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ASHEVILLE -- The
New French Bar after work on Fridays nearly boils with people
letting off steam.
Almost
everyone, it seems, has just come from a hectic week. Men loosen
their ties. Women slip off their heels as they lean into tiny
round tables crowded with drinks, hors d'oeuvres and cell
phones.
Center stage in
all this pressure relief is a large, triangular table filled
with people who work at, work with or work near Seventy-two dpi
Web Design, one of the highest-profile firms in Asheville's
emerging multimedia industry. The year-and-a-half-old company
can count 20 clients within a few blocks of its Haywood Street
office.
"There are so
many talented people around us," co-owner Blake Butler said,
sitting across the copper-edged table from Michelle
Lappas-Kotara, whose Better By Design graphics design firm gets
half a dozen resumes each week from people who want to move to
town.
Beside her is
Lorraine Ragsdale, a recent multimedia graduate from UNC
Asheville whose attempts to find a job at home are leaving her
frustrated. All around her are people swapping names and leads.
"In Atlanta,
this gathering wouldn't be happening," Butler, 33, said, waving
a hand at the dozen Web designers, engineers and publishers
around the table. "It's just important for us to stick together.
"We all want to
make it."
A promising (if
somewhat undefined) beginning
Last year, Nancy
Foltz of Communicatia, a marketing and public relations firm in
Asheville, spent three months talking to area high-technology
firms on behalf of the Buncombe County Economic Development
Commission. The commission wanted to find out what slice of the
Internet pie the city and county should pursue in its attempts
to widen the county's economic base.
Foltz
interviewed dozens of area companies to find out where Asheville
helps and hinders their ability to do work over the Internet.
Foltz wanted to know what it would take to attract similar
businesses and what might dissuade them from coming. She also
wanted to find out how many "new economy" concerns there were
already in the Asheville area.
What she found
were several small firms and one-person shops working in what
can best be called multimedia -- an industry that combines text,
graphics, arts, photos, sound, animation and video into material
that educates or entertains. By sheer numerical preponderance,
multimedia seems to be the niche Asheville has carved for itself
on the Web.
Typically,
multimedia products are delivered over the Web, through
intranets or extranets or via CD-ROM and DVD, streaming audio
and video, virtual reality, animation, 3-D graphics, video games
and simulations.
The artists,
technicians and administrators involved can live anywhere
there's a fast Internet connection. With plenty of broadband
access in Asheville, the multimedia minions who move to town
come primarily for the mountain trails and rivers and downtown
Asheville's funky coffee shops, art galleries and ethnic
eateries.
"It was a
consistent theme," Foltz said of her research, "that
(multimedia) content developers would be a good fit here."
Coming up with a
target market is easier than bracketing the trades that fit
within the category. What multimedia means seems to depend upon
whom you're talking to.
"Multimedia is
more interesting undefined," said Gail Wurthner, a north
Asheville resident who has worked in film for years. She was
production designer on perhaps the biggest project to come out
of the multimedia community in town -- "Salsa Man," a pilot of a
hoped-for series of food and cooking shows starring Hector Diaz,
the Puerto Rican-born owner of Salsa and Zambra restaurants
downtown.
"You'd be better
leaving (multimedia) fuzzy around the edges," Wurthner said.
But whereas the
definition may be unclear, the kinds of people the digital media
attract aren't.
"Many of those
who are employed in this industry segment have fine art, graphic
design, humanities, communication and computer science
backgrounds and degrees," said Dave Porter, the Asheville Area
Chamber of Commerce's vice president of economic development.
"To create the products they deliver, multimedia companies
employ producers, art directors, creative directors, technical
directors, engineers, writers, game designers, information/user
interface designers, instructional designers, video producers,
sound designers, animators and Web designers."
Many of whom, it
turns out, live in or near Asheville.
No shortage of
talent
"There is an
incredible pull of creative people in this town," said Adam
Greenberg, owner and engineer at Whitewater Recording, a south
Asheville recording studio that masters and packages cassettes
and CDs. It produces CDs that not only include music but also
can include interviews with the artists, links to their Web
sites and other add-on material.
"People are
moving into town with really high skill levels," Kurt Mann,
creative director and owner of Ironwood Media Group, said as he
edited "Salsa Man" inside the Ironwood's pastel-hued offices
above Pack Square downtown.
