Tangerine is setting up shop in an 11,000-square-foot space on 19th Street in Manhattan. The facility will take up an entire floor between 5th and 6th Avenues and will feature two Discreet Flame/Smoke suites, an Avid HD editor, four seats of Softimage, two seats of Autodesk 3DS Max, four Adobe After Effects seats and one Eyeon Digital Fusion workstation for compositing. Much of this gear comes from Creative Group, which continues on with its own Avid and Discreet rooms.
The studio will also be home to newly-acquired talent. New to the team are director of visual effects Alex Arce, visual effects supervisor Brett Miller, lead 3D animator Jianchao Li, 2D animator/compositor Felix Thoo, and executive producer Jeff Fischer.
Arce launched his own animation company, Arce+Kwan, in 1995. Prior to joining Tangerine he was working as a freelance CG supervisor, creating commercial visual effects on spots for Tic Tac, Listerine, Chevron, Alize, Lowe's and ESPN.
Miller returns to New York after spending seven years designing and creating visual effects sequences for feature films in San Francisco and London. His credits include work on Kingdom of Heaven, Troy, Die Another Day, The Matrix Reloaded, and Scooby Doo.
Li brings extensive experience in 3D modeling/animation, character animation, motion graphics, visual effects, forensic animation, Web graphics, print graphics and architectural rendering. He has most recently served as a visual FX artist for Eagle Entertainment Group and has also worked as a senior 3D animator.
Thoo is a visual graphics/motion graphics designer whose work includes television campaigns for Audi, Coca Cola and LG.
And Fischer joins Tangerine from McCann-Erickson, where he served as producer, managing production of television and radio commercials. His clients included Coca-Cola, Lowe's, MLB, Gillette, Wendy's and Johnson & Johnson.
Tangerine's Web site (www.tangerinenyc.com) will be online in the coming weeks.