SA’s award-winning animation industry had missed out on $70m-$100m worth of work in the past 18 months as the country had too few trained animators, Cape Film Commission marketing, communications and special 2010 projects manager Linton Rensburg said yesterday.

SA has a comparative advantage as part of the developing world, which is a growth point for the international animation industry because of low production costs.

The biggest growth in the international animation industry was in the developing world, where costs were cheaper and SA’s closest competitors were countries such as India, Malaysia and a few other African countries, Rensburg said.

The Cape film industry’s Animation Industry Development Initiative kicks off at the False Bay College in Khayelitsha tomorrow , when the first group of 50 students will start mouse-clicking their way into the nearly $80bn global animation industry.

The initiative had a R15m budget for the first three years of training, and was hoping to train 2500 people in that time, at no cost to the students, said Rensburg.

To do this the industry had gone into partnerships with the False Bay College, so that it could use the college’s infrastructure, and also with the services sectoral education and training authority, software and hardware companies, and the government.

Training at a film school in SA usually cost about R50000 a year, which was beyond the reach of most Cape Flats residents, Rensburg said.

Many South Africans did not know that the animation and visual effects in films such as The Scorpion King and Free Willie 4 were done by South African companies, he said.

South African animation won two grands prix at the 2009 Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival this week — advertising companies TBWA\Hunt\Lascaris and Network BBDO took the prizes in the outdoor and radio categories respectively, which showed that South African animation was of world standard, commission CEO Laurence Mitchell said.

“SA can deliver as much as India. There is capacity for as much as 10000 new jobs in new media in the next few years,” Mitchell said.

By “new media” he said he meant not only films and advertising but also console games and applications that ran on cellphones.

US film companies found outsourcing animation work to SA easy because there was no language barrier, the financial and legal instruments were similar, and the US industry had respect for the creative work done in SA and for the work ethic of South African animators, said Rensburg.

The Cape Flats was chosen because there was a pool of talent in the area, it was close to the Cape Town film industry, and the area had been chosen by the government as a priority area for development.

Rensburg said the global financial crisis had affected the animation industry, but the full effect on the South African industry had not yet been quantified.

Now is the time (for us) to look at new markets in Asia, India and Africa and also new distribution platforms. The ones we’ve got now are not working or sustainable.”

False Bay College is a further education and training college with five campuses dotted around the False Bay side of Cape Town.

by SUE BLAINE (blaines@bdfm.co.za)
Article published in Business Day

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