“Quicklook” Assessment of Greater Adelaide's Assets & Challenges ...

• Infogram is a games publisher from France (France didn’t have a dot.com
revolution). They bought Australia’s largest game developer – Beam software in
Melbourne. They have not developed their own IP so they have not gotten into as
good a position as Ratbag.
• AME was a venture capital fund that was set up in 1984 (set up with 45M) –
supported game development and now there are VCs in Australia so the
landscape is different – no AME, would have to go VC now.
Animation (Rob Farnan) –
• Animators are doing real well doing real time information into simulations. Still
doing arcade and redemption games but also doing simulation.
• Rob: does private work, runs a course in animation in a secondary campus. Not a
single tertiary public animation course in Adelaide. Need to have a public course.
• Canberra has an academy of animating/ quantum has a private course in games.
There is no cohesive set of coursework as far as animation goes. Main emphasis
has been on interactive media.
• Loudscreen is a volunteer organization 120-150 people in the database. Have run
meetings for 6 or 7 years and are a voluntary job placement organization. Also do
some industry development work, which is voluntary and spasmodic depending
on response they get from the industry.
• They are trying to bring in a wide group including the film industry.
• Rob’s things ‘seem to fit between the cracks’
• There are 2 groups of animation: Anafix- stop motion animation, cell animation
and does quite a bit of offshore work. (Offshoots in Cojo (production house),
Guava (3D animation), Oasis (post Hollywood film work- Shine, snow falling on
cedars – Rising Sun (digital post production – lots of post animation work, do
Hollywood films Red Planet and other Asian work) groups are run by two bothers.
• Tawson is a very strong company – there have closed their Adelaide office. 3D
representation of a figure that is used for injury analysis and education. Had 10
people in Seattle in their sales office that was selling to Nike, Dream Works, and
NBC. They have trouble with funding because they didn’t have enough revenue to
sustain themselves. Typical dot-com problems where business model was to go
for more rounds of venture capital, so when the VCs dried up….
• Ratbag uses CodeWarrior for development.
Wayne from Rising Sun Pictures:
• Knows Greg. Met in 1984 worked with robot animation for camera movement.
• More diverse than Ratbag. Rising sun started out in services and moved to
products
• Just finished a 50M contract with WB
• Working on media solutions. Provide solutions; print, new media (games,
interactive internet) and video work. Also SW solutions such as monitor
calibration. Make people be able to see film output and look at identical monitor
outputs. Big issue when working in visual applications.
• 3 partners in company.
• They cash flowed fee for service to enable them to go into products
• One income stream is not sustainable in Adelaide
• They generalized and became experts in a lot of areas so that they can be seen
as consultants – decided to be ‘specialists in general areas’
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