NEW YORK CITY — Assembly (Assembly.tv) is a new post production company in Manhattan that will span two downtown locations once construction is completed in February. According to Brian Sullivan, who serves as the company’s director of cloud engineering, the company will offer a range of dailies services, as well as offline editorial, DI, VFX, color grading and finishing for commercial and feature clients.
Sullivan’s background includes time at Light Iron and says the time was right to start a new venture that could take advantage of virtualization technology – including that outside the entertainment industry – as well as a clean slate that’s not beholden to legacy infrastructures. Assembly’s parent company is North Six (https://northsix.com), which has locations in Los Angeles, London, Milan, Madrid and Paris.
“We [saw] so many things wrong with the existing post landscape in New York City and LA,” Sullivan explains, noting that larger studios had a tough time being nimble when the COVID shutdown hit.
“We do a lot of in-house development,” he continues. “One of the things that I personally am very proud of is, we utilize a full enterprise development lifecycle for our development, which means we're basically able to leverage a lot of the enterprise technologies that exist outside the film industry to do a lot of that heavy lifting. I like to make technology work for us.”
Forty percent of Assembly’s current work is supported through AWS, he notes, which has allowed the company to shift its post applications into the cloud. The company’s location at 159 Bleeker Street, which will officially open in the next month, will be home to four DI edit bays, as well as administrative offices. The company’s SoHo location, set for completion in February of 2022, will feature a 4K DI theater and offline editorial suites. Gear will include Avid and Adobe editing set ups, and Baselight, Resolve and Colorfront color grading tools.
In house talent includes senior colorist Lez Rudge, senior digital intermediate colorist Sean Dunckley and VFX supervisor John McIntosh.
“I can tell you…there's no shortage of work in New York right now,” says Sullivan. “And in fact, the studios are basically telling us, ‘Hey, we're glad these guys are coming into existence.’”