Crashing back into work after my paternity leave, I’ve had quite a lot on my plate –at work and at home. So this is the first chance I’ve had to update this blog in a while…. Forgive me if I skip over some stuff….

The new showreel
The new showreel updated just before I went on paternity leave seems to have had a massive effect – instead of a couple of enquiries a month, I got about 1 a day while I was on leave (although it’s dropped off again in the run up to Christmas.




The change? Well, I put in a couple more shots to give a more rounded feel, but basically what I did was to change the music – from the gentle tones of “the blue Danube” to a piece of hard-hitting aggressive modern music (taken from http://www.istockphoto.com/).

Amazing the difference it’s made.


Book
Also, in the last couple of weeks I’ve written another book - on how to write and publish newsletters. It isn’t a massive book, and it’s not aimed at professionals, so it’s a fairly basic guide… However, I’m quite pleased with how it’s gone, and one thing it’s really made me think is that if I was really strict with myself, and really put some time aside, I could probably write a novel without affecting my other work too much.

When I say too much – it’d probably cost me about £2-3,000 in terms of the time I’d have to take away from other work and it would be incredibly hard work. In addition, I would have to give myself very firm targets and it’d have to be tightly written and planned without lots of arty digression and vagueness – but it’s something I’d really love to do… so maybe….

What I do for a living
This last couple of weeks, leading up to Christmas I’ve put aside for tidying things up – so I’ve managed to get all the admin and boring nonsense out of the way and even got some way to doing my tax for the year.

Doing all this involved doing a spreadsheet of all my work, and along side that I did a little playing with Excel’s chart function. In short, I used it to produce a pie chart of how much of my income comes from writing, artwork, documentaries, and animation.

Here’s the result:



Two music videos
I’ve worked on two music videos since returning to work – and they couldn’t be more different. One is completely animated – a really fun and fast moving piece of animation for a fun track. The other is a piece for a Norwegian goth band – on which I took the bluescreen footage they’d shot (about 60 shots in all) and did background and compositing including dragons and pirate ships.

Pitching article
I also – in my quest to work out how to pitch my work to new markets – wrote an article on how to pitch for 3d artist magazine. The idea behind this was to ask companies that were very good at getting 3d animation work how they do it, then try it for myself on a couple of projects.

I did get some useful tips from the research - including the fact that a lot of animation studios have a dedicated marketing person, so I’m planning to get one next year.


Christmas card mailout

I decided to send out a Christmas card to everyone on my mailing list with an offer of a free piece of stock footage to download at http://www.anachronistic.co.uk/ … it seems like something a lot of companies do and it just reminds people that you still exist…

I’m ambivalent about the results - When I checked my web visit stats, around 7% of people who got the email responded by visiting the site – and that’s not bad, I think. Or to look at it another way, I pay about 40p per click at google, and this got me 230 clicks, so the equivalent of nearly £100 spent on advertising. Which I guess if you look at the time spent on it isn’t much… Then again, they’re people I’ve targeted, so they’re more likely to be the right people… a couple of people responded by asking me to take them off my email list – but really very few (about 0.1% by proportion)

Things that don’t work
I’m taking a good long look at my strategy for getting work. Since I’m playing a bit of a waiting game right now and I’ve scaled things down (partially on purpose – partially not) ready for the arrival of our next baby (any time in the next couple of weeks).

Anyhow, that leaves me with a bit of time to think about how I should be expanding (now that there seems to be more work about). I did a bit of that at the beginning of the year, and discovered a couple of things that don’t work.

SEO – search engine optimisation is one of them. I re-worked my website, and replaced it with a slightly easier to update, but less good looking site mainly because I thought it would appeal to search engines.

I also wrote a lot of how-to articles that I thought might appeal to my clients and got a company to post links to them on lots of interested websites so I got lots of backlinks (something search engines love) to my site.

It worked from the point of view that my site now appears much more frequently in web searches and comes up strongly when my favourite keywords are typed into google.

A success.

Or so you’d think. However, what I find is that it doesn’t make any difference. I haven’t got a single piece of work or even a contact (that I know of) from a normal search engine search.

On the other hand, I’ve got loads from the searches I pay for on google – the sponsored links.

In other words, if someone searches for an animator and I come up in the normal search they don’t bother clicking on it – or if they do, they don’t then contact me. If it comes up as a sponsored link, they do.

Which is a bit puzzling because I do the opposite – I assume that the sponsored links aren’t what I’m really looking for, and the really good stuff is the stuff that’s come up without being paid for….

