Technicolor USA Inc. to shutter Burbank film facility

Citing a shift in its priorities toward a digital-servicing platform, Technicolor USA Inc., the French-owned film processing and post-production company, announced this week it would be closing its facility in downtown Burbank.

Layoffs are slated to begin May 23 and will affect 167 employees in Burbank, according to a company document filed with state on Tuesday. Another five employees will also be laid off at a facility on Gardena Avenue in Glendale that is “ceasing or substantially ceasing operations.”

The news comes less than a year after the company began consolidating six of its Los Angeles-area offices into a 20,000-square-foot office space on the fourth floor of Burbank Civic Plaza, located at 250 E. Olive Ave., across from City Hall.

That followed the closure in 2013 of a 40,000-square-foot lab in Glendale, where the company moved roughly 100 film-processing jobs in July 2011.

The latest closures strictly impact the Olive Avenue location and offices in Bangalore, India and London, according to a company statement.

“We are planning to make the difficult, but necessary, decision to transform our media services department by closing our stand-alone physical media services facilities in the United States and the U.K. and prioritize our nascent digital servicing platform,” according to the statement.

Company officials declined to comment further on the closures. Technicolor facilities on Ontario and Isabel streets in Burbank are apparently not affected by the closures or layoffs.

Founded in 1915, Technicolor was bought by the French consumer electronics maker Thomson Multimedia from Carlton Communications in 2001. In 2009, the company filed for bankruptcy protection.

Technicolor’s entertainment services division provides visual effects, animation and post-production services for motion pictures, television shows and other media clients. The downtown Burbank office is home to a variety of services, such as encoding, transcoding, subtitling, closed-captioning and editing.

Joy Forbes, Burbank’s community development director for the city, said on Thursday she had just heard the news. In an interview Friday, she said she was still waiting to hear back from Technicolor about the details of the closure.

“It sounds like it was coming no matter what we did,” Forbes said. “We’ve seen big companies go through some pretty serious layoffs in the past and we’ve seen them still do well.”

Forbes said she hoped the layoffs would mean the company becomes a “stronger, leaner company that ultimately is able to hire more employees.”