This time, we step into the world of Steve Giralt, the driving force behind Garage Studio. What is Steve’s recipe for consistently staying ahead of industry trends? How does he push the boundaries of visual storytelling in a fast-changing market? And what makes his seamless blend of creative and cutting-edge techniques so special? Let’s find out!
Agnieszka Celej: As the owner of Garage Studio, what significant business decisions would you point as the most important during the development of your company?
Steve Giralt: I think it’s always been for us about trying to stay one step ahead of what’s going on. To be the next thing that the clients are going to want. Whether it was social media content versus just TV or robots, obviously, we just dove right into all that stuff. For the last year it has been virtual production.
We’ve been working on our own custom pipeline, figuring out how to operate with LED walls and slow motion. As we are based in one of the most expensive places, we have to find ways to stay competitive globally too. Minimizing practical set builds could save tons of money for us.
For us, it’s always been kind of diving into the things that could bring value to our clients in new ways. And also simultaneously let us do new things as well. Cause it’s not just like, we’re doing virtual production just to match the set. Now we can bend physics and we can turn things upside down and we kind of blend CG with real practical things.
I’m kind of both left-brained and right-brained, much like the director and the DP, and it’s really always been about looking at things both creatively and technically.
Agnieszka Celej: Can you elaborate more on this virtual production? Is it already in your offer?
Steve Giralt: We’ve done a few jobs already with it here. It’s not a huge wall, but it’s good for tabletop size stuff here in the studio. We’ve worked out a workflow to do 240 frames a second, which means we’re one of the few in the world, I know, that have this workflow established.
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Jakub Laskus: That’s important and quite remarkable. And I think it’s absolutely worth underlining, 240 frames per second sounds amazing! Congrats!
Steve Giralt: It’s been a painful process to figure it out, but now that we have, it’s opened a lot of doors for us. Initially, for the first three months it felt like establishing a master clock to achieve super nanosecond precision, setting a standard for timing everything exactly. At the same time, we were developing the pipeline for our assets, which was also a learning curve.
Now, we’re exploring how to leverage our capabilities further to do even more innovative things. For example, with the new RED camera and its Phantom track setting, we can capture simultaneous speeds coming off the camera. This allows the wall to switch backgrounds and even lightiing dynamically.
It’s not perfect for every kind of job, but for a four second end card, most of the time, it’s so much smarter, you could do four different locations in a day.
To share these advancements, we’re planning to host a summit this summer specifically for ad agency producers. We’ll walk them through the process and showcase how this technology can be utilized effectively.