Oh, well.


Another thing I did that doesn’t work is mailing lists - Getting a firm to find email addresses for lots of companies and sending out a mail to all of them. I’ve got a pretty good response in terms of people saying thanks for emailing, and I’ll keep your details, etc. but nothing to speak of in terms of actual work.

I have a feeling this is partially because I don’t really like doing this kind of mailing, and I’m a bit nervous about it, and it doesn’t sit well with me.



I think I’m finding myself forced by degrees towards a more serious and more personal approach to marketing. I have to do, what I guess I knew all along I’d have to do – just go out (or at least get somebody to go out) and personally meet and talk to the people I want to use my work.

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. now, it’s just a matter of finding out who that somebody should be…

Because I’ve not got very much work on (although I know it’s all about to kick off again just in time for the new baby), I’ve taken the opportunity to try to make my life a bit easier.

Right now, when ever I have to produce a pitch or give someone an idea of what I’m planning to do, I end up spending most of my time making things look good and not much time actually laying out my ideas.

That’s because animation and graphics is difficult stuff, and just creating a lighting setup, background and materials that work is pretty time consuming before you even start on the concepts you’re trying to create.

So what I’ve been doing is building effectively a set of ready made studios. These are sets I can just load up and start to customise knowing that whatever I create in them, when I hit render the results will be pretty. All the laborious playing around with hundreds of settings to get the best result will already have been done.

I’ve also created a storyboarding “kit” – with simple primitive shapes and characters I can hopefully drag around to very quickly create visual representations of what I’m aiming at, so clients, others I hire to work on the project and me myself can get a feel for what’s needed.

I’m hoping the ability to do all this will become more important because I really do want to start pitching for more and higher level work. My magazine article on the pitching process is helpful – allowing me to pester people on the subject, and get lots of good advice on what to do and how.

I’ll put all that advice here once I’ve collated it, but the thing that’s coming across most strongly right now is that I really need to take networking seriously – I (or more likely a salesman who I hire) needs to be out there calling and meeting with production companies and commissioners to ensure that I’m on the list when animation work is put out to tender instead of just waiting for that work to come in from my advertising…

Stock footage is a strange discipline for the 3d artist. You have no brief so you can create anything you like, but at the same time, the overriding need is to be generic – if your footage doesn’t appeal to a range of people for a range of reasons, it just won’t sell.

And that, you’d think would work against the creative spirit – because it means you’re trying to create work that’s individual and beautiful and unique, but you’re trying to do it in a way that appeals to the most general market possible.

If that wasn’t problem enough, stock has very low margins. An average piece of stock might net you a few 10’s of dollars over 2 or 3 years, so when you’re creating it, there’s a massive requirement to work fast and efficiently, producing as much of it as you can (because at the end of the day you don’t really know what will sell and what won’t).

This wasn’t helped this week when other things kept cropping up to delay me – not least the fact that I wrote three reviews for a magazine, then lost them and had to do them again.

I also took delivery of another package for review – and I just had to try it out. This was videocopilot.net’s Action Essentials – a fantastic stock resource if you’re creating action footage. Take a look at this quick composition I did using a bit of CGI, a bit of shot footage, some photos and a few explosions from Action Essentials:




great stuff –

anyway, for the stock I’ve concentrated on simple settings and one character and just worked on really high quality rendering, so that hopefully the shots will look great – even though they’re fairly simple in terms of animation. I’ve also used a lot of motion capture data for movement, so that should give me a really effective look.

The downside is that rendering will take a long time even on multiple machines. The finished set of animations probably won’t be ready for weeks…

So what did I do with my free time? Well, I didn’t sit on my arse if that’s what you’re thinking (which it probably isn’t). I decided to enter the pitching game at full pelt.

Firstly, the Sheffield documentary festival has a pitching free-for-all called meetmarket, and I decided to have a go at it with my latest idea – which meant producing a pitch video for it in 2 days…. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1OkCRWWtWo






… hmmm… we’ll see how that goes.

I also decided to get myself into a few pitches for animation work, and came up with a cunning plan to allow me to do this. The plan involves writing an article about how to pitch for 3d artist magazine and using that as an opportunity to talk to lots of experts on how you do it…

Part of the plan is to get myself on the “pitch lists” for various interesting projects and getting the commissioners to give me a critique of my pitch which I can then write up for the mag.


In the meantime, I decided to concentrate on a bit of my work I’ve neglected recently: stock libraries.

