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The digital content industry: where art, science and technology combine
Australia has no shortage of imaginative and creative people and this is especially so in the creative digital content industry.
It's a dynamic, valuable and fast growing sector with a finger firmly on the pulse of the digital revolution. It's an industry that stretches technologies to do more and express more.
While new technologies underpin the Internet, digital TV and radio, next generation mobile phones, interactive TV and games, broadband, DVD and digital film-it was the digital content industry that meant they got picked up by the masses.
The industry produces creative and artistic digital content, applications and services that are used commercially and by cultural institutions and other sectors like health, defence and education.
The Australian Government has established a Digital Content Industry Action Agenda to pave the way for the digital content industry to grow domestically and internationally.
The action agenda is designed to promote close collaboration between industry and government so that Australian industries become more competitive in the global marketplace.
It is driven by industry identifying the opportunities and challenges it faces, with the Government providing a facilitation role.
The need for some sections of the industry to move from operating on a fee for service basis to a situation where creators own and retain intellectual property rights on the products and services they develop, is just one example of the key issues emerging in this process.
Public forums have been held in Melbourne and Sydney to explain the action agenda and to get input from industry players.
More forums will be held in 2005 and the work of the Digital Content Industry Action Agenda will result in a report to Government expected to be completed by June 2005.
For further information about the public forums and the Digital Content Industry Action Agenda visit the website: www.dcita.gov.au/arts/film_digital/digital_content_industry_action_agenda
The Action Agenda was developed with substantial input from the Government's Creative Industries Cluster Study. For more information on the study go to www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/cics.
Animal Logic
Australians often focus on the achievements of actors and cinematographers to judge our success in the global film industry. But our growing international reputation in film is also being fuelled by digital production success stories.
The visual effects work of the Sydney digital production company Animal Logic on the critically acclaimed film, Hero, is one example.
Just released into Australian cinemas, two years after its release in Asia and Europe, Hero broke Chinese box office records and shot to number one in North American box offices in August this year.
Hero is an epic retelling of a two thousand year old story of the first Emperor to unify China. The colourful tale unfolds in a series of flashbacks, each detailing the same event from a different perspective.
Animal Logic sent a crew of visual effects specialists to work with Director Zhang Yimou and his production team on location in remote regions of China.
Returning from China, animators and visual effects artists completed Hero's complex effects sequences at Animal Logic's facility in Sydney.
The film's Forest Fight, Library Brush, Lake Sequence and final Palace Exterior sequence showcase the work of Animal Logic. The company's matte painters also created visually stunning backgrounds based on still photographs taken on location in China.
Since directing Hero, Director Zhang Yimou has chosen to work again with Animal Logic on his follow-up martial arts film House of Flying Daggers, which screened in Cannes this year.
Ratbag Games
The South Australian, Adelaide-based digital content company Ratbag is regarded by many as being a world premier racing game developer.
Founded as Emergent Software in 1993, Ratbag also owns the motion-capture studio 'Madcap' in Sydney (www.madcapstudios.com).
Ratbag's first title 'Powerslide' was released in 1998 and was a worldwide hit. Now the company's focus is spread between PlayStation® 2, X-Box™ and PC and plans to develop games for GameCube™ in the foreseeable future.
In October Ratbag released their latest game, 'The Dukes of Hazzard: Return of the General Lee', in which players assume the roles of Bo and Luke Duke as they race to win prize money so they can save the local orphanage from Boss Hogg's latest crooked scheme.