A year after its creation, Dreamworks SKG, formed last year by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, has found a home on a beach near Hollywood called Playa Vista. The studio will cost some $750m by the time it’s finished, and will include a Sychronous Optical Network-based fibre optic network to be built by GTE Corp. The site once belonged to Howard Hughes, who used it to house aeroplanes including the Spruce Goose – a fact that Spielberg described as having Karmic relevance. It will now be transformed into 350,000 square feet of office and studio space, with 725,000 square feet for production facilities. Residential property, hotels and an entertainment complex are also planned for the development. Up to now, Dreamworks has been housed on the MCA Corp Universal Studios lot, hampering its reputation and performance. Work on the new site will begin in June, and is expected to be completed by the end of 1998. The project is expected to generate 32,000 jobs and add $5,300m to the Californian economy by the year 2001. When finished, DreamWorks will employ 1,400 people at the Playa Vista site and another 700 to 800 at an animation studio in the Glendale suburb north of Los Angeles. The DreamWorks team expects to release its first movie from the studio in about three and a half years, with Spielberg beginning his first DreamWorks film sometime in 1996. The GTE network will deliver advanced services to homeowners and commercial tenants of the new entertainment media technology district. It will include Sychronous Optical Network self-healing fibre-optic rings, along with Asynchronous Transfer Mode switches, giving tenants at the complex the ability to transmit vast amounts of speech, data and video at high speeds. It will enable DreamWorks and other entertainment clients to link their studios and post-production operations throughout Southern California and worldwide, and will enable the real-time integration of animation and computer-enhanced special effects in the studio process. Tenants will have access to services as high-speed Internet access, home shopping and banking, and home and office energy management. IBM is acting as technology consultant to the whole development, co-ordinating the other partners.
