Among the many national projects that Baton Rouge-based Digital FX worked on over the past year was an episode of the National Geographic television series, “World’s Deadliest Creatures.”
Using a keyboard, stylus and the latest in high-tech animation software, animators at the firm designed a 3-D cobra for the television show that graphically depicted the snake’s skeletal system as it squeezes life out of its victim.
That National Geographic would farm out its special effects to a shop in Baton Rouge speaks volumes—both about the caliber of companies like Digital FX and the reputation that the market now has as an emerging player in the world of digital animation. Just a few years ago, movie and television producers only did this kind of work in L.A., New York or London. Now, they come to Baton Rouge.
You can credit, among other factors, the Baton Rouge Area Digital Industries Consortium, or BRADIC. It’s a three-year-old economic development initiative that centers on growing a digital media industry in the Capital Region. So far it’s having considerable success.
“Any independent project that I’m pitching I always bring up the idea of trying to produce it in Louisiana,” says Dan Lund, an animator at Disney Studios and an independent producer in California. “To my mind, there’s no way not to take advantage of the tax breaks and the talent.”
But note Lund’s words: Like others in the industry, he tends to lump all of Louisiana together. While Baton Rouge has a growing digital media industry, other points along the creative corridor—like New Orleans and Lafayette—have much to offer as well. To executives in the sprawling megalopolis of Los Angeles, one city in the backwater that is Southeast Louisiana is virtually indistinguishable from another. That’s important to remember, because if Baton Rouge wants to grow its digital industry it has to be willing to share the wealth.
“I was talking to some folks about doing a project and they kept trying to keep it in Baton Rouge,” Lund says. “I kept telling them the important thing was just to get it to Louisiana.”
Before you can have a discussion about digital media, you have to understand that it encompasses many different things. There’s digital animation, which includes everything from old-fashioned cartoons to Pixar-type 3-D creations. There are digital special effects, such as those you might see in a television commercial, and also the digital visualizations that are used on a CAD design or MRI scan. Then there is video game development. Baton Rouge has made inroads in all those areas and in a short amount of time.
It was just three years ago that the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, the city/parish government and LSU came together to form BRADIC. Since then, EA—one of the largest video game manufacturers in the world—has opened a quality assurance testing facility on the LSU South Campus. Several other smaller companies have also sprung up. Homegrown Nerjyzed, for instance, has built an impressive national market for its video games, namely The Black College Football Experience.
“The BRADIC initiative has been incredibly successful,” says Adam Knapp, executive director of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber. “We had nothing five years ago. Today, our model has credibility and has attracted enough attention that we were able to land a blue-chip company like EA.”
The Red Stick Animation Festival has been an important factor in establishing Baton Rouge’s credibility as a place to do digital media. The festival actually pre-dates BRADIC. Its roots go back to 1999, when the state passed an IT initiative to fund the Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT, at LSU. Its purpose was to promote economic development for the state by using computational applications to aid research and develop solutions that benefit academia and industry.
That’s a tall order, and organizers of the upstart initiative weren’t sure where to start.
“We asked ourselves, ‘Okay, how can we have the most effect? What’s really going to change the state?” says Stacey Simmons, who is the director of both the Festival and BRADIC. “For us, the answer was threefold: digital media, high performance computing, and hardware and software development.”
Of the three areas, the state had the least experience in the area of digital media. It didn’t have a track record. How to build one? Their solution was to create an event that would help them build legitimacy very quickly.
The first festival was held in 2005. It was small but showed potential. This year’s festival attracted players from all over the world and was the biggest yet. It received more than 400 films from 45 countries for its annual Best of the Fest competition, twice as many as in previous years.
“The festival has done an amazing job of putting Baton Rouge on the map,” Lund says.
Another component of BRADIC that makes Baton Rouge look good—at least on paper—is the AVATAR initiative at LSU. It’s a multi-disciplinary program that aims to hire top-flight faculty and develop a curriculum in the field of digital media. The ultimate goal is to create a degree program at LSU in digital media that will attract students from around the country.
