Major contract means animator is giving young designers their first job, writes Karlin Lillington

Familiarity breeds content. At least to judge from one project in Dublin's Digital Hub that proves that clustering - placing large and small companies in a related area in proximity to one another - can pay.

For six-person animation company Kavaleer, being downstairs from e-learning giant Riverdeep has meant a major subcontracting job which has increased staffing levels seven-fold and in turn has benefited some three dozen animators, many of them students at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), who are getting their first professional work experience.

"We had a previous relationship with Kavaleer, as they had worked for us through a subcontractor on our Strawberry Shortcake product in our consumer line," says David Farrelly, director, partner relationships for Riverdeep.

"On this current project, we had a significant amount of design and animation that needed to be done and, this time, we went directly to Kavaleer."

Given that the two companies are on nearby floors of the former Guinness Hopstore building, which previously housed Media Lab Europe, "going directly" just involved a flight of stairs.

The project, Destination Reading, is an expansion of Riverdeep's e-learning Destination Success series in mathematics and reading that is aimed at the huge US schools market.

Farrelly notes that the Destination line is the product that opened up the US market to the firm and helped to turn the company into one of the international giants in its sector.

An existing reading product is for kindergarten to eight year olds; the new product will target "tweenies", the nine to 14-year-old age group, and therefore has quite different animation and multimedia needs, he says.

After developing the instructional content, Riverdeep outsources much of the actual production and design work on its products. Farrelly says that it works very closely with outsource partners, who might be anywhere from the US to Ireland to India, so the relationship with Kavaleer would not be unusual, although the proximity of their offices certainly is. The small animation company initially came on board as consultants.

Farrelly notes that "through that, we established there was an opportunity to grow a team around this". But when growing a team means hiring nearly seven times the number of employees you have at the time, that's a challenge, acknowledges Andrew Kavanagh, chief executive of Kavaleer.

"There were a couple of phases. We started with three people working on integration, then expanded. The trick was bringing on board a significant number of people, and maintaining a similar amount of control."

A total of about 40 people - and they are still hiring, he says - have been brought in "in batches of about 10".

The major project - providing the design and animation around the detailed instructional lessons and guidelines provided by Riverdeep - was broken down into "a series of manageable learning curves", he says.

Kavaleer is training people on a "need to know basis" - as soon as they need certain skills, they get the training.

Most of the training - some part-funded by Accel learning funds, supported through the European Commission and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment - goes towards the team leaders, Kavanagh says, and they in turn train their team members.

"It's a matter of training 40, but the emphasis is on six," he says.

Small animation and digital media companies often expand and reduce according to the needs of the projects they are engaged upon, but, by any measure Kavaleer needed an exceptional number of animators, and fast.

"This is where I played my Dún Laoghaire card," laughs Kavanagh, an IADT graduate himself.

Fresh from one of the main industry shows where production companies pitch project ideas to networks, he knew that several Irish studios had clinched deals and would be eyeing up the new graduates from the various animation courses around Ireland.

"So I was a bit cheeky and started interviewing students before the end of their degree, and took on 20 by April.

"I did an arrangement with the college to let them finish their own work while they were working here. It was a back-scratching scenario," he says, laughing again.

Jim Devine, director, IADT, is pleased with the placements.

"These are students who aren't even finished with their degrees yet. It says great things about the programme and how it meets industry needs."

Devine hopes similar work placements will become a regular part of the degree course.

For the students as well as some graduates from the previous year also hired by Kavaleer, the project will bring welcome CV work experience in what can be a tough industry. This is going to be a good year for Irish graduates because so much work is going around, Kavanagh says.

They are in the thick of production at present - the project began in March - and should wrap up by the end of summer.

At that stage, the IADT students, who are employed on a contract basis, will either return to college or move onto other jobs.

Some 80 per cent of company effort is going into the Riverdeep project, but Kavaleer has a couple of cartoon projects ahead.

Many of the extra 40 animators will move on, but Kavanagh says the current rate of growth has meant the company is expanding to 10 full-time employees. "So far, so good," he quips.

'We were thrown in at the deep end'

A third-year student in Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology's animation degree course, Áine McGuinness sits before a computer in Kavaleer's pleasant, sprawling office space in the former Media Lab Europe building in the Digital Hub.

She is using onscreen templates to create the elements that will become part of Riverdeep's "Destination Reading" e-learning product for the US schools market.

She says her course co-ordinator made a general announcement to her class about the chance to work with Kavaleer and, along with many classmates, she submitted a showreel of animation material from her coursework. "You just try to show off your best bits," she says, noting that she made sure she included animations created with the Flash program as she knew the job involved working in Flash.

She got one of the jobs and started at Kavaleer in mid-April. "We were thrown in at the deep end," she says cheerily. "We were shown what had been done before (on earlier versions of the product line), then we were eased into the animation work. We had some training days too."

She says the job has been a surprise because she thought she would be animating all the time, "but it involves doing lots of other stuff, working with templates and different programs. It's good to get a feel for working for a studio", she says. "All experience is good experience."

McGuinness says she was always into art, "always drawing characters", and when she read about the animation course at Dún Laoghaire, she made a quick decision to apply.

She loves the subject and would like a career producing classic, hand-drawn animation or the creation of backgrounds to animated films.