Some of the people
he works with are graduates of UNCA's 3-year-old multimedia arts
and sciences program, the only one of its kind in the 16-campus
UNC system.
"With the
university, the small number of (multimedia) businesses and the
arts standing we have here, this place appeals to people on the
artier side of technology," Foltz said.
Multimedia is a
$22 billion industry globally, according to Machover Associates,
a White Plains, N.Y., research firm that analyzes the computer
graphics industry.
No one knows
how big multimedia is locally. There are only estimates,
informal counts of people sharing a beer at New French Bar on
Fridays or attending the monthly meetings of the Information
Technology Council, an offshoot of the Buncombe County Economic
Development Commission.
"Right now there
are a couple hundred of us tucked away in people's houses or
apartments," said Mary-Allison Lind, an ITC member who owns Deep
Spring Design Ltd., a Hendersonville multimedia company. "Very
few of us have storefronts."
"When I first
came to Asheville (about eight years ago), it was almost a ghost
town, creatively," Mann, a documentary filmmaker from Los
Angeles, said as he spun through video of dancing peppers, the
intro to "Salsa Man" created by local animator Bob Zimmerman.
"There weren't many people with high (computer) media skills.
"Three years ago,
I noticed an increase. A year ago, it doubled. Three months ago,
it doubled again."
Moving
pictures, mountains
Keoki Trask, a New
Age musician and film composer and sound designer in Asheville,
credits the influx of creative people to the creation of Blue
Ridge Motion Pictures, a 40-acre movie studio on the old Girmes
plant site in east Asheville. During his interview, Trask was
preparing a musical number for a Bravo TV network tag and had
just completed music for a National Geographic production.
Blue Ridge
Motion Pictures opened last fall and is now building a
38,400-square-foot sound stage as part of an overall $16 million
investment, studio head Leanne Campbell said. With 176,000
square feet under roof and varied lots there or nearby that can
approximate the terrain of much of the United States, Blue Ridge
is negotiating lease of its facilities to several movie
production companies, Campbell said.
"Salsa Man," a
$6,500 production shot March 8-9, was one of the first big
projects filmed there. The supporting cast and technical crew
were all local, Mann said.
The area talent
"was one of the reasons we came here," Campbell said. "There's
just a pool of people (here) that have already been in the
field.
"We want to hire
local people ... instead of bringing them in from L.A. or New
York."
The quality of
people who worked on "Salsa Man" proved to Wurthner and Mann
that the talent here is good enough to work on "Jo," a proposed
weekly television series starring actress, model and Biltmore
Forest resident Andie MacDowell. MacDowell, who starred in "sex,
lies and videotape," "Groundhog Day" and the current feature
"Harrison's Flowers," plays a veterinarian working in an
Asheville animal hospital in the pilot Spelling Television is
shooting in town this month. "Jo" would be the first weekly TV
series shot in Western North Carolina if CBS decides to go with
it.
"If 'Jo' is picked
up, it could mean so much to so many people," Wurthner said.
Spelling
Television has toured the lots at Blue Ridge Motion Pictures to
see what's available locally, Campbell said.
"If (the show)
comes here," she said, "it may be five to seven years of work.
It would be similar to 'Dawson's Creek'," a television show shot
in Wilmington that brings between $20 million and $25 million
annually to that coastal city, according to Johnny Griffin,
director of the Wilmington Regional Film Commission Inc.
Marketing a
multimedia mecca
It's that kind of
possibility that prompted the Economic Development Commission to
create a new Web site that trumpets the existing talent to
information technology companies and individuals it hopes to
attract.
Ashevilletechnology.com is the centerpiece of a recently
launched marketing campaign to sell the area's talent, broadband
capabilities and quality of life to multimedia companies,
software development companies and other high-tech clusters.
In the true sense
of multimedia, the Web site was the collaborative effort of
local businesses: Seventy-two dpi, ZFx Inc. and Communicatia.
The site touts
several multimedia and other high-tech businesses already here.
It also describes the support from the educational community
that prospective companies would receive -- UNCA's multimedia
program, the fine arts master's degree in 2-D and 3-D that
Western Carolina University will offer in 2003, as well as the
many classes in Web design and systems engineering at community
colleges in the region.
The site gives
leads on venture capital. It also features the Talent Bank, a
free, online employment service matching job seekers and
available jobs in the area. Talent Bank, done by eWorker
Technologies of Asheville, will serve as a clearinghouse for
people in the multimedia industry, organizers hope.
