Independence from Disney key to new platforms and partners, says InLight

Newly independent from behemoth Disney Corp., the re-christened InLight Entertainment hopes to parlay private ownership into a raft of new products with a greater variety of partners. The company, formerly Disney Interactive Victoria, was bought out by three senior management members earlier this year as a result of restructuring within Disney. Now, the company hopes to begin developing new broadcast, console games and converged entertainment properties. Operating as Disney Interactive for seven years meant the company was tightly focused on developing products for the CD-ROM market, says InLight Creative director Darren McGrath. During that time, it made close to 200 titles for Disney, mostly interactive learning games for children. In-house production of such titles, however, has been outsourced. While InLight expects to continue producing titles for the Hollywood giant, McGrath says the company now has the best of both worlds as it seeks out new customers while continuing to work with the old. “It’s a wonderful thing because is still a publisher. There’s still a bunch of work that still needs doing for them,” McGrath tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. “It’s been a very good thing and we’ve got great relationships with those people. We just, in fact, got back from Los Angeles this past week. Things are going swimmingly, to put it into a nutshell.” McGrath says the company’s principals have gained important experience working with Disney, but are now ready to branch out. “They were looking for a very focused approach, so that’s kind of what we did. But, the great thing about being in business for ourselves now is that we can kind of find new people to work with as well as play in different sandboxes. We can work in console. We can work in broadcast. We can work in continuing to develop our core strength, which has been what we’ve been doing for the past seven years – but not exclusively.” As part of its new business life, InLight has recently moved its offices and studios to downtown Victoria, and McGrath lists a bevy of services the company can offer, including 2D and 3D animation, non-linear and compositing, project management, concept development, storyboarding, SGI and Maya work, video editing and interactive game design using C++, HTML and Flash, as well as a proprietary 2D sprite engine. As part of its move, the company has had to become leaner and meaner. McGrath says some staff cuts were unavoidable, and the company now operates with a bench of around 20. “By and large we’ve kept as many of the people that made sense. When I say made sense, it wasn’t an easy decision by any means because we had to make a decision that was responsible to a new business rather than a decision that was based on old friendships and stuff like that… had to be cognizant of what was best for the business. While Disney might have been able to have the redundancy of a number of people filling a similar position, we’ve had to go with maybe one or two.” He adds that the company does have the capacity to ramp staff up quickly should the need arise. “We’ve got a wonderful team, and in this business having a veteran team that’s been together seven years that is really pretty expert in its given areas – that’s pretty unique…The great thing about having been with Disney for seven years is that we’ve got really great relationships with a ton of people locally and abroad, whether it’s Vancouver or Seattle or Los Angeles or wherever. We can call on a pretty significant talent pool of world class talent to help us out in deadline time.” As for future announcements that would indicate the company is successful in broadening its offerings and customer base, McGrath is circumspect. “Suffice it to say, they’re concerning projects that we’re currently working on and are pretty excited about their potential.”

Independence from Disney key to new platforms and partners, says InLight

Broadcast | May 1, 2003

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