How is Wellington’s digital creative industry really doing?

Saturday, 19 October 2024

In the shadow of the Hollywood strikes, the pandemic and amid an economic downturn, Wellington’s digital creative community is making a push for more work, more people and greater global recognition. By André Chumko.

For Wellington’s prestigiously bestowed Unesco City of Film title it has much to credit for its big, foundationary studios Avalon, Stone Street, Lane Street and the like.

Glitzy, eminent Tinseltown film and television productions may have put the capital’s creative capabilities on the world map alongside our grassroots fashion, music and architecture industries, and seeded the city with great artists, but now our local digital creative industry that’s sprouted from that success ‒ those working across gaming, visual effects, post production, animation, digital sound mixing, intellectual property development and associated technologies ‒ is asking for a slice of the mind share.

Despite those businesses navigating rising production costs and changing audience habits, industry heads are now heralding a new era for the city’s eager digital creatives who have made a name for themselves beyond the illustrious productions of yesteryear.

With consumers, platforms and publishers searching worldwide for cutting-edge media and the next big thing, a major focus now for the local industry is selling its ideas and work overseas, said Tanya Black, the manager of Screen Wellington, a local peak body for the umbrella sector.

She cited Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production in Miramar compiling the docuseries The Beatles: Get Back for Disney+, in which Jackson’s team restored never-before-seen footage of intimate recording sessions of the legendary English rock band from 1969.

“That kind of stuff really puts us on the map,” Black says. “Our exponential growth and this [sort of] technology … really can’t be matched.”

A showreel of the diverse breadth of work from the region’s established and emerging digital creative companies has been released in the hopes of enticing more projects and talent to Wellington, which has set its sights on cementing itself as a digital media mecca that rivals our reputation for traditional media production.

It can be argued that in some ways, the growth potential for the ‘work wherever’ digital creative crowd ‒ which primarily produces weightless exports ‒ already vastly surpasses that of traditional media, as at any given time when shooting studios are full, there’s an obvious capacity problem.

But the industry has historically faced a visibility issue ‒ workers doing mind-bending magic behind a computer screen are not necessarily as easy to promote as celebrities manoeuvring around awe-inspiring sets. Plus, there’s often a load of dense jargon attached to workstreams of the digital savant. As a result, success stories are not as widely pitched or reported on, let alone deeply understood by the wider public.

There’s also a lack of robust data that quantifies our digital creative community. Despite anecdotal reports of growth for businesses, traditional research methods have been unable to measure the impact of workers across its subsectors, which are often siphoned off into separate categories ‒ for instance, animation and visual effects staff being counted as part of the software development sector.

For this reason it’s also been hard to attach a dollar value to the industry ‒ Screen Wellington estimates that Wellington’s post production subsector could be undervalued by up to 30%. The organisation is in the process of commissioning data to concretely show the growth it sees in the surging number of digital creative companies and workers in Wellington.

Jackson’s Wētā FX, one of the city’s largest digital creative employers with a local crew of 1600, is by far its most well-connected feeder company for talent. It gives people the opportunity to work on significant productions such as James Cameron’s Avatar series or Michael Gracey’s Robbie Williams musical biopic Better Man that’ll be out after Christmas, and the platform to springboard later into their own local venture should they wish.

One of those people, Marie Tricart, from France, who moved to New Zealand in 2017 with her partner to work at Wētā FX, and who’d before then done stints in Canada and London, now is the creative director of her own creative digital studio 37Degrees.

Inspired by the number of creatives with a connection to the French language who’d also moved to the Antipodes, she’s also the chairperson of the Creative Aotearoa French Exchange, an association that facilitates networking among expats and has started events like the Wellington Animation Film Festival, inaugurally held in March this year. It hopes to replicate the success of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival by bringing together the city’s wider creative sector in a market-style format to encourage business activity and drum up interest in locally produced content.

“It’s crazy how many talented people you have around you in Wellington compared to those bigger hubs. [Me and my partner] both loved London and Canada. But I think what we loved about New Zealand was how simple it was to bump into people that had really interesting experiences. They were happy to share and talk, that felt quite unique. And it had the balance with the lifestyle ‒ it's a small capital city, but still a capital city,” Tricart says.

Particularly convenient is that 37Degrees is based in Wellington’s eastern peninsula covering Miramar, Kilbirnie and Lyall Bay, a bubble within the broader city that has a dense concentration of digital creatives and boutique studios ‒ and is of course home to the Roxy Cinema and the site tipped to be Jackson and wife Fran Walsh’s long-rumoured film museum.

“It makes collaborating really easy,” Tricart says. “It’s such a unique place because of the amount of talented people you have [access to] … People have stayed around and have this type of mentality where they are able to share. That’s probably thanks to New Zealand being so remote ‒ you have to help each other.”

Then there’s Stephanie Parker, the co-founder of Floating Rock studio based in Kilbirnie who’s celebrating a pitch deck doing the rounds in Hollywood of its first original IP Kyōryū, conceived by its senior animator Benjamin Mulot. It’s described as a sort of reverse palaeontology story in which dinosaurs are fascinated by the extinction of humanity. Mark Andrews, the director of Pixar’s Academy Award-winning Brave, is attached as the showrunner of the animated series, but Floating Rock is also internationally pitching a playable game.

