Rob:  Well this spring FORBES magazine ranked Oklahoma City number twelve in the country for the best places to do business.  Our energy industry is helping keep the City’s economy moving while agriculture and aviation also play major roles.  Yet increasingly, Oklahoma City is starting to become a high-tech hub of sorts.  Our Keith Smith joins me now with a look at a computer software company that’s well-known in entertainment circles, but a virtual secret here in the heartland.
Keith:  You’ve probably already seen their work.  P L Studios has clients doing everything from major motion pictures to all types of commercials.  A teacher in the truest sense of the word, P L Studios founder, Piyush Patel, says he hasn’t changed a thing from his days teaching in a college classroom.  Now, he just teaches it to the world.
(Video clips courtesy Janimation:  Is this a great job, or what?)
Keith:  Testing the limits of imagination, digital artists are doing things that have never been done before, with a little help.
Piyush Patel:  Our company is focused on creating educational training material for folks that are in the visual effects industry…
(sound effects)
Piyush Patel:  video game industry.
(music)
Keith:  P L Studios, where everyone is part of the creative department.
Piyush Patel:  I always say, if you’ve been in the movies in the past three years, you’ve seen our work; if you’ve bought a video game in the past three years you’ve seen our work.  So it’s, we’re so deeply embedded into every major pipeline that, it’s pretty rare not to find our product somehow, somewhere being used.
Keith:  They’ve created hundreds of titles, teaching the biggest names the latest toolsets.
Piyush Patel:  Everybody from Pixar, ILM, Apple, Motorola, MTV, all of the big players, they use our products to help train their artists. Everything that we sell is out of the state, or out of the United States.  And so for Oklahoma, we’re truly a wealth generation company, where we take very little Oklahoma resources, but we bring in a lot of money for the state.
(Video clip courtesy Janimation:  sound effects.)
Keith:  The Company has pushed to bring creative professionals together, Janimation’s Greg Punchatz. 
Greg Punchatz:  They have a very, very good curriculum.  They teach software in a very easy to understand way and a very, very thorough way.  
You know, those cut scenes that you see in between, you’ll be playing your game, and then you’ll cut to a scene…
(Video clip courtesy Janimation:  sound effects.)
Where everything all of a sudden looks better than the game, and you’ve got good acting and all that stuff, that’s the kind of stuff we tend to work on.
(Video clip courtesy Janimation:  sound effects and music.)
Piyush Patel:  It’s always about what’s new tomorrow and what production techniques are going to shave off time for the artist.
(Sound effects)
Greg Punchatz:  You could be sitting there, and you spend your two hours or your two days playing the video game or however long it takes you to get through that video game. There is probably three years of man work behind any of that stuff, at the minimum.
Kyle Green:  I really, really enjoy the fact that no two days are the same.
Keith:  Employees like Kyle Green are in a constant state of change, keeping up with new software in an online world that’s always evolving.
Kyle Green:  Every day, your skill set has to be better than it was the day before, because everybody else in the industry’s is too.
Piyush Patel:  We have just incredible artists, and we have incredible teachers.  And when you mix those two together, you end up with a product that people say, wow, that’s really easy to learn; but, if they would have tried to do it on their own, it would have taken months of research just to get where we can take you in an afternoon.
Kyle Green:  Everybody up here really kind of has different strengths, different areas of expertise, so.  Some people deal in lighting and shading.  Some people deal in modeling.  Some people deal in animation.  There’s always a different problem to have to be tackled.  There’s always something that somebody needs help with, in the industry, and that’s kind of our job, is to kind of help people do things that haven’t been done before and help them figure these things out.
Keith:  P L Studios, redefining what’s possible, in an industry where imagination is king.
Keith:  While they compete globally, P L Studios also tries to encourage Oklahoma’s digital artists with workshops and seminars.  
Rob:  Now when you were working on this story, in your office, I did look over your shoulder and saw that you were doing a little animating of your own.
Keith:  I tried, and that’s the key word there.  There are these websites out there where you can do your own animation.  Take a look.
A world where just about anything is possible, the world of computer animation.
Rob:  Now in case our viewers didn’t notice, that animation looks strangely like someone that I know.  Let’s take a look again.
A world where just about anything is possible, the world of computer animation.
Rob:  So is that you?
Keith:  That would be me with computer enhancement, if you can call it that.
Rob:  Now how long did it take you to do that?
Keith:  It took me a little too long, but these sites are free, and once you get used to it, you can do it in no time