Hard Drives Hard Drives / Forget About Pampered Stars And Imperious Directors. The New Breed Of...

Brian Terr, a dapper, affable 29-year-old, is taking a rare lunch break from dealing with computer consultants and telephone companies and assorted other vendors at his fledgling offices in Santa Monica.

"There's a lot of work to do," he says, between sips of iced tea. "It's still early on."

Terr, 29, and partner Dwain Schenk, his former boss in the public relations department of the digital-equipment company Quantel Ltd., are tackling quite a challenge in setting up an unusual bicoastal business -- the world's first talent agency aimed both at digital artists and related postproduction professionals working in movies and broadcasting.

"One of the things we saw at Quantel was that there was no service helping the (postproduction) industry put together the talent side of the business with the facility side of the business," observes Schenk, 35, a beefy foil to the diminutive Terr and the other co-founder of International Creative Alliance Inc. "A light bulb just went on, and we saw an opportunity."

The duo stands on the cutting edge of a burgeoning industry trend, in which new-media employment services scattered nationwide are marching on Hollywood. Digital doings of all sorts increasingly preoccupy the industry, from dubbing stages to animation lairs. Studios pushing projects through both production and postproduction pipelines now face a near-constant recruiting dilemma: how to amass the requisite digital troops without going bust or bonkers.

This has created opportunity for ICA and others. Even former superagent Mike Ovitz has said that digital representation presents some interesting possibilities.

It's no coincidence, of course, that ICA's grand-sounding name has the ring of Hollywood's top film-and-TV talent agencies. With first-rate digs in Santa Monica and Stamford, Conn. -- a midrise offices-and-conference-room suite on the West Coast, executive loft space in the Northeast -- Terr and Schenk want ICA to present a polished, movieland image to its prospective below-the-line clients.

Still, they acknowledge their business model is more akin to that of a glorified employment agency than a true Hollywood talent shop. Unlike Hollywood talent agencies, which take a 10% cut from clients in exchange for exclusive representation to studios, ICA will reap variable fees from companies doing the hiring.

Top digital talent -- whose salaries vary by job class but who all earn well into the six figures or more annually -- will pay nothing and agree to exclusive representation by ICA only with respect to individual companies at which they're placed for projects. Clients are free to pursue freelance jobs elsewhere on their own.

Terr and Schenk see film-and-TV postproduction as the richest talent vein to tap, with broadcast graphics a close second and feature effects a substantial third opportunity.

Participants cite three trends driving the various moves toward digital-talent repping:

¥ The dramatic spread of digital operations. Hollywood now uses digital equipment and processes in most of its production and postproduction projects. In the broader business community, it's a rare Fortune 500 company that doesn't have some sort of Internet-based promotional project requiring outside digital help.

¥ The heightened speed of business. In Hollywood, film and TV projects commonly leap from executive suite to studio backlot in mere weeks; but mainstream corporate America also has become a lot nimbler in its project green-lighting, and placing digital talent a phone call away makes it easier to execute sudden flashes of genius.

¥ The need for labor flexibility. Hollywood digital production tends to ebb and flow, with dramatic peaks in labor demands often followed by periods of relative inactivity, so visual-effects houses and others supplement full-time staffs with per-project hires from a growing pool of freelancers who float from company to company.

Several potential employers already have given ICA a thumbs-up on its pitch and are working out details of contracts to use the firm for recruiting 2-D and 3-D animators, graphics designers, colorists and other more traditional post professionals who, like the digital artists, have gone without agency representation historically.

"As salaries have gone through the roof, you just can't afford to have all the artists you'd like on your staff," laments Steve Wyskocil, president of EDS Digital Studios, a digital restoration, compositing and editing company in Hollywood that plans to use ICA for project ramp-ups. "But if we do need somebody in a hurry, they'll find somebody for us."