Bolstering the
argument of Asheville as a multimedia mecca is the city's
February 2001 endorsement by The Industry Standard, a
newsmagazine that covers the Internet economy, as one of the top
five places for Internet-based companies that "want to get away
from it all, but still be part of the action."
Last February, the
city was ranked one of the 50 hottest cities in America for
expansion and relocation by Expansion Management Magazine.
Two months ago,
4,000 multimedia companies across the country received a large
postcard produced by the chamber of commerce that describes "our
idea of multimedia" over images of a paddler on the river,
rhododendron in bloom and the city skyline at dusk.
"Artists,
musicians, filmmakers and other creative people have been
attracted by Asheville's sights, sounds and energy for many
years.
"We are," the
card proclaims, "a natural home of multimedia studios."
One of those
studios exists in the old West Asheville Bank building on
Haywood Road. Electronica music wafts over the four men who work
at Black Box Studio: photographer Steve Mann Web site designer
Craig Hobbs Clayton Hooker, who does systems designs and
audio-video installations and UNCA grad David McConville, a
digital systems consultant.
Black Box's
clients have included Volvo Construction Equipment,
headquartered in Asheville, the North Carolina Arboretum and
Design One design firm in Asheville.
McConville brings
together various media into presentations featured in
planetariums, trade shows and flight simulators, to name a few
applications. His clients have included video game and Fortune
100 companies.
"I went to UNCA,
graduated in 1993, but I had to go away to get any training,"
McConville said. He worked in Research Triangle Park for several
years, where he met Hobbs. The longer they worked in the area,
however, the more they began to hate "the traffic, the
pollution, just the stress of everyday life," Hobbs said.
Looking for a new
place to live, Hobbs traveled the country and landed at the
Goombay Festival in Asheville. A celebration of African-American
life, the festival was "one of the best I'd experienced in the
South," he said. "There was an expression of a deep tradition
that was authentic and real."
McConville,
too, felt the pull of Asheville. He loved its beauty. He loved
its diversity. He loved the juxtaposition of the city's easy
attitude toward alternative lifestyles against the region's
Appalachian culture and heritage.
"You can be
exposed to just about any belief in the political and spiritual
spectrum. That makes for a pretty stimulating environment when
it comes to the arts," he said.
He and Hobbs
chose Asheville, Hobbs said, "because not only did it have the
potential of what any hotbed of economic development has --
people that are interested in technology -- but it also hadn't
been overrun yet."
Tough town to find
work
That absence of
large numbers of people working in technological fields can make
it hard to find a job.
Greg Hudgins, 24,
lives in Beaverdam. He runs the projector at the Fine Arts
Theater downtown. He has his own video editing system, and he
shares office space at Ironwood. He's working there for free,
improving his skills.
"If you're
looking to get paid, this isn't a mecca for (film)," Hudgins, a
production assistant on "Salsa Man," said. "Probably the biggest
payment you'll get besides experience is lunch."
Lorraine
Ragsdale's travails finding work attest to how young the
multimedia industry is here. She graduated from UNCA's
multimedia program in December. Now, after four months of not
finding anything, she's starting to look for secretarial work.
"I'm not having
much luck with it," said Ragsdale, a video specialist. She
interned for a few months at Seventy-two dpi, where her husband
works. She worked a couple of weeks at Bclip, a promotional
digital video service in Asheville. But she felt the company
didn't have enough work to keep her busy.
"I've been trying
to get leads through my husband about different competitors, and
it doesn't sound like there are many competitors they're going
up against," she said. She checks the Web regularly, looking at
Asheville-specific sites, to see who the Webmaster is. Most are
one- or two-person shops that don't have enough money to hire
her.
"Most of my
friends that graduated (from UNCA) in multimedia moved. I don't
really know anyone who stayed here," Ragsdale said. She's
thinking about moving, too.
UNCA is a big
reason why economic development leaders are pushing Asheville as
a digital destination.
Since its
beginning in 1999-2000, UNCA's multimedia department will have
graduated 30 students by this May in interactive design, 3-D
animation, digital sound recording and video post-production,
department director Mary Anna LaFratta said. The
interdisciplinary program requires students to take courses in
computer science, mass communication, drama, art and music.