I have a whole lot of footage (and still images) on various stock libraries and this provides me with a useful income whether I’m doing other work or not. The returns aren’t great and you need a large amount of footage out there to get anything out of it – which is why producing stock gets pushed down my ajenda most of the time. However, it does allow me to experiment with ideas I can’t otherwise do, so it’s worth having a crack at occasionally.

This time I’ve decided to do a series of buisiness-aimed clips using a high-tech android robot as a character. The initial renders look great and I’m hoping to get a finished shot or two after the weekend….

Here’s a taster:

Trilobite documentary
Finally the trilobite documentary is ready to send to the client. It was supposed to be last week, but I had a problem. The motion on the DVD flickered in an unpleasant way during pans and fast movement.

I realised this had something to do with the fact that I’d shot it at 24 frames per second and was burning a DVD at 25 FPS, but I was really surprised by what turns out to be the industry standard solution…

Apparently, the way to broadcast 24fps footage is quite simply to speed it up! That’s right – play the programme 1/24 second faster. In other words a 2 hour film will run five minutes shorter on TV than at the cinema.

I’m still a little unsure if this can really be the answer. It just sounds like such a bodge.

Anyway, I’ve done it and it seems to work (despite my commentary sounding a little squeaky – which I’ll be able to correct with a pitch shift apparently).

We’ll have to see what the client thinks….


Work is definitely picking up – I’ve had a couple of enquiries this week, (I’ve now put my google advertising up to £300 per month) – one of them ( a charity animation) required my first attempt at actually pitching for work.

Pitching is fairly common in animation, and basically means the client gets a load of companies to come up with ideas and styles for an animation and compete for the job of doing it.

Of course, that’s only usually possible if you’ve got a decent budget – otherwise animators will judge that it’s not worth risking the time you spend developing the idea. On this occasion, it’s a charity, so there isn’t much of a budget, but it is a strong idea and a worthwhile cause, so I do want to get involved.

I’m not at all familiar with what a pitch really involves in this context, so what I’ve sent it a plot outline, a budget breakdown and a couple of rough pictures to give an idea of the visual style.… in fact it’s not that much more than I usually provide when discussing an idea with a client – it’s just that this time, I know it’s a competition. Will the pitch be enough? I’ll find out next week….

From the client’s point of view there are advantages and disadvantages to running things like this. It does allow you to get a range of ideas and choose the one you want to work with. However, it also means that very little time can actually be put into devising the essential themes on which your project is based – because the production company knows they stand only a one in four or five chance of ever being paid for the work they do.

That said, I think I’ve come up with a really good idea for the pitch – which is another annoying side to the process. If you come up with an idea you’d really like to make and then you’re told you don’t get to make it, it’s a real disappointment!


UPDATE
Well, I did the pitch for the charity, and I think my suggestion was pretty good. Nevertheless, I found out today (Friday) that I didn’t get it. I’m actually really disappointed – it would have been a tough job, but I’d have liked to have been involved.

I did get a sale for my “how to colonise the stars” documentary – (Portugal – 700 euros), so I had to quickly do the script and music cue sheet. Transcribing the script meant listening to the film play back, and repeating everything that was said for the benefit of the voice recognition – pausing every few seconds to correct whatever it had miss-heard. A really tedious job, but better than typing it all….

The pop video (this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XidI2qz10as) needed to be put onto digibeta for the TV stations – and that turned out to be a hell of a hastle – for no good reason. Two hard drives went to Stanleys (who I use to dub projects onto tape) and neither worked – I eventually had to spend half of Tuesday and half of Wednesday in London wasting my time…. Anyway, eventually it all worked, so that’s done.



And, this leaves me in the strange, unfamiliar situation of having no work… Ok, I’ve got the book coming up and various articles I know I’m going to have to write, etc. etc… but for the first time in months (actually since the beginning of the year) I’ve actually got nothing in my in-tray.

It’s a strange feeling, and leaves me with no excuses. I’ve got to finally make a start on my “project” documentary – or give up on it. Looking over my scene breakdown, it’s looking like a huge challenge with no guarantee of any kind of payback. It’s complicated, scary and a huge undertaking.

Unlike my last docs – which have been pretty basic science movies, this one is an issue. It puts me as the narrator right at the centre of it and it will either work, or it won’t.

Can I afford to spend the time? Can I even do it? I just don’t know….

This week, it finally happened. I ran out of work.
Actually, that’s not really true. In fact I’ve got loads, but enough of it was on hold or out of my court by Friday that I actually had a chance to do some work on my new documentary idea….I’m doing a scene breakdown which should allow me to decide soon whether it’s a viable project for me or not. This is a big step. I haven’t had a full day to work on this since the beginning of the year, and it’s beginning to feel like I might actually get to start on it.

