The Asia Pacific region that encompasses Australia and New Zealand continues to grow as a hot spot for production of big budget feature films–and commercials.
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of Rings put New Zealand front and center on the Hollywood map a few year back, and the region remains there thanks to a steady stream of successful features including Jackson’s latest, Universal’s King Kong; as well as Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson, which used New Zealand locations and stages for production.
“The film business is primarily a business, and the studios are looking to maximize their dollar,” says Bruce Carter, creative director at Sydney, Australia-based post and visual effects house Animal Logic, which also maintains an office in Venice, Calif. “But we can’t rely on economics. Every project we pitch on our creative credentials. That’s really important.”
Carter and others interviewed for this story emphasize that the region also offers a mature industry and infrastructure. “Studios can get high quality work here, for good value,” Carter says.
Helping this along, Carter relates, is the commercial industry. Here it is not uncommon to work on both features and spots. “There is an active cross pollination; even tools developed on films may be used the next week on a commercial. And commercials can have a very experienced film crew. That cross pollination is very important and very active. We are also English speaking, have a great climate, [locations], and all of that factors in,” he adds.
King Kong senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri adds that commercials also get to take advantage of efficient and developed feature pipelines, a plus for the spot industry’s tighter production schedules.
Letteri also identifies broadband as an important factor in that it enables work to be sent quickly to other countries for review and approval. He reports that Wellington, N.Z.-based post/visual effects company WETA Digital, his current roost, wrote a software program called Remote Player that is used to allow two sites to watch work simultaneously. Animal Logic also developed a proprietary review and approval system.
London-headquartered Sohonet offer connectivity at multiple sites in both Australia and New Zealand, and reports that as a whole, this service experiences frequent use for international productions.
WETA
With its work on The Lord of the Rings and King Kong, WETA Digital has made a strong name for itself, and Letteri reports that things remain busy at WETA.
“We always get a lot of inquiries about commercials,” he says, adding that the company can especially accommodate a lot of spot work when it is between major features. This is one of those times; WETA is currently busy with multiple commercial assignments for clients in the U.S. and U.K., among other markets, as well as some feature work including a sequence for X-Men 3, scheduled for a May release by 20th Century Fox, directed by Brett Ratner and starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen and Halle Berry. Letteri predicts that WETA’s next big feature project will be Halo, a feature that Jackson plans to produce; he has not yet named a helmer.
“Peter Jackson will consistently produce big products of interest,” Animal Logic’s Carter relates. “That helps this region very much. Alongside that is the east coast of Australia, Fox Studios in Sydney, Warners in Brisbane, and Docklands in Melbourne. Across those three cities, there are soundstages and crews. There’s a real maturity across the board. I would expect the trend of large films being made down here to continue– at least that’s what we are hoping.”
In 2006, one can also expect a steady stream of discussion about Australian film production. Highly anticipated Superman Returns, scheduled for a June release by Warner Bros., starring Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth, is begin lensed in Oz and is already generating a lot of interest.
Meanwhile, Animal Logic is producing its first fully-CG animated feature, Happy Feet, which is scheduled for a November ’06 release by Warner Bros. Feature Distribution and stars the voices of Elijah Wood and Brittany Murphy.
Animal Logic has produced effects for features including Stealth, House of Flying Daggers, Hero and Moulin Rouge and is also a busy commercial house that has been making news in recent months for its effects work on Carlton Draft’s “Big Ad,” directed by Paul Middleditch of Sydney-based Plaza Films and created by agency George Patterson Partners in Melbourne. “Big Ad” features digital crowds of thousands on a sweeping landscape, and has already garnered advertising awards including two Gold Sharks at the 43rd annual Shark Awards, held in Ennis, Ireland (SHOOT, 9/23/05, p. 1).
“Our journey is a familiar one for a mature company in the advertising industry; it expanded and took on visual effect work in the features,” says Carter. To accommodate production of Happy Feet, he explains that Animal Logic restructured to offer a separate animation division and visual effects unit.
The company currently has roughly 430 employees, just under half in animation. That pipeline is built around primarily Maya (which was acquired earlier this month by Autodesk Media & Entertainment) and Avid’s Softimage XSI.
Happy Feet actually began thanks to a relationship with the animated feature’s director, George Miller, a resident of Australia and with whom Animal Logic previously worked on Babe: Pig in the City.
“Miller had been developing the film with Warner Bros. and we have a good relationship,” relates Carter. “We did testing and a proof of concept–eventually that turned into a film [project].”
PIONEERING DI
New Zealand and Australia have also found themselves on the map as pioneers in the Digital Intermedate (DI) process, which has fast taken hold in feature post. DI is the process of transferring film to data for all post including color timing to form a digital master, which is used to create the film deliverables. The key DI houses in the region currently include WETA; Sydney and Melbourne-based Digital Pictures; Auckland-based Oktober; and Atlab in Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and the Gold Coast.
One of the early projects to employ DI technology was The Lord of the Rings. Here, Jackson’s team used a digital color grading system based on Colorfront technology, which was since acquired by Autodesk Media & Entertainment and is the heart of its Discreet Lustre color grading software. Lustre was used to grade King Kong.
“The Lord of the Rings definitely required DI; it warranted this other-worldly feel. DI helped create that sense of somewhere else,” recalls King Kong supervising colorist Dave Cole, who has worked in New Zealand and Australia, at companies including WETA, Digital Pictures and Oktober. “People were not afraid to get in and start building momentum on something that seemed to be the way films were going to be handled in the not-too-distant future.
Cole explains that during production of King Kong, his team stayed on top of technical developments as color grading tools are currently evolving at a fast pace. He noted that as Lustre’s features matured, the King Kong team switched to a newer software version during the course of the production.
Looking back on how DI has developed in its short life, Cole sees how the Australia/New Zealand region became a leader. “There was an eagerness not to be left behind,” he says. “And everyone wore multiple hats [on a production], and so it didn’t need a crew of 50. In pioneering days, that’s good.”