For reasons both ‘carrot’ and ‘stick,’ post-production houses across Canada are continuing to do more work on videogames – rushing in to claim partnerships and a share of profits from the growing-like-mad gaming field (there’s the carrot) while stepping away from the endless hassles and money troubles (aka the stick) of domestic film and TV.

‘I’m sure it’s a factor,’ says Mark Benard, founder and managing director of Vancouver’s Lost Boys Studios. ‘Gaming is such a high-growth industry, it’s ludicrous… You look around and say, ‘Wait a minute, my industry is nowhere close to that.”

His shop drew 50% of its 2003 revenue from games, including The Hobbit and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, bringing in the remainder from a half-and-half mix of movies and TV commercials. Benard says the gaming slice of the pie varies from year to year, but is tracking upwards overall, driven in part by the increasingly lavish graphics abilities of PCs and the home gaming platforms.

Games often use the same high-end FX and post tools as the biggest blockbuster movies, but more significantly, say sources, the game companies are growing too fast to hire and train their own post talent. Electronic Arts, which makes the Harry Potter games and countless sports titles out of offices in California, Quebec and B.C., plans to double its staff within the year, for example.

‘That’s nuts,’ says Benard, ‘but it’s good news for us, because it means more high-end work will be subcontracted out.’

But there’s a catch. Posting a game tends to be more demanding, given that gamemakers use a wider palette of FX tools and software packages than film or TV producers. ‘One uses Maya, another uses Softimage|XSI, so you continually have to adapt. It requires us to be very flexible and organic,’ says Benard.

Game companies also work very differently than film and TV producers, much to the frustration of some post houses. One FX veteran, who asked not to be named, complained that the lack of experienced people at game companies is a problem.

‘These people are very fresh. They started out as game testers a year and a half ago – now they’re producing games,’ without any real knowledge of production issues, he says. ‘They’re moving up the chain so fast. It’s hard to interface with anyone with any real experience.’

To compensate, game companies will often assemble large teams to work on a title (Just look at some of those end credits. Geez.) – a move distressingly similar to the ‘screenwriting by committee’ process that has mangled so many projects over the years in Hollywood.

Gamemakers also tend to keep changing key material in a title, often right up to the release date, according to one source.

Gamemakers admit there are sometimes problems, but generally write it off as the growing pains of two industries – a new one that is expanding rapidly and another, older one that is switching gears just as fast.

-www.lostboys-studios.com

-www.ea.com