Monday, December 27, 2010

Pittsburgh Moves Forward in Entertainment Tech Field

The Next Three Days, Unstoppable, and Love and Other Drugs were just some of 2010’s box office hits filmed in the Pittsburgh region, which is growing in the entertainment field. Inspired by that growth and interest in the entertainment field, the Pittsburgh Entertainment Technology (PET) Project is to launch January 27.

PET’s goal is to bring together all of the region’s entertainment technology companies under one banner.

“We’re going to hope to get all of the entertainment companies together, and all of the people interested in entertainment technology, film, and all the innovative things we’re trying to do together, in one room,” Organizer Kim Chestney Harvey said of the launch, which will be hosted at the Entertainment Technology Center by Don Marinelli.

Chestney Harvey says along with bringing all these people together as part of one group, creating a database for filmmakers who come to the region is another objective of the PET.

“We will put the contents of this database into a nationwide directory for the filmmakers to use and access,” Chestney Harvey says. “When they come here regionally to work they can look and see what assets they have here to choose from.”

The PET is a project put together by four groups including the Pittsburgh Technology Council, the Idea Foundry, the Pittsburgh Film Office, and Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. Some of the technologies that the region’s companies have produced for filmmakers include music compostion, 3-D computer graphics and visual effects, and branded gaming among other things.


“We realize that we have a really robust culture and a lot of really interesting things happening here and we kind of wanted to show our support for that and come up with some way to support what all of our local companies are doing,” Chestney Harvey says.

No comments: