Early last week I wrote about an event that was coming up, the Digital Entertainment Leadership Forum, which took place in Hong Kong on March 24 and focused on the success of Wellington, New Zealand as a filmmaking center. Matt Aitken and Barrie Osborne were among the speakers, introduced by Mayor Kerrie Prendergast.

I was sorry not to be there for their talks, but I got a pleasant surprise yesterday when David Ivory, based in Hong Kong, emailed me with a description of the event. It’s fascinating and contains some scraps of news. David has kindly given me permission to share his impressions of what went on. I’ll let him speak for himself:

I’ve just returned from DELF at Cyberport where most of the Wellington Digital Media Industry had decamped for the last two days.

Not a lot on The Hobbit - but more rippling effects from LotR. In general it was interesting and informative, with a focus on ‘Innovate Locally – Collaborate Globally’ especially NZ&HK.

The most important item was that a memorandum of agreement was signed between Grow Wellington and Hong Kong’s Cyberport to foster collaboration between New Zealand and Hong Kong. There will be some articles in the New Zealand Media about this so look out for them in the next day or so.

[Note: The agreement was signed on March 23. So far I haven't seen any coverage in the NZ media, but I'll link any that appear.]

Matt Aitken keynoted and showed off Weta’s expertise and was the visual highlight of the day – he’s running a workshop tomorrow about more aspects of Weta’s work. There has evidently been a lot of internal discussion about Weta spinning off a Software firm to commercialise even more the technology Weta has developed… but they have stepped back from that… ( Except for Massive – I recall reading an Economist article recently about that.)

[I'll be blogging about that Economist article soon; it's quite amazing.]

Barrie Oborne discussed the highlights of his time since the LotR moved his centre of gravity to New Zealand and why he lives and works there now. He noted that he is happy to work wherever in the world there is great talent, but at the moment it is Wellington.

Park Road Post’s Aimee McCammon focussed on the collaboration that PPP has had with John Woo on his epic Red Cliff trilogy and how they did post production in Wellington for the first movie, but how they sent a team to Beijing to do Post there instead of Wellington.

Scott Houston was particularly interesting talking about how he has worked to repurpose the IT infrastructure built for LotR to create InterGrid a rendering service accessible in the internet cloud. The service is called Green Button and the website is http://www.greenbutton.co.nz

This is a direct development that would never have happened without the rendering requirements of the huge crowd scenes in Return of the King.

Dave Gibson (Gibson Group) & Steve La Hood (Story! Inc Limited) are competitors in their home market but collaborate on international projects. They work in developing not only features, Gibson’s Aftershock, but also interactive museum pieces – something that grew out of the touring of the LotR exhibition.

There were several Hong Kong speakers – of interest to me was Chow Keung a local producer who is developing Hong Kong and Chinese movies for the world market and who has been very successful in doing so. One of his directors. Jia Zhang-ke also spoke. They are looking at scaling up their movies (one presumes) which would benefit from this recent agreement.

I think you would have been fascinated by the way the Wellington industry has continued to grow and reshape the contours of the worldwide film industry – this was a nice snapshot of the state of play.

Lastly – there was little mention of the Hobbit movies – except as projects in the pipeline that they’re planning for. Aimee McCammon did note that post production on Lovely Bones is due to complete in a couple of weeks – presumably this will free up Peter Jackson and Park Road Post for his other projects. It will be interesting to see a new
non-epic PJ movie.

Thanks for that, David! I’m of course always happy to see more “rippling effects” from the trilogy. Very interesting to hear the The Lovely Bones is finishing up soon. I presume James Cameron’s Avatar is still occupying some of the time of Weta Digital and Park Road Post.

[Added March 28: No news reports yet, but the Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Ltd., a government agency that ran the DELF, issued a press release. On attendance at the Forum, it says "DELF 2009 attracted about 300 local and international attendees from all walks of industry including government officials, academics, creative artists, entrepreneurs, and ICT professionals, to meet at Hong Kong Cyberport and learn what will drive the next wave of the rapidly evolving and fast growing digital entertainment industries."]

[Added April 20: Thanks again to David Ivory, who has sent along a link to a more detailed press release from Cyberport.]