Sony Pictures Imageworks visits Kwantlen Career Day

Sony looks to students as visual effects industry begins to shift.

Walking the streets of Vancouver, one may end up near the set of the next major Hollywood blockbuster. It’s hard not to drive through the Lower Mainland without seeing film crews, set location markers, crew parking signs and trailer circuses.  Since the 1970s, Vancouver has shared with Toronto the affectionate monicker “Hollywood North”, and Vancouver deserves the title for being so close to Hollywood itself. A quick plane ride or road trip from Los Angeles and you are in Hollywood 2.0.

The film and visual effects industry in Vancouver has expanded and gone through a lot of change in the past decade. It’s no surprise, then, that the newly Vancouver-based Sony Pictures Imageworks, which has had teams involved with films such as Cast Away, I Am Legend, Godzilla, Alice in Wonderland and the Spider-Man franchises, had representatives at Kwantlen’s Career Day on March 3. In late May of last year, the company announced that they would be relocating their headquarters from Culver City, California to Vancouver’s Pacific Centre.

Stephen Winters, a member of the Production Services and Resources department, and Stephen Hassard, the Systems Administration Manager, both came to the Surrey campus in hopes to promote student interest in the company. Building that interest and finding talent can be difficult in an ever-changing industry, and the importance of this task was not lost on Winters and Hassard.

“We actually want to see what each school is specifically teaching. It allows us to better understand where the curriculum is going and where the students are. We get a feel for the kind of student body they are getting,” says Winters.

Hassard feels it’s important to let people know there’s a need for artistic talent and coming to career days events allows them this opportunity. “A lot of people don’t realize that we have technical positions that are supporting the artists as well,” he says. “It helps us kind of show students what Imageworks does and hopefully drum up a little bit more interest.”

With the relocation of headquarters comes the relocation of some employees, a reality that Winters is familiar with. “I was relocated a year ago and while I was relocated, there is a big push where we are no longer trying to relocate people from LA. I think it was more getting the management and the people who can train people up here that was critical.”

Winters and Hassard are in agreement that the visual effects industry in Vancouver has only gotten bigger and will likely continue to grow.

“It is a continued change that we are going to see in the next few years,” says Winters. “Hollywood and L.A. are always going to have their production companies, but I think Vancouver is always going to be known as the visual effects hub of North America.”

The future of the industry is hard to predict, but Winters believes technology will definitely have a role. “We’ve seen every five or so years, a shift where something bigger and better has come out in the technology that has really revolutionized how we are able to make the film that much better. For me, I’m really looking forward to seeing the next new thing that’s going to help make things better.”