SANTA MONICA — ArsenalFX Color (www.arsenalfxcolor.tv) is celebrating its tenth anniversary with an ambitious effort to grow and extend its reach. The boutique post facility, which provides dailies, color, finishing and visual effects services for television and film, is planning to relocate to a new, standalone facility in Santa Monica. Additionally, having successfully operated a satellite facility in Atlanta for the past five years, it intends to open new satellite operations in production centers around the US and Canada, with one slated to open in Albuquerque, NM, this fall that will offer dailies and post services for productions operating in the state.
Founded in 2012 by colorist Larry Field, VFX supervisor O.T. Hight and conform artist Josh Baca, ArsenalFX Color provides a full complement of high-end post services for episodic television in an intimate, creative setting. Recent projects include the series Rap Sh*T for HBO Max, Joe Pickett for Paramount+, Grey’s Anatomy for ABC and With Love for Amazon Prime.
Photo (L-R): Larry Field, Josh Baca, O.T. Hight
ArsenalFX Color’s new Santa Monica facility will include a variety of added resources, including two more color grading suites and a DI theater. It will also house larger visual effects production space, and will feature an entirely new infrastructure, with expanded support for cloud and remote services. Those improvements will result in greater efficiency and provide the company with more flexibility in managing projects. The client experience, notes Field, will remain the same.
“We will keep our boutique mindset,” he says. “We want our team to be fully engaged with their projects. This company was founded by three artists who still run the facility and continue to work on projects every day. We don’t have layers of management. Our philosophy is to remain artist driven.”
ArsenalFX Color’s satellite facilities are designed to provide high-quality post services to TV productions operating outside Southern California. The company selected Albuquerque for its next site due to the large number of productions that have located to New Mexico to take advantage of the state’s generous tax incentive program.
“We want to have a presence in hotspots where production is happening,” says Field. “Our plan is to establish permanent facilities to provide dailies and finishing services to studios and independent producers.”
The company is just beginning to build out a production space in Albuquerque, but its plans are already generating an enthusiastic response.
“The state’s film commission is excited to have us there,” says VP/business development, Cortney Haile. “We are thrilled to provide our post services and help grow the industry in Albuquerque.”
Haile adds that ArsenalFX Color is also evaluating underserved production markets in Western Canada and in US cities in the northeast and southeast for additional satellite facilities.