Planet55 Studios, the Australian animation house responsible for recent animated releases such as The Reign of Terror and The Tenth Planet have told Australian parliamentarians they may be forced to move to the UK in order to continue working on future animated releases for the BBC.
Head of studio Austen Atkinson told the Senate Select Committee for the National Broadband Network that the company needs to move about 30 gigabytes of data per day and that access to faster and cheaper broadband is essential for the future of the company in the country.
Atkinson stated that the company has been forced to mail its work, sending between one and three hard drives back to the UK per day at a cost of up to AU$500 a day, money that could be spent elsewhere within Planet55:
“I will use any technology that works to get this out. At the moment it is called ‘post’. That is what we are having to do. It slows down our productivity massively and costs us serious money. It would add about AU$1 million to transfer, which we could easily have spent on talent here, we could have trained more talent and spent it on animators, which I would much rather have done.”
While not stating whether Doctor Who was involved, Atkinson went on to say that the company is taking on more work from the BBC and is considering relocating to Cardiff:
“We will leave. We will take our money and go somewhere else because we have hit a bottleneck and we cannot expand. We are already looking at Planet55 Cardiff, in the UK… The fact is that it is very attractive to look at in the UK at the moment, because the economy is booming again now; it is growing in my sector tremendously. As a result of Doctor Who‘s success and so forth, there is a huge culture in Cardiff”
While there is no direct confirmation that future work being undertaken is for Doctor Who, the news is sure to raise some excitement of potential future animated releases such as the rumored Underwater Menace animation later this year.
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