Rushes specialise in video editing and computer animation. David Jefferson met Chairman, Godfrey Pye at their London premises.
Rushes Postproduction Limited specialise in video and film editing, computer graphics and computer animation, for television commercials, pop promos, corporate and industrial work. They are probably best known for the Dire Straits pop video Money for Nothing which used animation created on a Bosch Computer Graphics system and Paint Box. The company is based in Old Compton Street, Soho, London. When I went along to see them they were in the process of rebuilding some of their video editing suites. They have recently invested around £1 million in the latest state-of-the-art post production editing equipment and editing techniques.
I asked Rushes’ chairman, Godfrey Pye, how he first got interested in computer graphics.
“Quite simply I was a film editor and I gradually got more involved in video tape editing. I have always liked images with a simple graphic style, so when I saw the Bosch FGS Computer Graphics System at an exhibition in the USA I was immediately turned on by it.”
He realised it would enable them to not only manipulate the pictures people brought in but also to generate their own images. By virtue of computer graphics those images would have simple, clean graphic lines. “To be able to sit and create an image, to twiddle the knobs and make it go round and disappear up its own arse is wonderful,” remarked Pye.
They had a Bosch machine installed and after a while they realised there were certain things they wanted to do that could not be achieved by the Bosch alone, this was solved
by getting a Quantel Paint Box. The demand for computer animation quickly developed to the point where they were doing so much work on the first Bosch it was decided to get a second one. “The Paint Box proved to be so good that when Quantel brought out a new graphics system called Harry, we were the first company in Europe to install one, and it is excellent,” said Pye.
Harry is a digital random access hard disc device designed as an add-on to Paint Box, but it is much more than that, it is an editing system in its own right without using video tape. “It does beautiful matting and keying. You can take film images or video tape images or computer graphics, and edit them together, as you would in the traditional way with video tape and add technological opticals. The bit that turned me on about the Harry was the ability to put all these images together with no generation loss at all because it is digital. Take for instance Cel Animation, an infinite number of cels can be overlayed, all with first generation quality,” explained Pye.
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