When rising visual effects (VFX) hotshot Jason Dowdeswell decided to leave Hollywood and come home to Vancouver in 2002, he accepted that he'd be playing in a smaller league.
"[I knew] I would be doing TV commercials and TV-type VFX on the local Stargate work that was running through Vancouver," he remembered.
But he also saw opportunity.
"Part of it was the idea that maybe I could come to Vancouver and be a big fish in a small pond – I could bring some experience and maybe we could do something cool in Vancouver. "
Dowdeswell, a force behind Vancouver's transformation into a global VFX hub, has just taken the wheel at major Vancouver VFX shop Digital Domain Productions, Inc., where he plans to increase the headcount to 350 from approximately 260 by year's end.
Back in 2002, as 30-year-old Dowdeswell planned his return to Vancouver, the local VFX industry was far younger and smaller.
And it had just made a large gamble.
Local VFX house Rainmaker Entertainment, Inc. had landed the city's first major film VFX deal with 2003's animal movie Good Boy! – just as Dowdeswell was putting out feelers for the right Vancouver job.
"[Rainmaker] kind of said, 'Hey, we have no idea how to do this – do you know how to do this?' And it was perfect timing. Because I said, 'Yeah, I know exactly how to pull this off; let's start talking.'"
Dowdeswell, who earned his VFX stripes working in L.A. and San Francisco for Boss Film Studios, Sony Imageworks and Industrial Light & Magic, joined Rainmaker and helped train artists to tackle the large contract.
"We got to about 40 people, which is very small, but it was huge at the time."
Dowdeswell said at the time that, aside from driving his own career goals, he was keen to drive Vancouver's VFX rise.
"My own interest for Vancouver was: could Vancouver become the next mecca?"
Was Dowdeswell one of Vancouver's VFX pioneers?
"I participated with the pioneers for sure," he said, noting that VFX legend Warren Franklin, who oversaw VFX for groundbreaking films such as The Empire Strikes Back and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, became CEO at Rainmaker a couple years after Dowdeswell joined.
Franklin, who left Rainmaker last year, told Business in Vancouver that Dowdeswell was a key force in helping Rainmaker advance its ambitions.
"When I first came up here in 2004, I identified Jason as someone I thought would be key in bringing the A-quality of projects to Rainmaker," Franklin said.
"I leaned on him pretty heavily to put together the foundation of the company in order to get clients like [The Da Vinci Code director] Ron Howardand bigger directors to take a chance on using a smaller company that wasn't established," Franklin added. "It turned out very successfully, and [Dowdeswell] was a big part of the team that made that happen."
Dowdeswell said Franklin encouraged him to pick between VFX's creative and business trajectories.
Dowdeswell said picking business was an easy choice.
"Part of it was driven by an element of survival," he said, noting that he'd seen former L.A. colleagues who hadn't climbed the VFX ladder get pushed out by younger, faster artists.
"I thought management is a skill you can take anywhere," Dowdeswell said. "And VFX and filmmaking is usually quite volatile so I thought I should shore up."
But Dowdeswell's interest in the business of VFX went beyond pragmatism.
"[The attraction was] the ability to create jobs, the ability to attract projects, land work, create and feed an economy, to be able to run a studio where you double the headcount," he said. "It's about making people happy – the same kind of joy I had when I walked into Hollywood."
Dowdeswell stayed with Rainmaker eight years. During that time, he achieved career milestones such as helping launch Rainmaker London to do VFX work on The Da Vinci Code.
In 2010, however, he was ready for his next challenge: joining Image Engine Design Inc. in 2010 as head of studio.
The attraction?
The company's Academy Award-nominated VFX work on District 9 – a project that Dowdeswell said Rainmaker and many other local VFX shops turned down because of its tight budget.
"But not only did [Image Engine] make money, the effects looked amazing and made a $30 million film look like $80 million," Dowdeswell said. "I was like, these guys know something – they've got some special sauce that I would love to be a part of."
Dowdeswell stepped into the new role charged with building up Image Engine's capacity to handle a fivefold increase in sales that followed the company's District 9 triumph.
Dowdeswell said that while challenges included "getting rid of deadwood" and finding talent amidst the industry's global talent shortage, the size of that task didn't phase him.
"I loved it, and it's what I love today," he said. "The company was so nimble and so supportive that anything we put on the table, we could talk about really quickly and make decisions."
Besides helping Image Engine meet its post-District 9 surge, Dowdeswell said his time at the company allowed him to help drive two broader initiatives to build Vancouver's VFX industry.
The first, RenderCloud, allows local companies to pool their infrastructure investments in server capacity and creates a workshare mechanism that could allow Vancouver VFX shops to collectively land an industry-making film franchise – as London did with the Harry Potter franchise.
The second is Image Engine's new facility that repatriates entry-level VFX work from India and China to develop Vancouver's dwindling ranks of junior artists.
Dowdeswell said with Image Engine on a strong course, he's looking forward to "exciting times" in his new role at Digital Domain, which has just undergone a rapid expansion.
The role, he said, will involve auditing the company's personnel deployment and infrastructure needs to strengthen and prepare it for another growth spurt.
Dowdeswell credits his career rise thus far to long-range thinking, problem-solving skills and fearlessness – traits that are reflected in his advice to those contemplating a VFX path.
"You're not going to get better unless you break something," he said.
"If you're afraid to hit the button because you're afraid of what might happen, you're losing out. Be fearless, go for it." •
