The Los Angeles studio is focused to serve as the company’s production hub to Hollywood clients, and also represents Eclipse’s expansion in offering the company’s creative content-building skills to the rapidly-evolving, global market. The business model breaks the stereotype of providing low cost, off-shore resources for basic VFX work. Eclipse’s bilingual Chinese crew, led by Western VFX talent, is comprised of artists with the creative depth to establish and expand concepts into fully-detailed environments, CG characters and visually branded campaigns.
Eclipse’s work has recently gained industry recognition by earning Best Visual Effects in a feature film honors from the Asian Film Awards, the Hong Kong Film Awards, and the Taiwan Golden Horse Awards for their achievements in director Hark Tsui’s Flying Swords of Dragon Gate.
Through Spatial Harmonics Group, England and Shepherd established a reputation for their expertise in CG photorealism, customized CG fluid dynamics and particle systems. In prominent feature film and commercial projects they have consistently evolved creative 3D VFX solutions for challenging shots. They have built longstanding relationships working in alignment with leading software firms and innovators, and collaborated with their clients as content-builders in designing and developing innovative effects.
The merger marks a reunion for England and Shepherd with colleagues Sam Khorshid, creative director, Josh Cole, VFX Supervisor, and Brian Dowrick animation director, who are all part of Eclipse’s core talent team in China. The artists have worked together in various combinations to create visual effects for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 and Alice in Wonderland among other feature films. These highly experienced Western artists have been directing and evolving Eclipse’s artists in China for several years.
“Sam (Wang) had the vision to coalesce the best aspects of our production cultures,” England said. “The alliances he has built by forming an international team of top-tier VFX talent are examples of how he has laid the foundation for Eclipse becoming a global player in visual effects production,”
Eclipse’s established relationships with leading Chinese filmmakers are in synch with the growing international spirit of collaboration and cooperation between Chinese and American productions. “There is no question that Wayne’s accomplishments and experience as both VFX artist and producer are in demand and this is especially true for a growing market like China,” said Peter Shiao, founder and CEO of Orb Media Group. “Eclipse VFX is positioned at the cutting edge of collaborations between Hollywood and China.”
Eclipse’s production assignments will “go both ways,” with project work to be distributed across Chinese and U.S. locations. Eclipse’s timely blending of Eastern and Western resources, combines the creative aesthetics of U.S. talent and the organized, cost efficiency of Chinese operations to effectively service the visual effects needs of feature films and commercial productions for the global market.