AVATAR has gotten off to a slow start because of state budget cuts, which put on hold the hiring initiative. However, the University is still moving forward with plans to develop the curriculum. Equally significant, it’s working through BRADIC to open a charter high school with a curriculum based around digital media. So far, the school has received grant money from BP and has an ambitious target date of opening in the fall of 2010.
“It’s a compelling idea that you’d have a high school program dedicated to this field and a college degree program,” Knapp says. “Then you have EA fully ramped up so it’s all happening and once and it gives us a lot of credibility in the business.”
Of course, what has driven various digital media ventures and projects to Baton Rouge as much as anything is the state tax credit program. As it did with movie and television producers, the incentive program gives video game developers and producers of animated films a 25% production tax credit. They’re also eligible to receive an additional 10% credit if they hire in-state labor.
“This is huge,” says Sherri McConnell, director of the state’s Office of Entertainment Industries Development. “Basically, the state has sent a message to the world that we are in this for the long haul. Louisiana is the new frontier for digital business development.”
But tax credits are available to anyone who does business anywhere in Louisiana—not just Baton Rouge, which raises questions about whether Baton Rouge is really better suited that other cities along the corridor to position itself as the regional hub of digital media.
Lafayette, after all, is home to the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise, or LITE. It’s a $27 million, 70,000-square-foot complex of supercomputers that offers the latest in cutting-edge digital media and visualization technologies. Based at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, LITE is a state entity and services an impressive list of public and private sector clients.
To better provide the LITE facility with the resources it needs, the city of Lafayette installed a 125-mile, 96-strand fiber loop around the city. The powerful infrastructure delivers better, faster and more cost-effective communication means to homes, businesses and schools throughout the metro area. For a production company doing high-speed visualization work or a complicated digital media project, having that kind of fiber optic connectivity could be a major advantage.
“The fiber loop is the main backbone of the Internet, so if you’re on it you’re going to have much faster bandwidth and will be able to put stuff up a lot faster,” Milneck says. “Though, you could still have a bottleneck if your client isn’t on that same fiber loop.”
Still, LITE and the fiber loop are feathers in the cap of Lafayette. New Orleans has its own advantages, too. The Crescent City already claims a much larger share of the entertainment industry business overall, and one of its homegrown companies, TurboSquid, boasts the largest library of 3-D products in the world, with more than 158,000 textures, softwares and tutorials. In an effort to help grow other similar companies, the city’s economic development GNO Inc. has developed its own Digital Media Alliance.
But industry experts say the big-picture issue is not whether Baton Rouge is better suited than New Orleans or Lafayette to be the regional hub of digital media. The real question is how to build on the limited successes each city has had so far and get the region as a whole noticed nationwide.
“I think it’s very important for cities to work closely with the state film board and try to attract as much business as possible together rather than competing for business on a city-by-city basis,” says Tony West, an Orlando-area producer who has done work in Baton Rouge. “Trying to distinguish New Orleans from Baton Rouge or Lafayette is kind of like robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Those working in the trenches agree. When Milneck at Digital FX bids on a job, seldom is he competing with other companies in South Louisiana. Usually, he’s up against firms in other parts of the country, and being in Baton Rouge is not a particular disadvantage, he says. It’s being in Louisiana that’s the problem.
“Quite frankly, the disadvantage I have is that I am in Louisiana,” Milneck says. “It’s the perception that in Louisiana you’re not going to get as good a quality work.”
Milneck often downplays his location when dealing with out-of-state clients—often because of the nature of his business it doesn’t matter. Much of the work and communication is done via the Internet, so it’s just possible his clients really don’t know where he is. But in those instances when it does matter, Milneck knows the odds are stacked against him. If there were more digital media companies up and down the corridor, that wouldn’t be the case.
“Having other companies doing similar types of work in other parts of the region or corridor only enhances the area’s reputation,” he says. “If I was the only company no one would come. If there were 10 or 12 then it would be more appealing.”
Economic development officials in Baton Rouge don’t disagree and they now see BRADIC as serving a bigger purpose than they originally envisioned. Says Knapp: “We need to talk about all of Southeast Louisiana as a place where digital media is happening.”
