Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 82

Sunday, December 17, 2006 www.star-telegram.com FROM 1F Toons: Motion capture helps bring King Kong, Spider-Man, Gollum to life CONTINUED FROM 1F Bond. The magic of animation is a product of the latest technology and 50 employees at Fort Worth-based CRM Studios. With its motion-capture system, a dozen high-speed cameras surround an actor wearing a special suit dotted with marblesize gray balls, recording every bob and weave and translating it into data that can be applied to just about any character. It's the same type of system, just not as big, that filmmakers have used in recent years to bring King Kong, Spider-Man and the Lord of the Rings character Gollum to life and stardom. And it's an example of how the animation business has developed a surprisingly large presence in North Texas.

There's also North Richland Hills-based Funimation, which for more than a decade has been the U.S. distributor of the popular Dragon Ball Japanese cartoon series and has added titles featuring star skateboarder Tony Hawk. The company is expanding availability of its year-old Funimation Channel, which in North Texas is part of Verizon's FiOS cable television service and is carried on satellite TV provider Dish Network. Next up for Funimation: A fiveepisode production featuring the voice of movie star Samuel L. Jackson as none other than Afro Samurai.

It premieres on cable's Spike TV in January. As products are spinning off, companies are, too. About a year ago, three former Funimation executives broke away to form Illumitoon Entertainment, which also aims to distribute Japanese animation, or anime. The company has signed deals to distribute four new series starting in January. "Dragon Ball gave a big spur" to anime that still hasn't died down, said Illumitoon President Barry Watson.

"A few of us thought it was time" to introduce some new titles to the U.S. market, he said. Both Funimation and Illumitoon dub episodes in English, rework music and adapt scripts to avoid obscure Japanese cultural references. The English voices also have to match the characters' mouth movements, a trick that can send scriptwriters scrambling. Then they are released for broadcast or distributed on DVD.

Funimation's offices are a warren filled with about 130 mostly young workers staffing production facilities that include sound studios, mixing stations and even Funimation Channel's editing suite. Another 16 work at a store in Decatur that fills online orders. Illumitoon shares CRM's 48,000 square feet of sound and video studios packed with highend technology at its offices on the RadioShack corporate campus in downtown Fort Worth. CRM, formerly known as Circle Media, was once part of RadioShack but was A computer records Ethan Norris' movements and plays them back on a monitor. motion-capture system will attract new customers, such as makers of computer BOUAPHANH Voice director Christopher Bevins, left, and audio engineer Jason Grundy work on recording English dialogue at Funimation.

The North Richland Hills company distributes the popular "Dragon Ball anime series, among other products. sold to an investor group about three years ago. Motor over to Irving, and you'll find the offices of DNA Productions, maker of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius in 2001 and The Ant Bully last summer. Keep going east, and you hit Mesquite-based id Software, creator of Quake, Doom and other computer games. "With companies like us and other boutiques, it keeps a fairly goodsized talent pool busy," said John Davis, a Dallas native who heads DNA Productions.

"There aren't very many cities with this many companies" involved in animation, he said, venturing that North Texas might have the largest animationrelated industry outside the West Coast and New York City. The "other boutiques" Davis re- PENNINGTON Fort Worth-based CRM Studios hopes its new games. "I think if the parents don't understand it, it's good." Ryan Ball, Web editor and staff writer at Animation Magazine four independents," the most ever released in a year, said Ryan Ball, Web editor and staff writer at Animation Magazine. And Funimation changed hands last year in a deal valued at more than $100 million. The company, launched in 1994 with financial backing from Decatur's Cocanougher family, was acquired in May 2005 by Minnesota-based Navarre a big distributor of computer games, DVDs and software.

According to spokesman Jeff Dronen, Funimation is the country's largest anime distributor. Funimation President Gen Fukunaga said his company's work with Afro Samurai, which will be shown in the U.S. before it's seen in Japan, is a step up in commitment. At a cost of about $1 million per 30-minute episode, he said, Afro Samurai's production cost is four or five times that of a traditional anime episode. "They've beefed up the quality," he said of the Japanese producer of the series, "and we've spent more on marketing because we're expecting so much from it," Fukunaga said.

He'd like to do more original content creation for the U.S. market, he said. If Afro Samurai's concept sounds a bit over the top, that's just part of the market, Ball said. Consider Illumitoon's upcoming Beet the Vandal Buster, or just the name of one of its newest acquisitions: Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo (or Bo-Bobo for short). "The crazier it is, the more they like it," Ball said of anime's principal fers to include companies like Reel FX, which started in Fort Worth but moved to Dallas in 1996.

Reel FX produces 3-D animation and visual effects for customers that include Fortune 500 companies and major movie studios. In April, Pharos Capital Group invested $8 million in Reel FX, money that will be used to cover current production costs and future development. It's not the only local animation company to attract money. Jimmy Neutron was part of a huge increase in animated feature films when it pulled in more than $100 million after its December 2001 release, according to Box Office Mojo, an online film-industry reporting site. "This year there were 16 animated features, 12 from the studios and Customer: Web site is naming names to get companies to improve service Passing the test Less than 10 percent of 500 companies and government agencies evaluated by Gethuman.com earned a or better for their phone service: Earning an Hertz, Commerce Bank, Dillard's, Lands' End, L.L.

