THEY taught experts who worked on the mind-boggling visual effects of the Oscar winning film Inception.

Now staff at a successful school at Bournemouth University want to help encourage the film and video game industries to do business in the town.

The National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) was highlighted as one of two centres of excellence in the whole county by a major new report into the industry.

You would be hard pushed to find a game or film that NCCA graduates have not worked on.

They created the magic of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and more than 50 worked on Avatar.

Graduate Andrew Lockley recently accepted the best visual effects Oscar for the futuristic thriller Inception with other staff from the London-based Double Negative firm.

NCCA lecturers would like to see some of their graduates' expertise stay in Dorset and boost the local economy.

Sofronis Efstathiou, the joint associate dean, said: “It’s a shame because a lot of our graduates end up moving away to London, Bristol and around the world.

“It’s strange – we have London coming down here to employ our graduates but we don’t have any VFX or games businesses working in the region.

“Bournemouth should really think about it, because there’s no reason why the industry could not be developed here.

“It’s a beautiful area and we have skilled labour coming out of the university.

“We are responsible for only eight per cent of the VFX and Games graduates in the UK, but last year, 53 per cent of all students finding jobs in visual effects and the games industry came from Bournemouth.”

The industry is huge and getting bigger, while Double Negative alone employs 800-1,000 staff.

The IT and creative computer industry is worth £102bn to the UK as a whole.

Professor Peter Comninos, co-founder of the NCCA, said: “You can go practically anywhere in the world where there’s a visual effects industry and meet ex-graduates.

"The thing is that nobody knows all these people were educated in Bournemouth.

“There needs to be some sort of concerted effort and interest for it to happen here. Dorset could bring these companies, provided it is made attractive.”