Natural History

Last night I went to meet a friend, at the Natural History Museum. He’s a researcher into fossil fishes and helped a lot on my last documentary. I also gave him some of the animations from the programme and he used them in a talk he gave to some students.

Apparently, two of them came out of the talk wanting to be paleontologists! And the museum itself is delighted with those talks – and with the part the animations played in them. When I was making the programme, I approached the museum and after a couple of meetings, they decided that they couldn’t let me film inside the museum without paying them. I offered them use of the animations in return, but they declined… so, now I’ve let them use them for free!.. hmm…

My friend has given me a lot of information about the way the museum works, and I’m hopeful that together we can set up some way that I can become involved with them… I’d love to interview their palentologists for a record for the museum.. I’d also love to do some animations and illustrations for them.

There’s also the fact that an image library I work with wants to start selling video clips and filming at the museum would give them a lot of clips to add to their library – perhaps the museum would allow this for a cut of the profits.

My friend is going to try to set up a meeting with the talks organizer. It’s a start.


Distribution

Electric Sky, the distributors of my last documentary say they’ve had screeners requested by 30 TV companies so far – that’s a good start and hopefully some will turn into sales. I estimate that if we get 8 sales over the next 5 years at an average of £3,000 per showing, then taking away the distributior’s commission, I’ll have justified making the documentary.

Electric Sky also said they might be able to pre-sell my new documentary – that would be a great weight off my mind, allowing me to commit time (and money) to it without worrying that it was eating into my income and not providing me with anything in return.

In order to do that, they want a trailer, a synopsis, a list of interviewees and a budget breakdown. Hopefully after I’ve done a couple more interviews and some animation I can do a trailer. The budget will be tougher… I’ve no idea where to start since I’m the only one working on the project and I’m not paying anyone! I guess I’ll just have to work out how much hiring people would cost and make that my wage for doing each job… I’ll probably be shocked when I work out how much I ought to be paying (and being paid!).

Anyway, people are being slow to respond about interview dates. Time to give them another prod on Monday.


Queing up
Still trying to render some more stock animations – there’s now about 75 queued up on my PC and it’s rendering day and night – each 10 second animation takes about 8-12 hours to render. I’m hoping these stock animations will sell – but I’ve no guarantee…