So long, CBS Digital; hello, CBS VFX. The technology group has rebranded itself — here’s a look at why they’re making changes.

  • The company is expanding to meet rising demand from producers of tv series. In November, it will move from its current headquarters at CBS Television City to a new home at the corporation’s Studio City production center. It’s also got a shiny new logo.

  • CBS VFX will continue to be led by Craig Weiss, executive creative director, and George Bloom, executive producer.
  • Founded in 1991, the company provides a variety of services, ranging from virtual and augmented reality to vfx, pre-vis, and color grading. At the core of its offering is a virtual production system known as Parallax. Its rebranding reflects the growth of all these tools in broadcast content — they aren’t just for films.

    Parallax system demo.

  • Parallax provides intricate, fully-3d virtual recreations of real places. Crews can film freely within the virtual locations, saving them the cost of actual location shoots.
  • “The enormous demand for series content, led by the growth of streaming services, has reached an inflection point where the cost of shooting on location is a budgetary concern,” said Weiss in a statement. “The use of virtual locations offers an enormously creative way to save time and money with an end result that is indistinguishable to the viewer yet transformative for cast and crew.”
  • CBS VFX has previously worked on Netflix’s G.L.O.W. and Orange is the New Black, NBC’s This Is Us, CBS’s Hawaii 5-0 and the upcoming All Rise, ABC’s Modern Family, Showtime’s Black Monday, and a vr experience based on Netflix’s Stranger Things.
CBS VFX reel.

Alex Dudok de Wit

Alex Dudok de Wit is Deputy Editor of Cartoon Brew.