The Garage opens new studio FFFRAME in Guadalajara

The Garage, a production company known for pushing creative and technological limits in tabletop, has opened a new studio in Guadalajara, Mexico called FFFRAME.

Co-owned by a collective of companies with a mission to create a Mexican production hub for visual storytellers, FFFRAME is the creation of partners at The Garage, Ool Digital, and Mango Films. It capitalises on the combined tabletop, live action, and post production forces available on the ground in Guadalajara, as well as on the favourable exchange rate between U.S. and Mexican currencies.

Proving this strategy right is a recent project The Garage took to its southern partner: Lays Potato Chips working with Buck as the creative agency and directed by Charles Nordeen. The shoot required tricky motion control shots partnered with choreographed rigged elements to capture the appetite appeal of Lays chips while maintaining the humanity of the live-action talent.

“Each spot has a fun reversal shot for which we relied heavily on in-studio testing combined with a pre-viz so we could dial in the motion control,” explained Nordeen. “It was an exciting challenge to have precise shots that also needed to communicate appetite appeal and satisfaction.”

The technical resources and know how for pulling off complex productions of all sorts already was in place in Guadalajara, said Steve Giralt, tabletop director and founder of The Garage, who has been working with Ool Digital there for several years on projects that required photoreal CG. They brought Mango into the consortium to add its years of experience producing live action across Latin America, explained Giralt, who is a first-generation Cuban American and fluent in Spanish. He called the venture a “dream team.”