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(Catherine Lamy, Buzz illustrator)

In September 2006 a new romantic comedy was released. The story is about a young telecom specialist and his Seattle-based firm that closes its doors and moves to India. The ironic twist is that the young ‘telecomer’ will be kept on until he can fully train his coworkers and his doppelganger. The film is (predictably) titled Outsourced and couldn’t have premiered at a more ironic time for American filmmaking. The subject of the film, outsourcing, is the process of one company contracting another to do its work. Outsourcing is not a new concept — turn on the television and you’ll see it debated in documentaries, crossfire-type news shows and, most prominently, by our presidential hopefuls (mostly the Democrats). Outsourcing is a heavy and controversial topic, because it is seen as detrimental for American workers, but just like the textile, telecom and electronics firmsm, Hollywood is traveling down its own global development path and it, too, involves moving some operations to other countries.

Today, many Hollywood studios outsource remedial tasks to other countries, or, in other words, jobs that are easily mechanized. For other industries this means automated car factories, building cheap shoes in Chinese sweatshops or moving customer service to Mumbai. For Hollywood, though, it means doling out legal services, animation work and even some creative processes to third-party contractors in India. Starting with the most mundane, Hollywood has begun outsourcing its legal responsibilities to Indian firms. Martha Neil of ABA Journal discusses this in her article “Hollywood Outsourcing Higher-End Legal Work to India.” In it she says that, “While outsourcing ‘back office’ work such as document reviews is fairly commonplace today, Indian lawyers working on planned Hollywood productions are conducting legal research, writing legal opinions, drafting motions, copyright clauses, preparing documents for insurance coverage and processing visas for Hollywood actors, producers and directors.” Borat, a film that attracted a lot of controversy and litigious problems, used legal outsourcing to reduce these potentially costly requirements. Neil says legal requirements done with an American lawyer would cost $450-$650 per hour, while the same work could be done with an Indian lawyer for $60-$100 per hour.

These recent developments couldn’t be accomplished without the advent of high-speed networks that traverse the world. There is no more obvious an example than the energy-intensive computer-generated animation work that Rhythm and Hues does for major Hollywood studios. Rhythm and Hues studios is a third-party contractor that has done animation work for nearly 100 films, including Academy-Awards-visual-effects winner Babe. To keep up with studios in the United Kingdom (which get tax brakes and grants), Rhythm and Hues has opened up two facilities in India, which together with its Los Angles headquarters, act as one cohesive unit. The Indian units have collaborated on Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Golden Compass, Night at the Museum and are working on The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and the new Incredible Hulk. On Alvin and the Chipmunks, 375 employees at R & H worked on the film, of which 75 were from the Mumbai facility in India. In Asmita Bharratui’s article, “R&H and the Indian connection to Alvin and The Chipmunks,” says that, “The Indian digital artists were involved in pretty much all the stages of the pipeline, from modeling, to tracking look and development, to animation and technical-animation (fur and cloth dynamics), to lighting and then to final compositing, plus a significant number of support employees.” This is unusual in the world of outsourcing, however, because R & H has allowed the Mumbai facility to do a lot of the creative work in this film and in The Golden Compass.

Is this bad for America’s filming industry? Not necessarily. After all, attendance at the box office is down and so are DVD sales. If we want to have the same selection and quality in our future films, then we shouldn’t be surprised that Hollywood needs to cut back on something. I’m sure we all can agree that skimming on something that rarely affects a film (legal processing and technical animation) is better than skimming on the actors, directors or screenwriters. Although, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if M. Night Shyamalan was an outsourcing experiment gone awry.