Sandcrawler vindicates Lucas' Asia move

[SINGAPORE] Right in the heart of Buona Vista, dozens of digital-animation and visual-effects specialists - many of them Singaporeans - are busy working on Hollywood blockbuster movies such as Avengers 2 and Transformers 4.

Some others are putting the finishing touches to a full-length animated feature film produced entirely in Singapore.

All this activity was abuzz within a futuristic-looking, horseshoe-shaped building in Fusionopolis called Sandcrawler, which is Lucasfilm's regional headquarters and its first studio outside the United States.

The eight-storey, glass-enclosed structure with 22,500 square metres of space takes its name from the large vehicles that trundled across the landscape in George Lucas' original Star Wars film of 1977.

Besides Lucasfilm, the Sandcrawler is also home to the new headquarters of the Walt Disney Company (South-east Asia) and sports cable TV network ESPN Asia-Pacific.

In town for its official opening yesterday, the 69-year-old founder of Lucasfilm described the facility as a symbol of an achievement that seemed "vaguely foolhardy" a decade ago, when the company first expanded into Singapore.

He recalled in his off-the-cuff speech that he was met with a "great deal of scepticism" when he mooted the idea of setting up shop in Asia: "Everybody thought I was a little crazy to try to do this."

His detractors had voiced concerns that the quality of work produced overseas would be inferior to that coming out of Lucasfilm's California headquarters.

But where once it was so difficult to convince Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) - the visual effects company under Lucasfilm - to even farm out some basic jobs to the Singapore team, things have reached a stage where ILM has declared the quality of work here to be of equal standard to that from the US.

Among the notable projects Lucasfilm Singapore has had a hand in are Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV series and about a quarter of the work on Rango, which won an Academy Award for best animated feature three years ago.

Lucasfilm president and renowned film producer Kathleen Kennedy said: "This is a very robust operation that is comparable to exactly what we're doing in San Francisco or Vancouver.

"Many of the top-end movies that are being made in the next 18 months to two years, a vast variety of that work, will head in this direction," she said.

Mr Lucas disclosed that Lucasfilm had considered other Asian locations for its regional headquarters - Japan, India and Taiwan, among others - before settling on Singapore.

The clincher, he said, was the Republic's attractive living environment and its ready pool of creative and talented people to draw from.

Lucasfilm's general manager David Anderman told reporters before the launch that Singapore's strong protection of intellectual property, its pro-business policies and the support of the Economic Development Board were other pluses.

Mr Lucas said: "(The Sandcrawler) is a symbol of the people of Singapore in computer animation, combining with Lucasfilm to create something that is world quality.

"This has been a long road. It's been tough, but I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. And we couldn't have found a better partner anywhere in the world.

Source: Business Times 17th January 2014

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Sandcrawler vindicates Lucas' Asia move

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