Recent UNCA
graduates who have taken multimedia courses there include Robert
Klein, a 26-year-old animator who created Klein Digital in
Asheville and Paul Schattel at Oliver Multimedia.
Holding area
multimedia back right now, said Barbara Pollock, customer
service coordinator at SofTrain, is a certain lack of interest
for advanced-level training.
About six times a
year SofTrain, a software training center in Asheville, offers
classes in Active Server Pages, JavaScript, XML, HTML,
Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash. Five times a year, it has to
cancel the classes.
"This has been
going on a year and a half or more," Pollock said. There are a
couple of reasons, she believes.
One is that
free-lancers don't have the money to enroll. The other is
they're wary of taking expensive training they may forget
because they don't have much opportunity to use advanced skills.
They do, it's
just that clients don't want to pay for them, said Lappas-Kotara
of Better By Design.
"People don't want
to pay for service here," she said. "Seventy-five dollars to
$125 an hour is a reasonable rate. ... There are a lot of people
out there making us look really expensive," she said of
free-lancers who charge $25 to $55 an hour. But she knows why
they do -- they're trying to build a base of clients.
"We all started
out there," she said.
Going global
But they're not
content to stay there.
"I haven't met one
person who doesn't think nationally," said Debra Roberts at
Heron Productions, a video and documentary production company.
As producer, she meets and hires people skilled in various
media.
"I made it my
business when I moved here four and a half years ago to meet
everyone I can related to my work. ... Through collaboration, we
are changing the perception that Asheville might not measure up
to other parts of the country.
"It does. We're
just in our infancy."
Jeff McCoy, an
animator who works with graphics, film and other artists in
offices at the Innsbruck Mall, said his group had to look for
work nationally because there isn't enough here in town. But
that's a good thing, in that it's making him hustle, which
ultimately makes him a better animator.
"We're starting to
get some interest," he said, "especially in (cartoon creation),
everywhere from the Research Triangle to California. Broadband
is allowing us to approach these companies and say we can do
this kind of work for you and send finished versions to you via
the Internet.
"Basically,
it's how fast can we crank this stuff out to these companies
now. If everyone keeps going the way they're going, the business
and industry should come here."
Back at Ironwood
Media Group, Mann is talking not about the past but about the
future. With Hudgins' help, he'll soon have a 60-minute "Salsa
Man" pilot that he'll show to the Food Network and
Spanish-language channels Telemundo and Univision.
The timing for
the show is right, Mann said -- Latin TV is hot. There are more
Mexicans and Central Americans in the country than ever before.
Tropical foods are in mainstream groceries, and people these
days are in a mood to stay home.
And then there's
the main character, Hector Diaz, and his sweet smile, Mann said.
Mann loves that smile. It convinced him, a year ago while the
two were traveling, cooking and dancing in Costa Rica, that Diaz
is a natural for television.
So full of life
and smiles, Diaz sells himself, Mann said.
"This," he said as
he highlighted more footage from the pilot-in-the-making, "is a
turning point for the local (film) production community."
From Blue Ridge
Motion Pictures to all who worked on it, "Salsa Man" proves that
local artists can pull together various media into a product
that's ready for prime time, he said, whether it's on film,
video or something built and launched over the Internet.
Foltz, who did all
the research that propelled the economic development commission
to go after multimedia, isn't sure there are enough artists and
businesses to say Asheville has a multimedia industry.
Though there
are plenty of them to fuel stress-reduction happy hours at
places like the New French Bar, they are still too few and far
between to be brought under such a large umbrella term, she
said.
"To me, it's more
of a future tense," Foltz said. "We do have some now. They're
doing well, and they show promise of bringing more into the
area. .... We have the forerunners of a really good cluster."
Contact Clark
at 232-5854 or PClark@CITIZEN-TIMES.com
ON THE NET
www.ashevilletechnology.com -- The Buncombe County Economic
Development Commission's new Web site showcasing the area's
multimedia talents and potential. Includes tabs that connect
job-seekers with job-holders, list broadband possibilities,
point toward potential venture capital and extol the area's
outdoor and downtown activities.
http://www.goasheville.com/webdesign1.html
-- An online directory of services in Asheville, including Web
design and Web photography.
www.main.nc.us/afn/
-- The Asheville Freelance Network is an informal group of
creative independent professionals in writing, design,
photography and related fields.