It actually felt a bit of a cheat - like I wasn’t really working – because, of course, this is a zero-budget project with no commission and no idea how it’s going to make me any money… anyway, more of that later – I might even reveal what it’s about soon, but until I know what I’m doing, it’s a bit sensitive.

So what’s all this about having no work? – well, it’s a lie. A complete lie.

The music video is now with the client – fast work, and there may be adjustments to be made, but it’s to all intents and purposes, done.

The zoom from deep space I’ve just got to complete a couple of renders and cut it together, so I can’t do anything more to that for now.

The first cut of the trilobite documentary is rendering as I write – very slowly, and because Premiere doesn’t seem to be able to handle it, I’ve had to break it into chunks (can’t work that out – a quad core 8gb machine should be able to handle it – HD or not!) – anyway, by the end of the weekend I should have a DVD I can send to the client.

Finally, the two reviews I’ve just had to do on Poser 8 and Director 11.5 have been done (a bit of a panic there because of tight deadlines, but done nonetheless, and I’m really glad to have been able to take a look at the new version of Poser).

Book
There’s more work on the horizon though. I may have a banner animation to do, but it also looks like I’m going to be writing another book in the “really really really easy guide” series - with a deadline of November. I’ve already done one on video editing using windows movie maker – so I know what’s expected – and at 20,000 words, it’s a relatively small book…

It’s also a relatively small fee. Books – or at least factual books – are much less well paid than you’d think. Typically you’ll get an advance followed by royalties depending on the sales. My advice to anyone thinking of writing one is to treat your advance as if that’s all you’re going to get – because it usually is. I’ve never had any royalties from any of the 5 books I’ve written.

Anyway, if this one happens, I’ll let you know more as I go along…

This week was a week of finishing things… or at least getting things to a reasonably finished stage.

The music video is more-or-less done – there were some changes to be made on the first version, but that’s pretty normal, and the results look really good – especially considering the budget wasn’t massive.

I’ve also done – or more-or-less done a documentary intro sequence for another client – a zoom from deep space to the Earth. There’s still a bit more tidying up to do on this, and I’d like to add a few bells and whistles to give it some spice, but again, it’s looking good.

In addition, I’ve done a couple of illustrations for a book on interstellar flight by one of my interviewees from my last documentary (“How to colonise the stars”) and he seems happy with the results….

Finally, I’ve got the first draft of the fossil hunting documentary done – or more-or-less done. There’s still some balancing to do on the sound, and some tidying up, but this project has been going on since February, so having it in a watchable state is a massive deal.

I’ve learnt a lot on this project – most significantly about shaping a story you don’t have before you start and working with lots of material which you’ve shot reacting to events rather than as part of a plan…

Also, it’s really brought it home to me how important it is to create significant “moments” and then build the structure around them. Just telling a story full of interesting material isn’t enough. You need to pace it and create a kind of punctuation in which things are brought together.

Also, the places where I’ve managed to take out the narration and interviews and just let the visuals and music tell the story are the best bits of the film… Not having the shots to do that is the biggest frustration in the project… but a lot of that is down to the chaotic nature of the shoot.

I’m not saying I’ve succeeded in doing these things in this project – only that their importance has really come home to me!


All of which means I now have – or think I’m going to have some space in my working schedule – some time to think about the documentary project I’ve had on my mind for most of the year, but haven’t had time to do anything about.

This is the big one – a full length feature project that I think could be great –and a story I think needs telling in a popular form… but can I do it? do I have the nerve to take it on? and how can I make it happen given that it requires masses of interviews, a placebo controlled drug trial and the building of a battery farm for pixies….


Anyway, a couple of notes on the space documentary I finished earlier in the year: the distributors told me there’s a slight problem with the audio levels – they’re peaking at -6 rather than -8 – whatever that means… I think I’ve persuaded them to adjust them at their end rather than having to re-do the master tape which would be expensive and awkward.

More importantly, the documentary has been accepted by HD fest in New York – I’m not sure if I’ll be able to go (Lisa is expecting in October and the festival is in September, so we’ll see!), but It would be interesting.

I’m now well and truly stuck into the pop video now – it’s a low budget job which means I really need to get a lot of animation done in a short time – and I seem to be succeeding. The cartoony style looks good so far and I think the story is going to make sense. The only worry now is whether the project can be given the kind of stylistic look I’m after. I’ve gone for a mix of art deco and modern imagery and I’m hoping it will fit together… I’m also doing a few over-ambitious things (like cloth simulation and a bit of 3d lipsyncing – both of which are things you’d mostly try to avoid in a quick-turnaround cartoon style project).

