It is a theme taken up by Soren Jensen of Photon VFX, a company whose credits over the last ten years include the television series The Lost World, Journey to the Center of the Earth and the Emmy-nominated Moby Dick. "We are totally reliant on return of business, so we have to make our stuff extra good. We basically care for our product. We massage material until we are all happy with it, whereas in a lot of the countries like the United States, there are so many FX companies they just spit it out at an enormous rate."

Many Factors
This difference in scale between Australia and America has also led to a different model of operation between the two countries. Peter Webb, who before starting work at local FX house Phenomena worked on such U.S. productions as Batman Forever and Coneheads, points out that, "American companies, because of the throughput, have to specialize and compartmentalize people, whereas in Australia you have to be more resourceful. Rather than spending 5 or 6 weeks in development, and then having a texture team working for 6 months to get a scene to look a certain way, here we just hit the ground running and come up with the results much more quickly. We're very resourceful through necessity, and I think that filmmakers like that."

It certainly is one of the reasons for the increasing work heading Australia's way, but there are many other contributing factors that have converged to put Australia in its current position. Some are beyond the control of the industry, such as the state of the Australian dollar, but other factors that were once seen as an impediment, are now viewed as an asset.

"Technical evolution has been part of the film globalization," explains Rachael Turk, "enabling us to transcend physical and geographical time zone barriers. What we have now is a 24-hour workday, with half-day shifts between Australia and America. At the close of our day we can send over our output so that when the client wakes up, they're ready to do revisions and send back their comments. There's even an overlap of about 5 hours each morning where we can have direct contact over the phone to work things out."

Fox's wild spin on the classic tale Romeo + Juliet included the work of Complete Post. ™ and © 1996 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

Lower Budgets At Work
This technical evolution has also reaped benefits for the smaller-budgeted Australian films. Chris Schwarze, who together with wife Kerri founded Complete Post, recalls that, "Initially Australian producers were very reluctant to get involved with visual effects, but gradually they started to realize that this stuff could actually save them money. Simple things like crowd generation to save on extras and set extensions to save on building enormous sets. So now people are using visual effects to get the look that they couldn't otherwise get and to save them money."

Peter Webb confirms this view: "With lower budgets you can't afford to just stay on set for another 3 days and wait for that perfect sunset, or move the whole crew 50 miles across country just to get that beautiful shore-line. With visual effects you can add that at a much lower cost. I guess the phrase I would use is less compromise. Less compromise visually, which translates into less compromise in the storytelling. If some important story point needs to be made we can look for ways to achieve that."