BOX
What will it
take to bring more Web-based businesses to Western North
Carolina? E-mail your thoughts to staff writer Paul Clark for a
follow-up story about your ideas.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
Go to CITIZEN-TIMES.com
for the following:
-- Sample work by
Black Box Studio, Ironwood Media Group and BClip Productions.
-- Visit a
photo gallery featuring pictures taken at many of Asheville's
multimedia firms.
-- Learn how local
artists and designers are pooling their talent, and find out how
one computer game designer got away.
John
Fletcher/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
What a monitor
would see if a monitor could see: the creative workings of
Seventy-two dpi Web Design, whose seven-person staff here is
creating a client's Web site. Co-owner Blake Butler, left,
watches as Creative Director Keith Bowman maps the site with
input from the rest of the staff.
Debbie
Chase-Jennings/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
A low-tech
beginning to a high-tech afternoon, Adam Greenberg at Whitewater
Recording sets up mics to record the Carolina Home Schoolers, a
group of area children that was heading to West Frankfurt, Ill.,
for a taping at Three Angels Broadcast Network. On trumpet is
William Guthrie. Behind Greenberg is Jasmine Bailey and beside
her is Laurel Ann Guthrie. Tour the studio and hear clips of the
children by going to the studio's Web site (www.whitewaterrecording.com)
and clicking the Download tab.
John Coutlakis/STAFF
PHOTOGRAPHER
David McConville
of Black Box Studio pilots a VisionStation, a hemispherical
immersive computer display system that projects a 180-degree
field of view. McConville was the content development specialist
on the project when he worked for Elumens, a company in Research
Triangle Park, and he's still developing the device. McConville
is meeting with Blue Ridge Motion Pictures, a movie studio in
Asheville, this week about its producing video for the system.
Multimedia in
Asheville
Dozens of
multimedia companies exist in Asheville, many of them so small
they work out of a spare room in the owner's house. Though they
may loom small in the office space they occupy, nearly all have
big, splashy sites on the Web, where a quick tour of the mouse
will turn up nearly any service needed by anyone or any company
with a product or message. Here's a list of some of those
companies:
•Accent Website
Designs, www.accent-webdesigns.com
•Alphadesigndotorg,
www.alphadesign.org
•A New Light
Video Animation, www.anewlight.com
•Asheville
Sightband Sound, www.ashevillesightandsound.com
•Better By
Design LLC, www.betterbydesign.net
•Black Box Studio,
www.blackboxstudio.com
•Black Mountain
Video Productions, www.blackmtnvideo.com
•Bonesteel Films,
www.bonesteelfilms.com
•BugLogic,
www.buglogic.com
•ByTheNet Inc.,
www.bythenet.com
•CPU Inc.,
www.cpucorp.com
•Daniels Graphics,
www.danielsgraphics.com
•Deep Spring
Design, www.deepspring.net
•Design One Inc.,
www.d1inc.com
•Doctordirectory.com,
www.doctordirectory.com
•Earthlight
Multimedia Inc., www.earthlightmultimedia.com
•Eastern
Hi-Tech Design, www.ehtdesign.net
•Harrow Beauty,
www.harrowbeauty.com
•Heron
Productions, www.littlepearls.org
•Ironwood Media
Group, www.ironwoodmedia.com
•IRX
Productions, www.irxproductions.com
•JPM Design,
www.jpmdesign.com
•Klein Digital,
www.kleindigital.com
•MagicBus.com,
www.magicbus.com
•Mandala
Multimedia Productions, www.easycommercespot.com
•NextGen Video
Inc., www.Next-GenVideo.com
•New Context
Video Productions, www.newcontext.com
•Oliver
Multimedia, www.olivermultimedia.com
•Procomm Studio
Services, www.procommss.com
•Projections
Company, www.projco.com
•RKR Graphics,
www.rkrgraphics.com
•Second Star
Communications, www.second-star.com
•Seventy-Two
dpi Web Design, www.seventy-twodpi.com
•Sonopress,
www.sonopress.de/global/
•Totsie.com,
www.totsie.com
•Viewpoint
Productions, www.aviewpointproductions.com
•Visionary
Music & Multimedia, www.visionarymusic.com
•Whitewater
Recording, www.whitewaterrecording.com
•Wright
Creative, www.keithwright.com
•Ydesigns.com, www.ydesigns.com
•ZFX Inc.,
www.zfx.com |