The animation will be done (it’s rendering over the weekend), so what I’m worrying about (I always have to have something to worry about) is that indefinable uniqueness that you need to give a music promo its style. You can’t just do a cartoon or just do a video shoot or just do a dance routine – it has to have an unusual quirk – a Look that’s unmistakable and unique. And that’s the thing that’s most difficult to get on a low budget production because you’re so pushed for time you end up putting most of your effort into just getting the thing done.

What you really need is time to experiment and play around with the imagery to get something you’ve never seen before, and that’s what you don’t have a lot of the time.

In this case, the individual style is going to come from overlays and transitions I create in After Effects as well as colour correction… I’ve tried a few ideas, but I don’t think I’ve quite got there yet.


I’ve managed to get another 8 minutes of the documentary cleaned up – so I’m now about half way through the polishing stage before I send it to the client. After I get his response to it, I’m sure I’ll have to go back and re-cut to some extent – then there’s sound and colour correction to do – so it’s not finished.

Google adwords
I’ve also found a bit of time to mess about with my google ad-words adverts – and I’ve more or less doubled my click through rate (the number of people who click on my ad having seen it) from 1% to 2% just by re-wording the ad.

The trouble is, more clicks don’t necessarily mean anything except my advertising budget gets used up faster

Straight back into work after our holiday last week. I’ve got one confirmed new job – an animated music video which I’m already stuck well into, and it seems to be going well. I’m aiming for a kind of art deco/cartoony look which is going to be fun.

I’ve also been contacted by someone who asked me to do an intro sequence last year, but it never happened. It seems he’s now got a budget and is ready to go – so that’s another short job to add to the list.

I’ve started up the google advertising again (but not nearly at the level of the beginning of the year) and it seems to be paying off, so it’s possible the downturn I found earlier in the year might be coming to an end… though I’ve no idea why.

I’ve fine-tuned the advertising a bit, so it’s more targeted at people who are actually looking for animators rather than people who are looking to watch animations – although it’s quite difficult to separate the two groups by thinking of the keywords they might search for. I’ve also limited the ads to just the UK and Ireland. Not something I wanted to do because it really doesn’t matter whether I work for people in the US or Australia…. However, I seem to be getting more contacts from UK people, so it makes sense if my advertising budget is small to concentrate there.

This week I got back the 3d model I sent to shapeways. Shapeways is a company that will take your 3d virtual objects and turn them into real solid objects using a process involving powdered plastic and laser beams.

I got them to reproduce one of my trilobite models as a full scale plastic creature – and it’s amazing to see your 3d visions bought to life. There are a few restrictions on the process (like you can’t have walls thinner than 2mm) and the finished objects have a rough, almost contoured look about them with tiny (less than .0.1mm) ridges, but I can’t help feeling this kind of bespoke manufacturing is going to be huge.

If only I could think of the killer app….


Anyway. renewing my advertising on Google is paying off by the looks of it - it looks like I’ve got a pop video to animate which should be fun.

I’ve also removed the email form from the front page of http://www.anachronistic.co.uk/ – it’s been nothing but trouble with lots and lots of emails coming from it, but no actual leads to speak of.

I’m still getting more graduates wanting to work in animation than I am animation jobs, but that’s a sign of the times, I suppose.


Next week I’m on holiday….

I’ve managed to start (i.e. get about 15 minutes into) the final (ish) cut of the trilobite hunters. It’s really starting to look like a programme now – with music, captions and all the effects shots in place… I won’t have it finished before I go on holiday (a flat I’m looking after for a friend and a short-deadline review will see to that), but I’m getting there. This project will be finished – and soon!

Lots of work on, and possibly some more on the horizon, but unfortunately, the cover I’ve been working on for Nature isn’t now going to happen… a pity, but it sometimes happens.

I got an email back from my distributors – I was asking about possible pre-sales of new documentaries, but surprisingly it doesn’t look like it’s going to be that easy… I may have to actually talk to broadcasters. Hmm.. don’t know if I want to go that far.

The rendering has finally finished for the effects shots in “the fossil hunters”. It would have taken half the time, but my 2nd (64 bit) render PC couldn’t be used because I had to order a new network thingy for it. when that arrived, the power supply on my main render machine blew up, so I had to replace it with the one from the 2nd PC, so I still couldn’t use it. Now that the replacement power supply has arrived, the rendering is finished and I don’t need it…. typical.

