Creative control centre

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This article was published 09/03/2024 (587 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Soon, Reid Valmestad and Austin MacKay will be in South Korea. And Las Vegas and Texas and Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, however, MacKay was in front of a camera at his Exchange District office in Winnipeg. Behind him, a video wall displayed a golden field and bright blue sky.

As Valmestad turned the camera, the background moved, responding as if he were turning his head.

“This kind of shows you how you’re able to blend the foreground with the background virtually,” he explained.

Valmestad motioned to a nearby TV screen: his business partner, MacKay, looked as though he were in a Prairie field. A fence prop in front of MacKay appeared to fit with the digital scene.

Virtual production isn’t the industry the two men expected to enter when they launched CoPilot Co.

Nor did they expect to work with Fortune 500 companies or join a trade mission. However, Global Affairs Canada asked if they’d represent the country’s creative industry — so they’re headed to South Korea in April.

“It’s really crazy,” MacKay quipped, minutes after stepping away from the video screen.

The screen is made from tiles used to film Star Wars TV series The Mandalorian, he said. The show changed CoPilot’s trajectory.

MacKay, 29, and Valmestad, 30, knew each other at Grant Park High School. They both studied business in university and agreed they should start a company together.

It didn’t happen at first. Valmestad got a job with a film production agency; MacKay worked in destination marketing.

The pair would hire each other for projects. Finally, in 2018, they jumped into entrepreneurship together.

“We went to the Starbucks academy,” Valmestad said with a laugh. “We were laptop warriors, we started our business.”

The two took a “shotgun approach” to CoPilot. From their respective family basements, they offered website building, social media strategies, advertising campaigns and video creation.

Local hotels and Travel Manitoba were the first clients. When they grew tired of basement headquarters, the pair moved to the third floor of 62 Albert St., where they rented a room.

CoPilot had just hit its stride — focusing on video production, nixing the rest — when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

MacKay called it “crushing… As a business who specialized in tourism, there wasn’t tourism.”

The entrepreneurs laid off themselves and a brand-new hire.

Then, they watched The Mandalorian on the Disney Plus streaming service and behind-the-scenes footage of The Mandalorian’s creation. The intergalactic backgrounds were filmed on, essentially, “a big LED TV” with a 270-degree bend.

“That kind of clued in for us, ‘Oh, this is really cool — how do we learn more about this?’” MacKay said.

He and Valmestad spent their free time researching all they could about virtual production. It meant building a master list of contacts and information found online, diving into 100-page PDFs and calling anyone in the field who’d pick up the phone, MacKay said.

At the same time, Valmestad and a co-worker were learning Unreal Engine, a computer program used in video game creation and virtual production. It was “extremely daunting,” MacKay recalled.

CoPilot’s founders started talking with the National Research Council Canada in 2021. The federal agency provided money for staff to tinker with virtual production technology.

“This is a massive opportunity for the (Winnipeg),” said Michael Le Goff, CoPilot’s industrial technology adviser from the NRC. “If the home of the technology is here, then all we would need to do is find the capital to build a full-on virtual production studio.”

CoPilot focused on sets where movement aligns between the camera and virtual background. The concept was already in play; CoPilot sought efficiencies.

Valmestad likened it to creating “a synced heartbeat between the camera, the computer engine and the LED walls.”

Also in 2021, CoPilot hired a staff member for YouTube video creation. The founders provided an outline: “We have no ROI (return on investment), we have no expectations. We just want to put content out that we can look back in 10 years and be proud of.”

And so, CoPilot released explanatory videos about virtual production. They were doing so in a tight-lipped industry, Valmestad noted. He saw it as “putting waves out” — a project may come their way if they kept up with the content.

A project did: Exxon Mobil called with questions. In late 2022, the Fortune 500 company asked CoPilot to build it a virtual production studio in Texas.

The Winnipeg company accepted. It took roughly a year-and-a-half to build the Houston site, where Exxon Mobil will now film its advertisements and in-house productions.

CoPilot orders the studio equipment, wires the cables and sometimes hires crews to build the LED wall. It handles the custom work.

Since Exxon Mobil, the Winnipeg team has built at least three studios and is in the works with three or four more, MacKay said. Walls range in width from 15 to 75 feet and in price from nearly $1 million to $4 million.

The Prairie entrepreneurs travel to conferences, promoting their business. Shoulder taps and “Are you CoPilot?” aren’t unusual — clients have felt the waves of the YouTube videos, Valmestad said.

It’s how the entrepreneurs have inked some deals and partnerships.

“We do it all from a tiny team,” Valmestad added.

CoPilot has grown to eight staff, plus a handful of external contractors. (MacKay believes the number could double within the next year.)

In addition to studio building and content creation, CoPilot is testing an artificial intelligence-powered system, called FlightDeck, to make using Unreal Engine (and virtual production) easier.

Staff are eyeing spring as a launch date; users will pay in a three-tiered system. When the free version launched in August 2023, the website crashed twice from demand, Valmestad recalled.

He and MacKay hope to create a full virtual production studio in Winnipeg. Currently, they must leave the province to film; the 1,000-square-foot studio in their office is for research and development.

Le Goff, from the NRC, noted CoPilot has other destination options. However, the company is good for Winnipeg, which is already a movie-making hub, he added.

“You’d find a lot of productions to come here,” Le Goff said, referring to a full virtual production studio build in Winnipeg. “It’s the tech that drives the value.”

The NRC has spent “hundreds of thousands” of dollars funding innovation at CoPilot, according to Le Goff.

The company founders will jet to South Korea in April, alongside 19 other Canadian businesses. Global electronics and appliances company LG is on the to-meet list for MacKay and Valmestad. Finding new customers is another target.

“We’re just really proud of them, and really proud of the work that they’re able to do,” said David Pensato, Exchange District Business Improvement Zone executive director.

Amanda Macdonald, Economic Development Winnipeg vice-president of business development and market intelligence, said it’s “rewarding” to see local businesses expand internationally.

Though CoPilot may eventually have offices elsewhere, it plans to keep its headquarters in Winnipeg, the founders said.

gabrielle.piche@winnipegfreepress.com