Please welcome Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (MARZ) as the latest addition to the Rhino Crash!
HQ: Toronto, ON
Founders: Jonathan Bronfman, Lon Molnar
The Problem: The visual effects (“VFX”) industry has been experiencing a paradigm shift; with the rapid growth and popularity of streaming platforms, such as Netflix and Amazon, film and episodic content is no longer limited to “on-air” times for viewers to watch and engage. Consumers can watch movies and shows on demand, driving the need for studios to spend billions producing new content at a faster rate than ever before.
With this rapid increase in new content creation, demand for VFX work is at an all-time high while, at the same time, VFX talent is limited and becoming increasingly competitive. This pressure to produce the highest quality content at quicker turnaround times is driving post-production costs up. VFX studios like MARZ are solving for this by putting technology at the forefront of their work.
The Solution: MARZ is a tech-enabled VFX studio, specializing in premium, episodic TV shows, with a focus on beauty, aging, and de-aging VFX. By leveraging the vast dataset accumulated through its traditionally-completed VFX projects (with a team of artists editing each frame of a shot), MARZ has built its own proprietary AI software, Vanity AI, to significantly reduce the amount of manual editing required. By doing so, they are able to offer studios feature-film quality aging, de-aging, and beauty work with unparalleled speed, consistency, and cost.
In the future, MARZ plans on further developing Vanity AI to offer a wide range of complementary VFX services including digital doubles, cloning, and head/character replacements.
The Team: Headquartered in Toronto, ON, the 100+ team is led by Jonathan Bronfman (Co-Founder and Co-President), Lon Molnar (Co-Founder and Co-President), and Matthew Panousis (COO). Lon and Jon are VFX industry veterans, having worked at numerous other studios over the past 20 years. Matthew is a co-founder of ACTO and formerly their CRO. They not only bring with them years of experience, but also strong relationships with leading streaming and production studios that they have developed over the years.
Rhino’s Perspective: As demand for movie and episodic content continues to grow, the need for fast, accessible, and reliable VFX work is growing in parallel. With strong tailwinds pushing high production content growth, along with a technology-enabled offering, an experienced team, and a proven ability to build lasting relationships with the world’s leading production studios, we are excited to partner with MARZ and join them on their journey.