"There's a growing demand in this industry for top-shelf talent, but finding the right people can be a full-time job, and people who run businesses need to focus on other things," said Peter Ronick, vp-general manager of Click 3X, a New York-based computer-animation and postproduction company. "Having people who pre-screen talent helps me better manage my time and streamlines the process."

John Parenteau, a managing partner at Santa Monica's Digital Muse computer-animation shop, agrees that recruiting digital talent can be extremely time-consuming.

"An agency like [ICA] searches the little nooks and crannies that are difficult for us to find," says Parenteau, who adds that Digital Muse plans to use the agency to fill both temporary and permanent positions.

Other agencies are pursuing similar plans.

The San Francisco-based Digital Talent Agency is ramping up for a foray into feature-effects and broadcast-postproduction repping. DTA has placed digital artists in positions for two years but so far has dealt almost exclusively with companies working on Internet graphics and multimedia projects.

"We haven't placed feature people yet," says DTA agent Lisa Cleff. "But we've already started to place people in (projects involving) TV station IDs, promos and spot work."

DTA works on a "hybrid" business model featuring a roughly 10% fee that's sometimes paid by the artist and sometimes by the company seeking talent.

"What we see ourselves doing is something like the early days of the William Morris Agency -- but in the digital era," says Paul Smith, a DTA co-founder.

Indeed, Ovitz, former chairman of Creative Artists Agency, is known to be keeping his eye on the digital talent world these days. Ovitz is building a talent-management boutique that a well-placed source suggests may serve the occasional digital artist.

But while Ovitz -- a renowned technophile -- may be mulling such a limited possibility, he's said to believe there's not enough business to be plied in the digital world to build an entire agency around.

Don't tell that to ICA's Terr.

"It's going to be great," he enthuses over a stack of cappuccino pancakes. "Companies are telling us they're so glad somebody will be finally doing this."

But despite the dollar signs fixed firmly in his gaze, Terr says ICA will have a go-slow approach to taking on representation, aiming to sign only 1,000 artists in its first year from a labor pool hundreds of times that number.

United Digital Artists Inc. is a New York-based digital employment group that, like San Francisco's DTA, is considering a move into broadcast and feature work after a promising start in new-media representation. And the Los Angeles area has a couple of rep firms already mining certain well-defined digital niches.

Owner Jayelle Sargent says her 11-year-old Hollywood-based company, HFWD (Have Fun We Do), decided three years ago to branch out from its base in live-action commercials to repping freelance cinematographers, supervisors and producers for visual-effects movie projects.

"We were the first," boasts Sargent. "But we don't represent artists -- that's not what we're about."

On the other hand, Bob Coleman's Digital Artist Agency in Santa Monica specifically targets visual-effects animators and compositors in addition to supers, and will also take on the occasional postproduction colorist or video editor. Both HFWD and Coleman get a 10% participation in their clients' income.

"This way, (visual-effects companies) can call me knowing that it's not going to cost them anything," says Coleman, a former postproduction executive. Currently a one-man band, Coleman plans to hire several more agents within three years to service a projected 300 artists.

Artists represented by Sargent's HFWD say they've found agency representation beneficial.

"She's able to open doors for me," says Alex Funke, an effects cinematographer ("Starship Troopers") who is one of 20 effects pros on HFWD's roster. "While I'm working on a project, she can keep the fire going."

Despite the scattered competition, ICA's Terr considers his firm a below-the-line pioneer, because it targets talent throughout the digital world, plus other core technical areas such as sound postproduction and broadcast engineering.

"We're the only ones doing the whole gamut," Terr says. And ICA's taking fees from facilities rather than artists will allow the company to sign up greater talent numbers to service the industry's biggest, most demanding projects, Schenk adds.

The firm, which went online with its Web site and full database on Nov. 15 (www.ICA-online.com), aims to turn a profit by its second year in business.

"I don't know exactly how big we'll be in 10 years," muses Schenk, hunched over his desk in Connecticut. "But I think we'll have offices all around the world -- London, Tokyo. Right now, there's really no one else even doing this quite like us."