity loss. I’ve seen the numbers for a visual effects facility for decades, and when you compare work-from-home and without work-from-home, there’s no difference. You’re able to do more with less staff in a work-from-home situation. It’s controversial; I know people say, “We’ve got to get back in the office so I can watch my employees do their work!”

I think that when you’re in an office situation, you’re seeing all of these people there. The cultural pressure is to say, “We should have a meeting,” and then that interrupts people’s flow. In order to be a great visual effects artist, you need to get into that flow state where you’re working and your hotkeys are going, and I think that’s easier to achieve in a work-from-home environment. We offer “hybrid” at Zoic now, and I think having that hybrid flexibility is important as well.

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