LessFilm.com was created to promote New Zealand short film. The makers of that site Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan of Cactuslab in Auckland, found themselves dazed to be interviewed by www.frodoeconomy.com an American website started in response to the perceived potential for global domination by New Zealand creative and technological enterprise.
LessFilm.com was created to promote New Zealand short film. The makers of that site Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan of Cactuslab in Auckland, found themselves dazed to be interviewed by www.frodoeconomy.com an American website started in response to the perceived potential for global domination by New Zealand creative and technological enterprise.
Frodoeconomy asks: Is there a wave building in tech, film, and media in New Zealand? After the massive hype that was Silicon Valley I know it's important to get facts and not fiction or wistful thinking. So lets start with the creators of the LessFilm.com site referenced below. Technologist Karl von Randow and designer Matthew Buchanan have built a growing multimedia studio based in Auckland, New Zealand's 'City of Sails'.

I spoke by phone with Matt:

rb: Hi. So, have you read the article in the Los Angeles Times?

mb: Umm.. No.

rb: I'll give you the short version. The reporter interviewed the family that owns the farm where the Hobbit village was created and other folks who contributed to the film. The locals call their new found fortune the 'frodo economy' he says. After reading that I decided to start looking into what seems to be a cool phenomenon. I called you because of the LessFilm.com site you created.

mb: We are probably not the best people to talk to about the film industry. We're not really involved in the film industry, we are really on the internet side of things.

rb: I understand. So for your area are you seeing any evidence that all this attention is affecting your business?

mb: I think that yes it probably has. It's quite obvious that New Zealand has found itself in the world's spotlight. In terms of what we do, we do very little business with overseas companies. All the work we do, aside from the short film site, is with local clients in Auckland city or clients from elsewhere in New Zealand.

We haven't seen a huge upturn in overseas people contacting us for work, but we have seen increases in the amount of people coming to the film site and watching those films.

rb: Do you anticipate a co-ordinated effort among companies like yours to take advantage of all this new attention much the way Silicon Valley once grabbed the public's imagination?

mb: I think everyone in the industry is aware of what happened up there, a huge explosion of growth that mirrored the expansion in the IT sector. Web design companies grew very, very quickly and some of them got out of control. Then following the tech breakup up there we saw companies here rethinking the kinds of projects they were going to get involved in. A lot of companies went out of business and we're now seeing much smaller groups of people in the industry. Companies of just three or four people, or fewer working on projects. So yes, there is a chance to get together to drum business. But by the same token some of the work we have done for overseas companies.. well we found that despite it being an online environment we found communication to be quite tough for doing our particular brand of work. And we've had problems with payment and things like that.

rb: Tell me about your company and its direction.

mb: Right. The Less Film site is very much a side project for Karl and myself. We got involved in it mainly to showcase our talent and to do something for the short film industry. We saw that there was nothing in that niche.

Frankly the response from some of the more established players such as the New Zealand Film Commission has been a little underwhelming in terms of the support that they have given us. They prefer to focus on their own endeavors, they're not doing anything like what we're doing...they haven't really welcomed us with open arms.

Mine and Karl's company is Cactuslab. We have a whole portfolio of companies on our site. We are working with agencies and small companies wanting ecommerce solutions and those sort of things. We are a technologically savvy company and there's just two of us here full time so we have our hands full with the kind of things we're doing right now. Another reason why we probably don't need to take advantage of overseas work is we have plenty enough as it is.

rb: What type of technology are you providing for your clients? Anything touching on Open Source?

mb: We are basically committed to Open Source in a big way. The content management system that Karl has written called Supermodel is J2EE and we are pretty much exclusively using Java or PHP for our clients. Our sites reside on Linux servers and we are quite happy in the Open Source environment.

rb: Are you using JBoss for your (J2EE) container?

mb: No, we are using Tomcat. We thought about JBoss but it caused a few too many issues.

rb: In the states there are going to be folks who will think it's a good idea to hop on a plane and head on down to New Zealand to catch this wave. Is that a good thing? Is there enough work in New Zealand to support an influx of gearheads who might try to make it down there?

mb: Well I think we are obviously attracting a lot of visitors and that has a knock-on effect of people coming down here realizing that this is quite a nice place to live and that we are a technology leader on a lot of fronts. If people are going to come down here looking for work...well there will always be work here for good people who know what they're doing. We've been in business a little over two years and we've found that if you do good work at a good price point there will always be work around.

But, you do have to take into account that the whole industry, especially on the Internet side has seen a big downturn. There's not an overabundance of opportunities down here.

rb: How well are you guys wired down there in terms of fibre, T1's, that sort of thing.

mb: We probably suffer a little bit in terms of the cost of connectivity. We are such a disparate population that the cost of getting fiber or DSL to the last mile has cause us to be a little slower on the uptake than people would have liked down here. Basically it's a cost issue and we do pay more because the average cost of installation is quite high. But we have wireless solutions starting to come on line. If you are willing to pay for it, it's here.

rb: Anything you'd like to add?

mb: We kind of like it that New Zealand has got the world's eyes on it at the moment. That's a good thing. Where that's going to go from here we just don't know. We want to be sure that we don't get a little to big for our boots I think.

Link: www.cactuslab.com