Bean, Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Hyatt Walt Disney World. Earning a Allstate Motor Club, Budget Rent A Car, National Car Rental, American Express Business Gold, Chase Credit Cards, Bear Stearns, ING Direct, the FBI, the White House, Bose, Eddie Bauer, Cabela's, Williams-Sonoma, Best Western, JetBlue Airways, Motel 6, Radisson, Southwest Airlines, Super 8. Earning a Ryder Rentals, U-Haul, Charles Schwab, Goldman Sachs Mutual Funds, Google AdWords, Motorola, T-Mobile Smart support, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Hormel Foods, Tyson Foods, Timberland, Verizon fraud reporting line, Vonage, Hampton Inn, Lufthansa, Spirit Air. SOURCE: Gethuman.com use prompts to direct calls to particular areas. "We strive to answer approximately 80 percent of our customer calls with a customer service representative within 60 seconds after a prompt from the main menu is selected," Hodges wrote in an e-mail.

"Of those calls, over 90 percent are resolved to the customer's satisfaction within five minutes without the need for additional action." The group, launched by Internet entrepreneur Paul English, hopes to empower consumers to do business with PENNINGTON High-speed cameras are instrumental in the motion-capture process at CRM Studios. They film an actor's movements, and the gathered information is used to create animated characters. audience, which is not young children but kids 15 and up. "I think if the parents don't understand it, it's good," he said. CRM Studios also has high expectations for its motion-capture system drawing in a whole new customer base, such as makers of computer games.

Tom Kirkhart, the company's marketing chief, said there are about two dozen computer game developers in Texas, and most of them are in North Texas. "We're going to aim at smaller boutiques," said CRM's Kyle Entsminger, who helps turn the raw data into finished product. Traditionally staffed with 10 or fewer people, "these companies have no way, the space or the funds, to buy this technology, so they're doing it by hand. They ramp up to 25 or 30 animators, and it still takes them two or three years." Motion capture can help finish an animation job in a fraction of the time, Entsminger said. Ball said just having a motioncapture system isn't enough to guarantee a stream of business.

"There was a time when motion capture was a big deal. Now some of the smaller studios have their own setup," he said. "But that's a twoedged sword: There's a lot of animation, but a lot of it's bad like blogs." At the same time, the spread of animation technology means that companies that can offer technical polish and creativity can flourish regardless of where they are. That's good for North Texas. "It's the virtual-studio idea," Davis said.

"It doesn't really matter so much where you are." For example, he said, during production of Jimmy Neutron, the studio distributing it, Paramount, "wanted us to move to the West Coast. Once it was successful, we never had to argue that Jim Fuquay, 817-390-7552 CONTINUED FROM 1F that many transactions are done on the airline's Web site. "The only place we do phoneto-phone contact is our reservations line." Smith said customers can reach an agent "in a very short period of time." Nine companies out of 500 earned A's: Hertz Rent. A Car, Commerce Bank, Dillard's department store, retailers Lands' End and L.L. Bean, Comfort Inn, Days Inn, Hyatt Corp.

and Walt Disney World. "We were disappointed that the companies did as badly as they did," said Lorna Rankin, Gethuman's project director. Many of the country's most prominent companies WalMart, Visa, Washington Mutual, Apple, Toys Us are failing their customers on the phone, according to Gethuman. Entire industries flunked the audit, including all TV and satellite companies as well as most insurance, shipping, software and hardware companies. RadioShack spokesman Charles Hodges said that given the high number of failing grades, Gethuman's rating system appears to be biased against any phone systems that can get to a person but what happens to you along the way," Rankin said.

Can you ask for a callback rather than wait? Do you get an estimated wait time? Can you understand the agent when one finally comes on the line? Among the sins companies must avoid to get a good grade: No hiding the zero. Callers should be able to dial 0 or say "operator" for a human. No repeats. Callers should not have to repeat information already provided during a call. No happy talk.

Companies should avoid patronizing, overly cheery computer voices and cliche phrases, such as "Your call is important to us." At least one F-rated company said it is working on improving its phone system. Electrolux Home Care Products, manufacturer of Eureka vacuums, was reviewing its automated phone system before Gethuman's rankings were published. "I feel it's too hard to get to a human being," company spokeswoman Jackie Tanner said. Electrolux will add a new menu option soon so that the 60,000 customers who call during a typical month can quickly reach human help. At the same time, Tanner said she is trying to balance the desire for human contact with the need to minimize wait times.

"We don't have lots of people answering phones and we don't want to fix one problem and cause another." At retailer L.L. Bean, the phone hadn't even started ringing on our end when an agent answered the call. "Providing a human option is critical to our business model," spokesman Rich Donaldson said. L.L. Bean's customer service representatives answer calls at four centers in Maine.

It's costly to do business that way rather than hiring contractors or relying on automation, but Donaldson said the company views it as a longterm investment. Doing away with the human touch "is something we wouldn't consider," 1 he said. Staff writers Heather Landy and Trebor Banstetter contributed to this report. customer-friendly companies. But Rankin also hopes that naming names will goad companies to do better by their customers.

"If we see companies over time raising their grade, I would view that as a very positive thing," she said. Each month, three teams of Gethuman volunteers will audit each company's phone system and rank companies based on how they. measure up against 10 standards voted on by visitors to Gethuman's Web site. "It's not just whether you Ford Motor Capital 9.50% 9.50% Coupon 9.50% Due Yield to Maturity 9.50% $1,000.00 Securities offered by Contact: Randy Ferguson FIRST WESTERN 817-553-1492 SECURITIES 800-327-1279 Member and availability as of 12-15-06.