CAREERS : SHIFTING GEARS : Interactive Promised Land : There Are Few Careers Now in Multimedia, but Growth Is Coming
SAN FRANCISCO — Meet Paul Drexler, antique dealer turned comedy writer turned corporate scriptwriter turned software marketer. And Chris Lathrop, video director and producer turned pay-TV executive. And Tim Bigoness, TV production assistant turned high-tech publicist.
Despite their disparate career paths, Drexler, Lathrop and Bigoness have converged on common ground: interactive multimedia, the hot new industry that merges pictures, sound, graphics and text, and has enlivened the market for video games, educational computer software and corporate presentations.
The field of interactive multimedia is suddenly all the rage, attracting such high-powered types as fallen Wall Street maven Michael Milken, an investor in multimedia start-ups, and Hollywood’s Strauss Zelnick, who left as president of 20th Century Fox Film Corp. to head a small video game company.
All the hype about interactivity and free-flowing digital data on the Information Superhighway makes multimedia sound like the career for the 1990s and beyond. But keep in mind that the hubbub has been way out of proportion with the fledgling industry’s size.
If you’ve been bitten by the multimedia bug and wonder whether you have the right credentials, here’s a dose of reality: Getting a job won’t be easy, or especially lucrative, unless you’re one of those rare people with computer skills, creativity, vision and experience. On the other hand, there is broad agreement that the industry is poised for a hiring boom.
Multimedia is “exciting and fun,” but at the moment it’s “like a TV job--everybody wants one but there are not a lot to go around,” said Bigoness (pronounced Bee-jho-nay), vice president of marketing at Morph’s Outpost, a multimedia magazine in Orinda, Calif. (The industry does have its rewards: He spoke by phone from Cannes, where he was attending a multimedia conference.)
“It’s a relatively small market right now,” said Bruce Ryon, multimedia analyst at Dataquest Inc., a San Jose research firm. Even so, he added, it’s packed with potential, as the public embraces CD-ROMs, the compact discs that come loaded with video and sound to make interactivity possible on computers.
Consider that 2.4 million systems with multimedia capabilities were shipped in the United States last year, up from 700,000 the year before. Dataquest projects shipments of three million this year and 30% annual growth for the next few years.
Half the computers shipped for home use this year will have CD-ROM drives, and by 1998, practically all machines are expected to come equipped with them.
Although some giant companies--including Paramount, Viacom, Microsoft and Apple--have started multimedia divisions, the industry is mostly concentrated in cottage ventures with fewer than five employees.
Fast-growing players in California include Compton’s NewMedia of Carlsbad; Electronic Arts in San Mateo, and Knowledge Adventure in La Crescenta. The staff at Compton’s, which produces an interactive encyclopedia, has doubled every year for the last three years and now numbers 200. Electronic Arts, which has several top-selling sports and game titles, has grown to 1,050 from 450 workers two years ago. Both companies expect to boost staff by 10% to 20% this year.
Most of the work to develop and produce multimedia titles is being done on a contract basis. Especially in demand for full-time and contract work are experienced content developers: graphic artists, writers, animators and producers. There is also a big need for contract programmers, who earn $60 to $70 an hour. (Very “hot” programmers and producers can make as much as $80,000 a year, but salaries of $40,000 or less are typical.)
Getting a foot in the door of any company, large or small, is tricky. The industry requires long hours and high energy, so it’s no surprise that most of its practitioners are well shy of 50.
“We’re looking for people who were successful in traditional media and want to work for half as much,” said Bing Gordon, a co-founder of Electronic Arts.
For newcomers, professionals advise taking classes to learn the language of multimedia and the dizzying scope of an interactivity project.
Programs are sprouting at universities such as USC and UCLA and at the American Film Institute. At San Francisco State University’s extension, a multimedia program that started with two classes 18 months ago enrolled more than 900 students last semester. And in the first week of the most recent sign-up period, 452 students snapped up classes in interactive filmmaking, writing for multimedia and 3-D.
At USC, Apple Computer, Viacom and Warner Bros. joined to establish the four-month-old Entertainment Technology Center to train the multimedia experts of tomorrow.
With advantages like that, you’re certainly more likely to find a home in multimedia in California than if you lived in, say, Alabama. California has three thriving multimedia incubators--San Francisco, (known as Multimedia Gulch); Los Angeles, with its Hollywood connection, and northern San Diego County.
Drexler, the former antique dealer, got started in multimedia thanks to a contract with Apple Computer that led to a stint in the computing pioneer’s multimedia lab. Three years ago, he started InterWorks with his wife, Julie Marsh, a veteran video producer and director.
From two offices in their San Francisco home equipped with five computers and some audio equipment, they are developing children’s interactive fairy tales, with occasional coaching from their twin 5-year-old daughters, Lily and Michelle. Drexler and Marsh are scouting out investors: Developing and publishing a title can cost $300,000 or more.
