DTV Worries Special-Effects Companies
techweb.com
(12/11/98, 3:47 p.m. ET)
By Reuters
While TV executives ponder the rose-colored possiblity
of new DTV and its effect on millions of U.S. viewers,
Hollywood's special-effects companies are worrying
about their businesses breaking apart.
With digital comes the promise of a whole new
entertainment medium, interactive TV, on which
consumers can shop, chat, send e-mail, and surf the Web
all from their own living rooms.
To entice viewers to buy these new services, TV
programmers need the flashy, computer-generated
effects Hollywood has produced for years at large
companies, called post-production houses. But that is
where the problem comes in.
Demand for computer-graphics (CG) artists and
animators has skyrocketed in recent years from TV
producers, movie studios, and even Fortune 500-sized
companies looking for slick digital effects to use in their
sales pitches. The result has been a scramble for CG
specialists and rising costs for their work.
At the same time, the price of computing has fallen, and
many graphics artists find they no longer need a
well-financed company supporting them with pricey
equipment. That, in turn, has created many small, highly
creative post-production shops that threaten to put the big
companies out of business.
"Finding and keeping creative talent is certainly the key
to success in this industry right now," said John Hughes,
whose Rhythm & Hues production house won an Oscar
for special effects for its work on the hit 1996 film Babe.
Those sentiments were echoed by Herve Tardis of
MediaLab Studios, producer of Fox Family Channel's
Donkey Kong Country, famed for its cutting-edge,
real-time animation.
Tardis said over the past year senior, computer artists
have been asking $45 to $50 an hour to start, and a junior
specialist can now command $30 to $40 an hour.
"We've noticed it's extremely hard to get CG artists
unless you pay a high price, and even if you pay that
price, you still have to train these people for weeks,"
Tardis said.
The film and video-production business is estimated at
about a $37 billion business by industry researchers at
Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research. But in the
new digital age, it's expected to grow even bigger.
Across the country, as major corporations dip their
fingers into e-commerce on the Internet, they are finding
like TV, they need more digital content to keep users at
their websites. As a result, they, too, are seeking CG
artists who can put together slick, Hollywood-style
graphics.
"The Web is offering a 24-hour representation of what
these companies are," said Michael Skerly, spokesman
for a recent Digital Content Creation conference in Los
Angeles.
"For instance, they can utilize high-quality video,
corporate interviews, and printed pieces across a number
of different areas," he added.
Skerly said to get the best quality possible, many
companies are stealing from Hollywood's talent pool.
Like the old studio system that kept actors, directors, and
other talent sewed up with long-term contracts in the first
half of this century, the special-effects companies and
production houses kept a lock on computer talent in the
past two decades.
But the system is being shaken not only by the increased
demand for graphics artists, but also from radical new
software used with Microsoft's Windows NT operating
system and powerful microchips from Intel.
Combined, the two have reduced hardware size from
entire rooms to the desktop and cut the cost of high-end
graphics from hundreds of thousands of dollars to just a
few thousand.
The result is graphics artists and production houses are
becoming highly specialized and the once-big production
houses are splitting into smaller companies, a process
Forrester Research calls the atomization of the industry.
In the next year or so, Forrester sees these production
companies struggling to define their role as some houses
embrace the changes brought by digitization and others
simply go out of business.
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