Moving On Up

Well, the basics are the same - people need good quality animation, but I think if anything we find ourselves pushed harder by developers than we are by the film industry - because there's so much innovation, things are changing so quickly, with different engines, software packages, methodologies...

I don't see that same pace of change in the film industry, but the film industry has matured - it's working practices are set. Yes, there'll be advances on the CG side of things, but they seem to have found a fairly robust system.

The games industry is so fluid, so it's development that's pushed us to innovate the most - the facial capture, demand for finger articulation, all that sort of stuff. You've got to keep ahead of it, and that means we have to work as closely with teams as possible. We're often considered as an extension of the animation department, because our guys will work so closely with their opposite numbers.

That's different again from the film model - but you've got the crossover from people who specialise in things like writing, or lighting, or other things, who are looking over to the games industry and thinking it looks pretty exciting... whereas before they would have treated it with some disdain, they're now thinking it's more exciting than what they've been doing for the past few years.

Well, the service companies to some degree have been feeling the tail end of the financial woes - perhaps with money being tight, a team of lads who might've gone to a venture capitalist a few years ago with a great idea looking for funds... there's a lot less of that.

And with publishers seeing their shares performing maybe not quite as well as they have been, they've become more cautious. Because we've been working on projects that were green-lit two years ago or more, if there was any pain there it's been mercifully short.

We can see that the industry is gaining confidence again - it's still tough out there for developers, but it does seem to be getting its confidence back.

Oh absolutely. We take the risk out of it by not working exclusively in videogames, but also in film and TV, so we don't have all eggs in one basket.

Film seems to be fairly robust at the minute. They were suffering from the fallout of the writers' strike some time back, and that meant that if the writers were on strike then nothing was being green-lit, and that was causing quite a bit of grief.

As it turned out the writers were on the picket lines during the day, and busy writing away in the evening, so there was a stack of stuff ready to go - but it was interesting having this conversation with developers and publishers because some were looking over there and thinking it was tough, but that it wouldn't affect them... I was gently pointing out that the franchise of that movie, the videogame now isn't going to happen.

The two industries are intrinsically linked - but that all picked up. The UK film industry is in great shape, which brings us on to some degree about the benefits of tax credits. Because the amount of Hollywood movies that are being both shot and post-produced in the UK as a result of attractive tax breaks is phenomenal. There's an awful lot of work coming into this country as a result, both because of the financial benefits and because of the talent that's here.

So it is an attractive place to work, to bring big budgets, because you know you're going to get them made by talented creatives, on time and within budget... so shouldn't the games industry be getting a little bit of that action?