Multimedia and digital visual effects: an emerging local labor market (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, Mar. 1998

Multimedia and digital visual effects: an emerging local labor market

Allen J. Scott

Since the 1980s, the multimedia and digital visual effects industry has been emerging at an extremely rapid pace in the State of California.¹ Two geographic areas, namely, the Bay Area and southern California (principally Los Angeles County) contain most of the industry’s establishments. The southern California region is now moving into a position of dominance, not only in the State, but probably in the world at large.
In its narrowest sense, the multimedia industry consists of firms that produce compact disks and materials for diffusion over the worldwide web. These products can be further categorized by substantive content, such as games, interactive stories, educational and self-help materials, business aids, and advertising. In this sense, the multimedia industry is currently pushing all media (visual, textual, and audio) into convergence around interactive, digital methods of presentation. However, the industry can be defined in a somewhat wider sense so that it includes not only the activities previously indicated, but also all forms of digital enhancement of conventional media—particularly, a wide range of computerized approaches to graphic design. It is this larger conception of the industry—the multimedia and digital visual effects industry—that will predominate in this article. Applications of computer graphics, particularly in the fields of animation and special effects, have developed apace in recent years, and Hollywood feature films and television programs now routinely depend on ancillary high-technology image-processing operations for their commercial success.²
The remarkable dynamism of southern California’s multimedia and digital visual effects industry is, of course, closely related to the region’s overwhelming and long-standing importance as a center of the entertainment industry. As such, southern California represents the country’s most densely developed concentration of specialized workers in such domains as storywriting, visual dramatization, and scenario production. It is also a place where multimedia content providers can always find an available supply of subcontracting services in film and video production, photography, graphic art, scriptwriting, musical composition, acting, voice-over, and so on. Even so, and in view of the recent mushrooming of the multimedia industry in the region, many firms interviewed for this research reported an acute shortage of workers with computer graphics skills and other forms of multimedia expertise.

This excerpt is from an article published in the March 1998 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes
¹ Multimedia and digital visual effects is an emerging industry and is not officially designated under the Standard Industrial Classification system.

² Making Digits Dance: Visual Effects and Animation Careers in the Entertainment Industry (Los Angeles, The PMR Group, Inc., 1997).

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