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While the burgeoning gaming industry in New England has raided all the headlines lately, the boomlet in talent it has created has been a boon to some of the other industry areas focused on 3-D design and animation.
A small but steadily growing cluster of companies in New England has been working for years in areas such as film special effects, architectural rendering and animation, and even naval architecture.
“Gaming is taking off, and that’s what people are doing. They are trying to get into that business,” said Stefan Vittori, the founder of Kittery, Maine-based 3-D studio Tangram 3DS LLC.
For Tangram, which specializes in 3-D rendering for architectural designs and 3-D animations for large development projects, the attention that gaming is getting these days is spilling over into its own market. And, while there are specific skills associated with creating 3-D designs for architects, Vittori said, having access to new talent that has already been trained on Autodesk Inc.’s 3DStudio Max is a big step forward.
“Clients are expecting from us cool ultra-dynamic animations now,” Vittori said. Among those clients is a brand new high-end yacht design company in Boston called Schöpfer Yachts LLC. When attempting to sell yachts that would cost more than $80 million to build, having high-end, realistic 3-D renderings and animations is vital.
Realism is also a selling point for new recruits at 3-D animation and visual effects studio Brickyard VFX LLC, said founder Dave Waller. While the graduates coming out of design programs like those at Boston University, Northeastern University, Champlain College and Worcester Polytechnic Institute seem to immediately flock to gaming companies, once they see the photo-realistic quality required of film work, they are hooked.
“Everyone thinks they might want to go into gaming, then when you show them feature work, they say, ‘Oh, that’s like gaming times ten’,” Waller said.
Waller recently co-founded a new venture, Brickyard Filmworks LLC, with partners Geoff McAuliffe, Brian Drewes and Marc Sadeghi, to handle the influx of feature film work streaming into the Bay State recently.
To help fill the workstation seats whenever a new project lands on his desk, Waller has established what he calls “Brickyard University.” The Boston-based company in early August will begin training a group of about 10 people with no design studio background on some of the simpler, more repetitive design tasks that always need to be done to complete a job.
For the full-time, non-contract employees Brickyard needs, the local schools have been fantastic, Waller said.
“Not only have we seen an increase in applications and interest but a greater increase in the quality of candidates,” he said.
One program Waller called out in particular is the Center for Digital Imaging Arts, a BU program run out of a Waltham campus. “We’ve had good luck with the people coming out of there,” he said.
In fact, the various Brickyard divisions have added 10 new staffers in the past year and now have about 50 full-time employees in Boston and in Santa Monica, Calif., at a studio that Sadeghi runs.
One of the oldest 3-D shops in the area is Synthespian Studios LLC in Williamstown. The company started life in 1987 as Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., named after founders Diana Walczak and Jeff Kleiser.
Since then, Synthespian has racked up a resume that includes films like “Stargate,” “The Fantastic Four” and all three X-Men movies, specializing in the application of effects on real actors.
Kleiser also sees the wave of interest in 3-D as a boon, and not just for Synthespian. “There are a lot of students coming up and that’s a good thing for the industry,” said Kleiser, who was a 1998 Mass High Tech All-Star with his partner Walczak.
That influx of talent gives Kleiser the ability to find good contract 3-D animators, which enables him to keep the company’s full-time payroll small.
“We are not a big company and we don’t want to be a big company,” Kleiser said. “We have about 15 core people.”
That staff of 15, however, was just weeks ago swollen to 45, as Synthespian wrapped up its work on a new film from The Walt Disney Co., “The Surrogates,” starring Bruce Willis.
In fact, “The Surrogates” was one of those films that Brickyard’s Waller said has been streaming into Massachusetts. It was filmed in Boston and Lynn, and both Synthespian and Brickyard did effects work for the science fiction movie about humans and androids.
One reason for the boom in digital business in Massachusetts is the new focus the state is placing upon it, according Jason Schupbach, creative economy industry director for the state of Massachusetts.
“We have worked very closely with digital media companies across all platforms to see how we can help their companies grow,” said Schupbach. “We are very interested in how the schools that are teaching these skills get better connected to these businesses.”
To help get a better handle on how to make the sector flourish, Schupbach’s office has launched a baseline study of the videogame industry in the Bay State, through the University of Massachusetts’ president’s office.
“We are very interested in what are the secondary benefits of the growth in the videogame industry here.”
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