B.C.-based Sony Imageworks studio in its 25th year
Operation has blossomed since moving to Vancouver, still creating hundreds of new jobs
Imagine the latest box office hit, or your favourite action movie, without special effects.
Taron Egerton would be just another nerd in a fancy suit in Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Tom Holland just a skinny kid in a Halloween costume in SpiderMan: Homecoming.
Not a pretty picture.
The animation and visual effects (VFX) industry is booming, and it’s growth is more evident in British Columbia than anywhere else.
One of the engines of the massive Hollywood North VFX industry turns 25 this year. Sony Pictures Imageworks is an Academy Awardwinning unit of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, which made moved its headquarters to Vancouver in 2014, Operating out of a massive 6,900 square-metre facility on Granville Street, Imageworks has 80 per cent of its international workforce based in Vancouver.
Imageworks is unique as one of the only studio-run visual effects and animation divisions. While it is a Sony operation producing in-house films such as The Emoji Movie, Imageworks’ 800-plus employees also produce considerable content for most major studios.
“When it began in 1992, the original idea was for a small group of a dozen or so to get some equipment and experiment to see what value could be added to Sony movies by an in-house unit working in visual effects and animation,” said Senior VFX supervisor Jerome Chen, who has been around for the full quarter century run.
“Over time, Imageworks became well established as a major effects source and works with all the major studios. I’m not sure any of us foresaw the industry expanding with larger and larger requirements for movies to the degree it has, but the tools and technology just continue to improve and do things at ludicrously faster and faster rates.”
A recent list of the past few year’s clients includes Warner Bros (Suicide Squad, Storks), Disney (The Angry Birds Movie), Marvel (Guardians of the Galaxy), Columbia Pictures (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Emoji Movie) and the just-released Kingsman: The Golden Circle for Fox.
Randy Lake, President of Studio Operations & Imageworks, says that relocating to Vancouver six years ago was key to the success of the unit, which had been through some very rough spots in its history.
“We were bullish on Vancouver when we moved here six years ago, and it has been critical to the very dramatic growth and level of success we have experienced,” says Lake. “Part of that was the existing talent base in the market that we could build off of but also because the city has been identified by the entire VFX industry and a good portion of the animation business as an attractive place to put a significant amount of their workforce. This means that it is an attractive location for employees because they know that there is going to be steady work, where you can find work at another facility once one project winds down.”
Early this week there were 23 Vancouver job postings at imageworks.com alone. On any given day, there are 100+ jobs posted in VFX, animation and other tech sector jobs involving film, TV and gaming in the province.
Three-time Emmy Award nominee and VFX supervisor and artist Mark Breakspear has been based in Vancouver since moving here from the UK in 2001. One of Sony Pictures Imageworks most experienced supervisors, Breakspear says that all sorts of talents are required to keep the studio producing the cutting edge work seen in films ranging from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to Kingsman: The Golden Circle.
“We’re always looking for programmers and coders to come and write the software that doesn’t even exist yet, to do things that nobody has every dreamed of doing,” said Breakspear. “It’s just showing no sign of slowing down. And last year around this time, I did a back of a napkin kind of calculation of where the industry was going and I calculated about 1,900 new jobs would be created with just the work coming in, including all the existing people still continuing working.”
So business is good. But what keeps it going is movies that require cutting edge applications to keep audiences piling into theatres. All three senior staffers agree that until you have worked in the business, it’s really very hard to grasp just how much work goes into just a few minutes of action. Contemporary filmmaking of the sort Sony Pictures Imageworks specializes in does not happen fast. The robotic pit bulls you’ll see in Kingsman: The Golden Circle were quite challenging to create, says Randy Lake.
“It was an interesting and fun project and our first time working with Matthew Vaughn (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Kick-Ass) and it has some crazy action sequences, cool work we did with robotic pit bulls, a robotic arm and a fembot that looks extraordinarily like Claudia Schiffer, who just happens to be Matthew’s wife,” said Lake. “We developed a new software technology called Sprout for building plant environments really quickly and a lot of the shoot involved a jungle environment which we could build quite fast and get in front of the director.”
Breakspear says that developing new ways to create environments and effects that are all the more realistic is key to avoiding the intense audience scrutiny which accompanies its demand for ever more fanciful filmmaking.
“With visual effects, I go off filming somewhere with a director on set and then come back and bring that footage with me and we then add in environments, locations, and so on,” said Breakspear. “The just finished Kingsman looks spectacular, but if you saw the before and after you could be possibly confused. While we didn’t build the actors or some of the props, we do create some pretty amazing things on top of that.”
Lake says one of the best aspects of the global nature of the film business is directors pushing to find the audience something that it has never seen before to get it to come to the theatre. This impetus means that Sony Pictures Imageworks and the visual effects and animation industries in B.C. can look forward to the next 25 years.