In a bid to accelerate the growth of Vancouver's visual effects (VFX) industry, VFX house Image Engine Design Inc. has launched a new venture to deepen the talent pool in the city's missing employment cohort: junior VFX artists.
Jason Dowdeswell is Image Engine's head of studio. He said that for the past decade, Vancouver and other global VFX hubs have outsourced much of their entry-level work to countries such as China, India and Thailand.
The result, he said, is that they no longer have those entry-level jobs.
"We've eroded our opportunity to grow our workforce."
In an attempt to reverse that trend, Image Engine has created a new facility dedicated to "in-sourcing" the company's entry-level jobs. The Centre for Digital Media on the Great Northern Way Campus, Image Engine's new – and third – facility, will house 30 employees dedicated to the entry-level disciplines of camera tracking and rotoscoping, which involves manually preparing film plates for compositing.
"We need to have big teams of people that essentially represent our next generation," Dowdeswell said of the company's move.
BC Film + Media CEO Richard Brownsey said in a statement that Image Engine's initiative will have significant long-term benefits for the industry in B.C.
Aside from addressing Vancouver's talent needs, Dowdeswell pointed out that the second business imperative behind the new facility is a push from film studios to maximize B.C. tax credits on VFX work.
"When you take a certain amount of man-days on a project and park it in another country, that studio or the film producer that's banking on a certain amount of tax credit is going to see a smaller amount. So it's breaking their [business] model when we don't do all the work in B.C."
Dowdeswell added that in-sourcing that labour back into B.C. can increase Image Engine's value for its film clients while tackling the industry's talent needs.
On the talent front, Dowdeswell said more still needs to be done to keep Vancouver's VFX hub growing.
He noted that last year, the elimination of the federal immigration system's IT worker designation, which fast-tracked hiring, threatened to choke off the flow of needed human resources into the industry. He commended the provincial and federal governments for listening to the VFX industry's outcry and creating two replacement job designations to fill that gap.
"With the absence of anything replacing the IT worker, we were screwed; this has eased our pain greatly," he said.
But Dowdeswell added that the process could still be improved to address the industry's needs.
Beyond missing entry-level jobs in Vancouver and an imperfect immigration system, Dowdeswell said Vancouver's high cost of living is another roadblock to growth for the talent-driven industry.
"The average age here is probably 28, but [as employees] get into their thirties, they want to settle down and have kids and a family – and they have to move out to Maple Ridge or something and the commute becomes too difficult."
Image Engine was also one of the forces behind a recent move to increase server capacity for Vancouver's digital industries by launching RenderCloud, a super-computing hub. (See "Vancouver super-computer movie processing hub launched" – BIV Business Today, January 27.)
Dowdeswell said that move, in conjunction with building the local VFX talent pool, could position Vancouver's VFX companies to land a film project on the scale of the Harry Potter film series – which is credited with catapulting London's VFX industry onto the world stage. •
