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MillimeterYour Move
Jun 8, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Post-recession strategies.
Renegade Animation
Looking ahead
Most industry professionals millimeter spoke with agreed with the old adage that there is opportunity in chaos, and they are currently hunting such opportunities. Most say that 3D represents one of those potential opportunities, as do videogames, but there are many others. Among them is the business of previsualization. The early concept of previz gave birth to PLF in 1995. The company has since expanded its service menu to include finished CG visual-effects work as well, and it has “a few big projects persevering” as it attempts to navigate through the recession, Green says. Other companies are adding previz to their slate of services, and some, such as Digiscope, are routinely using previz techniques to storyboard shots as part of proposals as they bid on new work.
Data management and restoration is another service area that some facilities are exploring in order to serve new and emerging industry trends. Just prior to Pacific Title’s closure, Newby made the point that companies across the industry need to search for what he called “pockets of opportunity” to service studios in ways unrelated directly to new production.
“Obviously, the studios have large libraries of titles, and they are only going to be more interested than ever before in figuring out how to mine those libraries to generate additional sources of revenue,” Newby says. “... There are a couple of industry trends driving [these new business areas]. One of them would be the drive to distribute content through home channels and through retail stores, generating revenue from titles that would otherwise be gathering dust. That stands as an alternative for them to new production.”
Expertise developed over years working on major visual-effects projects also opened up a new production-management service for Digiscope to offer clients. “For the last couple of years, we have been doing production-pipeline management—managing the business side of [visual effects] when a show is often split up between several vendors,” Stuart says. “Maybe none of the work is even being done at Digiscope. Especially when shots are at other facilities that don’t have the same experience, clients have found it valuable to have us work with those facilities to get better end results by providing schedules and breakdowns, taking care of weekly status reports to producers, the calendar, etc. Recently, we’ve also moved to take on and finish troubled shows that were running into problems in other countries.”
There also appears to be a growing number of educational programs and manufacturer training and free software appearing across the industry. Autodesk has launched a new program to provide free software licenses and online training to artists and designers who have lost their jobs. It’s called the Autodesk Assistance Program, and unemployed artists can get access to resources at students5.autodesk.com/?nd=assistance_home. Autodesk also offers a community site (area.autodesk.com) that offers virtual access to Autodesk presentations at tradeshows, product demos, master classes, and various tutorials.
Few of these strategies were invented for the current economic downturn, but many of them became higher priorities in recent months. Many of the people millimeter spoke with say these strategies will continue to have relevance as conditions improve and normal production patterns resume. The analysis from many people is that will start to be the case by the end of this year or early in 2010, particularly since at press time, it appeared the threat of an actors’ strike was over.
The questions, then, are if facilities can weather the storm until that point and what the industry business landscape will look like going forward. Certainly, there will be fewer facilities to compete with in some categories. Beyond that, some people also say there will be subtle shifts in who produces content and hires facilities to begin with.
“It’s clear the major studios are, for the moment, producing fewer feature films, but at the same time, it’s clear that the so-called minimajors are growing, and they may fill some of that gap as production comes back,” says Technicolor Chief Technology Officer Ahmad Ouri. “We’ve done a number of deals in recent months with some of them, such as Overture Films, and their work is offsetting some of the main studio’s production decline. Animation also appears to be gaining, along with 3D. So I do think things will come back, and companies have to be ready for when that happens.”
“I don’t see anything going on that seems like a fundamental risk to the whole business,” Herskovitz says. “More productions will be funded by foreign money, and somehow, the industry will find a way through it. And remember that cable TV is a real growth sector right now. So I don’t see fundamental damage as much as incremental changes to how our industry operates.”
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.