Wall street

The last couple of days have been filled with the wall street animation… communication with the company has improved, but information about what they want still comes in dribs and drabs and the requirements are always unclear. There are constant changes required to every piece of the work. The changes are always URGENT. The deadline is always TODAY, but once the deadline passes, there’s always a reason why the deadline never happened and ended up getting moved on to the next day so that the panicked rush can continue. I begin to suspect that the deadlines aren’t really deadlines they’re just picked out of the air, which is a shame for them more than for me because when you organise yourself to a very tight deadline the first thing you drop is any attempt at experimentation or creative interpretation. All you’re left with is a formulaic interpretation of the brief (or whatever brief you’ve got) and you’re forced to do everything in the quickest possible way rather than the best way.

In addition, nobody at the company seems to have any notion of working hours – they called me at 1;30 am on Wednesday morning and when I didn’t answer, they emailed to ask me to call them when I got into work (1am their time!). Once the work was finished, they still kept adding extra changes even calling me to insist on another update at 8pm when they must have known I’d stopped work for the day.

It didn’t help that I’d already spent the previous evening working on their animation, as well as some of the previous weekend. And the one thing I’m very definitive about in freelance work is that I don’t work evenings and weekends!

In fact, yesterday was my day for looking after George, so there was a limit to the amount of work I could do anyway.

Anyway, job done – it’s out of the way now (hopefully – they could still come back with other changes)!


So today I’ve been taking it a little easier. I did a brief bit of what I suppose you’d call pitching, but I don’t call it that. Basically someone emailed saying they wanted to make an animated rap video. Fair enough, but they really didn’t have the budget for it. What I’ve done is a quick mock up of the kind of thing they could do for their budget – with an improvised green screen and some pre-shot footage and stills. It’ll work well, and his budget will let me spend a couple of days working on the project. Plus it’ll be a bit of fun if it works out.

That only took a couple of hours, so I spent the rest of the day working on a TRex poster I’m doing for a company that make – well – posters. There’s still nothing ready to show for it, but I’ve done a lot of the groundwork, the 3d modelling (actually adapting and refining models I’ve already done). The results are pretty good, although the young Trex needs to be feathered and that’s a little tricky.

Anyway, it gives me a chance to work on some models and techniques I’ll eventually use in my theropod documentaries… if they ever get off the ground!