The business was originally co-founded by four artists, and had humble beginnings as a service provider of animation and assets for film, ads and game cinematics. It now employs about 35 staff and is developing its own content with Kyōryū and via Pitchfest, in which it works with the public to turn their ideas into pitch decks for buyers. Three exciting projects are nearly ready to pitch.

Parker specifically cites Wellington’s collaborative nature, and how easy it is to fall in love with its natural assets, chill vibe and the friendliness of its people as reasons for Floating Rock’s success.

“A lot of us, myself included, have worked in quite large companies where you can get a bit lost in the crowd. Joining a startup, it is challenging but in the best way. You really get your input [heard] and see where the impact is being made,” Parker, originally from Canada’s Vancouver, says.

Although its growth has come with the added challenges of admin and on-the-go learning, it lucked out during the Hollywood strikes, which brought on a quiet period for many other studios, when it landed two episodes of a documentary to work on.

The strikes hit at an already difficult time, post-pandemic, amid soaring national inflation and with a cautious global buyer market. This coalescence has left the big commissioning streaming companies like Netflix committing to making less content, meaning IP has to be particularly amazing to stand out.

And Wētā FX hit headlines last month when it was revealed to have posted a loss for the second year in a row, with $83 million lost in the year to March, and a $107m loss posted a year earlier. The company was not expected to return to profitability for at least two years, according to account notes.

This was after it made job offers late last year to all of the 265 engineers who Jackson sold off for $2.3 billion in 2021 to American video game software development company Unity Software, who were then laid off in a restructure of Unity in late 2023. Of those workers, 97% are now back with Wētā FX.

David Wright, Wētā FX’s chief executive, said it had generated more than $400m in export earnings for each of the last two years and had a strong balance sheet. Its recently posted losses were largely due to depreciation and amortisation adjustments, he said, adding he was confident its future projects would continue to support the economic and cultural wellbeing of Wellington.

Wright continued: “Wellington has been Wētā FX’s home since the company was started at a Mount Cook dining table over 30 years ago. This city is part of our DNA and where all of our executives and most of our crew are based.

“There is a culture of creativity, innovation and excellence in Wellington, as well of course the stunning landscapes and wonderful lifestyle opportunities we have on our doorstep. This has inspired some of the best creative and technical minds from Aotearoa and around the world to call the city home and help us make the world class visual effects Wētā FX is known for.”

David Wilks, the chief executive of sister organisation Wētā Workshop that’s also on the Miramar peninsula, says there’s a huge pool of specialist talent to draw on for its renowned props and costume work in major blockbuster franchises including in the Marvel Universe, Alien, Planet of the Apes and the Avatar films, but even its work in the digital space was growing: its game studio team is developing the new game Tales of the Shire, for example.

It has also recently collaborated with Chinese pop star Jay Chou to develop a unique virtual avatar and promotional video for his metaverse called the JVerse.

Black says there are other things for Wellington to champion: a new indigenous animation exchange with Galway, Ireland; Shrek being translated into te reo thanks to a collab between Māoriland and DreamWorks; Jane Campion’s film intensive is returning; there are several productions shooting this summer including two New Zealand television series and a Film Commission-funded feature based at Avalon that The Post understands has a working title of Caterpillar, with others in the pipeline.

This week Judith Collins, the minister of science, innovation and technology, unveiled new figures at the NZ Game Developers Conference held in Wellington that illustrate the growth of the country’s gaming industry.

In 2024 it employed 1097 fulltime employees across the country and grew its export earnings from $434m in 2023 to $548m this year, representing an increase of 26%, significantly higher than the global industry growth of 4%.

Those numbers were up from export earnings of $143m in 2018. The majority of gaming studios were in Auckland at 33 followed by Wellington at 21, Canterbury at 14 and Otago at 14.

Almost 90% felt they would maintain or grow their income in the next financial year, off the back of the Ardern government introducing a $40m annual gaming rebate scheme to entice skilled workers and businesses to remain in New Zealand. A majority 85% said they invested their rebate back into their business, hired more staff and retained existing staff.

But more women are needed ‒ only 28% of the gaming industry’s employees nationally are female; while 14% are neurodivergent and 8% are part of rainbow communities, according to new research.

Mario Wynands, the chief executive and co-founder/co-owner of PikPok, New Zealand's largest game development and publishing studio that’s had its games downloaded more than half a billion times, said even after extensive travel, Wellington is still his favourite place in the world: “It is a city-sized village which is accessible, diverse, creative and friendly with outstanding food, coffee and activities. It provides a great lifestyle and inspiration. There is no other place quite like it.'

Game Developers Association executive director Joy Keene said the country was now, through major industry events like Games Week, attracting lucrative networking opportunities for international publishers and investors interested in what’s happening at New Zealand’s gaming frontier.

The next generation of Wellington’s digital creatives, meanwhile, is supported by institutions including the Hollywood Reporter-acknowledged Miramar Creative Centre and Massey’s newly redeveloped National Academy of Screen Arts.

Black wants to take the lightning in a bottle story to the world: “It’s time, definitely, for this digital part to have that have a light shone on it for sure … They might not yet know which company they need to do their animation, visual effects or sound mixing ‒ but they know Wellington is the place to come for it.”