David Alexander Davidson was working as an art director when he had the epiphany from which his post-production company, Solventdreams, was born.

“I was doing a Coke commercial on the Universal Studios lot and the executive producer walked over holding a manual of Final Cut Pro version 1,” he relates. “He pointed in this big gesture over the whole lot and said, ‘All this we’ve built up’ — the infrastructure and equipment — ‘will go away. And this’ — he’s holding up the Final Cut Pro manual — ‘is what will replace it.’ It was very dramatic, like those grand cinematic moments in a film from the 1920s.”

“Since our budget didn’t permit a multimillion dollar post, we orchestrated a methodology that a handful of people could execute using off-the-shelf computers and software.”

Davidson took the prediction to heart. “I saw the writing on the wall,” he continues. “I’d heard of Final Cut Pro, and it seemed to be the Holy Grail of the digital revolution. But that experience galvanized it for me. I saw that if the big guys, the major producers, were interested in editing on the Mac, it was going to happen.”

In 2000 Davidson started Solventdreams in his living room closet. Today, at 39, the filmmaker has weathered the start-up years and is gathering an impressive roster of clients who engage him to do editing and post on his all-Mac platform.

A Claymation Spoof

Most recently, Davidson and his whippet-lean crew have wrapped post-production on an 87-minute feature called “Disaster!” The film is a spoof of flicks like “Armageddon” in which, as Davidson puts it, “the Earth is un-imperiled by the stereotypical blue-collar father figure and his extended family of sophomoric miscreants.” The difference, in “Disaster!,” is that the entire conceit is carried out in claymation.

Early in the development process, director Roy Wood and Dream Entertainment contracted Solventdreams to manage the post-production process on their stop-motion feature. For two years, Davidson and co-producer Sim Tuzun supervised thousands of hours of visual effects work, including editing, compositing, CGI, and color grading.

Unique to the project was a workflow based on the use of standard digital still cameras. To manipulate those stills, Davidson and his tiny crew relied on a Mac-based system that included Power Mac G5s, Xserve RAIDs, Final Cut Pro, and Shake. Says Davidson, “Since our budget didn’t permit a multimillion dollar post, we orchestrated a methodology that a handful of people could execute using off-the-shelf computers and software.” Such a workflow, he believes, “has never before been realized at this scale for a theatrical claymation feature.”

Two Sides of the Golden Triangle

“This project was more than eighty percent greenscreen,” adds Davidson. “We started compositing on day one and we basically never stopped. There wasn’t a shot we didn’t manipulate frame by frame. I don’t know of any other film that has that much visual effects compositing.” The challenge was to maintain professional-quality results in an ultra-cost-conscious production environment.

Davidson isn’t kidding when he says his crew was small. “We had two VFX supervisors and two compositors,” he says. “That’s remarkable when you compare this project to films of equivalent length and resolution. Look at the credits for ‘Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ or ‘The Corpse Bride’ and you’ll see that hundreds of people worked on them. And that’s typical for VFX-heavy features. But on our project, if you don’t watch carefully, you’ll miss the post credits — they’re gone in an eye-blink.”

To achieve pro results under strict cost restraints, something had to give. “You know that golden triangle of speed, quality, price — pick any two?” asks Davidson. “Well, something had to give and in this case it was speed. That’s why it took us two years.”

Next Page: Frame by Frame