Is There Gold in Them Thar Multimedia Hills?
Tumbleweeds are blowing past many boarded-up storefronts these days in Sillywood, the virtual boomtown created by the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Fueled by a gold-rush mentality, many companies looked to make a quick buck by creating video games that would go on to be books, movies and live shows; after their first couple of failed attempts, many folded.
But don’t let that fool you: There’s actually more opportunity than ever in interactive media for talented people just out of school, much more so than in the traditional media of film and television.
Games are still big business. For someone starting out, the upside of the industry is that it’s the Wild West. It’s still inventing itself and can afford opportunities to people in their 20s that are unmatched. The downside: It’s still the Wild West. That means having to forge your own trail while working insane hours and often taking lower pay.
You’re more likely to get work and actually see it produced than if you were writing a screenplay, but it’s essentially nonunion work for now. A number of game companies have agreed to pay into the Writers Guild pension and health fund when employing a guild writer, but they’re not obligated to pay any set amount to the writer. Agents in general aren’t very active in setting up such deals for their clients, as there’s relatively little money to be made.
But for the ambitious and hungry, the work is plentiful--and the pay will follow success. “We have negative unemployment. It’s very hard to find good people; we’re always looking for talented producers, designers and writers,” said Alan Gershenfeld, vice president of creative affairs and production at Activision, one of the industry’s more solid companies and a leading maker of “cinematic” games for CD-ROM, Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn platforms. Activision moved to West L.A. from the San Francisco Bay Area several years ago for the express purpose of being closer to Hollywood.
Gershenfeld himself worked as a documentary filmmaker and as a development executive with Edward R. Pressman Film Corp. before going to Activision four years ago. Like many other game companies, Activision has hired a number of people with film backgrounds partly because of their parallel experience and partly because, in a new industry, it’s necessary to hire people from the outside.
There have already been many examples of people like Gershenfeld moving from traditional to new media. And “below-the-line” crews--who work in lighting, sound, etc.--and digital effects specialists already move easily among working on interactive projects, commercials and music videos. But what is still developing is a clear route for writers, designers and directors of interactive games to move into film and TV.
Gary Goldsmith, an artist-in-residence teaching multimedia offerings at the USC School of Cinema-Television, said USC, like every other university, is still trying to figure out how to best prepare its students for interactive careers. The film school two years ago realized that it “had to prepare students for the Digital Age, not just retain the traditional emphasis on film as a career path,” he said. It added classes specifically tailored to that purpose.
The program is still in its infancy; the film school currently offers only an introduction to interactive media and a class in interactive game design. (Classes are open to other USC students, not just film majors.) The department’s six Macintosh computers are just now being supplemented with PCs.
USC is conducting a search for a full-time professor to take over and extend the interactive program. After that happens, the university expects to start awarding film school degrees to students who complete an interactive project, rather than a film, to fulfill their master’s degree requirement.
UCLA is just slightly ahead. The school’s Lab for New Media has about a dozen machines, both Macs and PCs, and expects to graduate two students this year with multimedia thesis projects. Sheldon Schiffer, the lab’s technical director and himself a UCLA grad, estimates that at least a dozen UCLA filmmaking graduates from the last couple of years are now working in multimedia. Brian Boyl, professor of interactive animation, estimates that easily two-thirds of animation grads from UCLA now go into the interactive/multimedia field.
Meanwhile, most people entering the interactive field as writers, directors and designers don’t have a degree in it. Margie Stohl, for example, was an unproduced screenwriter with an affinity for interactive subjects. While many film types were intrigued by a script she’d written that involved the Internet, few understood it.
“I’d find myself sitting in the office of a top director, watching him struggle with how to use e-mail,” she recalled. “One executive seemed excited about my script; he said, ‘OK, so it’s opening day on the Internet’--not realizing that that was a ridiculous statement.”
Then Activision called her for an interview. When it heard she’d become familiar with games through her husband--an attorney and former Tron video game champion (remember the Disneyland attraction, based on Disney’s pioneering but unsuccessful movie?)--it hired her to work as a writer on Zork Nemesis and her husband to be a producer.
Stohl’s work as a writer on Activision’s popular Zork franchise has led to her becoming a full-fledged game designer on the next Zork adventure game, now in development.
Being a designer means that, unlike a writer who’s often called in only to fix dialogue and such for a month at the end of the process, Stohl is overseeing the story line and game play from day one. That’s a big step up the food chain, as designers are often hostile toward outside writers whom they feel--rightly or not--don’t understand their game well.
It’s also led to her association with Larry Kasanoff--producer of the “Mortal Kombat” movie and its upcoming sequel, due out in August--who’s optioned Zork for his Threshold Entertainment to develop into other media, including a TV show and film. Stohl and others are consulting with Kasanoff on the project, and Stohl may get a shot at writing the screenplay if the film is green-lighted.
As one of the only people ever to turn a game into a successful movie, Kasanoff is bullish on the continued convergence of interactivity and film. But even he admits it can be tough. He’s still trying to make a film based on The 7th Guest, the popular atmospheric (and largely non-narrative) game he optioned about a year ago.
“Most studio executives don’t play video games. . . .” he said. “A lot of them still don’t really understand, unless maybe they have a 9-year-old at home.”
Still, he believes that “one day it’ll be just as common as making a film from a book. I mean, the first time Samuel Goldwyn made a movie from a Broadway play, everyone said he was nuts.”
Kasanoff thinks talented filmmakers will soon be able to launch careers through the use of technology, avoiding the long-standing method of study, apprenticeship and groveling that aspiring filmmakers have endured.
“Very soon, someone will be able to make a short film entirely on his computer and e-mail it around the country to show people how he can write and direct a story,” Kasanoff said.
“This is really a great training ground,” he said. “You can create a whole contained world right on a computer, and there’s much less downside if you screw up than if you’re in charge of 200 cast and crew members shooting a movie. The only thing it doesn’t give you is people skills. . . . Maybe they should offer a people skills course for interactive guys.”
But even the socially challenged can easily make it big with talent and the right set of skills. Among the hottest right now if you want to make good money right out of school: high-end computer animation, generally done on Silicon Graphics hardware. Most of the schools that have animation courses in place have largely shifted their focus to computer animation. Demand is through the roof in the wake of hits like Pixar’s “Toy Story.” Computer animators have quickly pulled down six-figure salaries after being chased after by the studios.