This week I’ve been writing articles (one, ironically enough on how to make your render farm more efficient!). and a couple of reviews (which means I’ve now got to play with Vue, EIAS, Quidam and speedtree – all very clever packages actually...) anyway, I’ve also been asked to build a couple of spaceships – which is always fun, so I’ve shunted that job to the front of the queue!

These are REAL spaceships – or at least proposed designs for interstellar craft based on known physics – i.e. they’re things we could build if we had the cash and the inclination, so it’s quite inspiring to see them take shape…


My meeting
Anyway, if you were reading last week, you’ll know I had a very important meeting scheduled with myself in which I decided to strategically plan a few things about my strategy for the next few months… I like to stand back every once in a while and try to work out where I actually should be going rather than just following where I end up going….

Anyway. here, in semi-ironic management speak are my ideas (or action plans, or mission statements or whatever) – these are notes to myself more than anything else:

Finances:
Having got my books (sort of) up to date, I’m on schedule to earn probably 16% less this year than last – but that’s not as bad as I thought – and there’s certainly the opportunity to catch that up – I’m not in a dire situation, or anything like it. In fact, I saved more than that last year anyway. I’d planned to grow – but global downturn and all that….

Mailing lists
I haven’t really done anything with the mailing lists I had made at the beginning of the year. I really should pursue this – and it’ll probably take me a day or so to come up with a couple of offers to send out .

New documentary
I’ve emailed a friend to see if he’s willing to help research the new doc I’ve got in mind. It’s a full length feature, and I’ll need to be fully committed if it’s going to work, but it’s a cracker. I need a little backup (if not funding).

Other documentaries
On the back of my last two docs being fairly popular, I’ve emailed my distributor to find out if there are any possibility of securing pre-sales or other funding, and what I’d need to do to get it. I’m waiting for the response on that, but we’ll see…

Google adwords
I’ve had my google adwords account switched off for months now because at the beginning of the year I spent about £2,000 and got nothing from it. I’ve now turned it back on, but at a much lower level and with more targeted keywords – just to test the water.

A brief pause while 3d animations render means I’ve had time to clear away some of the admin that’s been building up, and re-asses where I actually am.

As it turns out, the recession, though it’s changed a lot of my plans, hasn’t really done much harm to my overall income…. It’s just made it full of smaller, bittier jobs, which in turn means I’m spending all my thinking time thinking about what I’m doing tomorrow – so my longer term ideas are suffering.

Using the enforced pause, I set up a meeting of everyone in my office along with all my departmental heads and the people in charge of each of my project areas.

In other words, just me.

My meeting overran (or actually, I got a commission to illustrate a cover for Nature so I had to postpone it) so I’m not going to write up the full minutes until next week, but I should have some post-recession strategies by then… and I should know what I’m going to do about all the projects currently waiting for me to get to work on them.


In the meantime, I’ve got my master tape back from stanleys – and managed to save about £200 by getting it to them in the right format on the right disk (a firewire 800 disk and an uncompressed avi if anyone’s in the same situation). I’m now hoping it makes it through Electric sky’s quality control and doesn’t need re-doing.

I also bought a copy of the EDN financing guide for documentaries – a sort of telephone directory for documentary commissioners - and so far it seems everyone commissioning documentaries has set up online submission for programme ideas. This is a shame because I’m very sure these are a waste of time.

I’m sure they’re just like publishers’ slush-piles – designed to give the impression of considering people’s submissions while they’re quietly binned with little serious consideration.

I’m sure that like in publishing circles, the actual work of commissioning gets done by another, less formal system of networking.

One of the things I need to do is start to discover a little more about what that system really entails and whether it’s something I want to get involved in. I don’t mind working hard, but I’m not willing to have my time and energy sucked up and spat out by the TV industry – I’ve got far too much else in my life – so if there’s no sensible way to go, I can always stick to no-budget fun…

This week, I’ve finished (sort of) the animation for “The trilobite hunters”. It’s all rendering now – only since I’ve switched to 64 bit and a new version of 3ds max, I’ve only managed to get one system going on it so rendering will be slow.

That’s OK because I could do with a break on this project. It’s about time I finished it, and it’s close enough that I can almost see the result…. I don’t mind taking a breather and getting rid of some of the admin and other things on my desk while my trusty PC renders away at the animations.

It turns out some of the DVDs I’ve sent out of “how to colonise the stars” have not worked (I should have tested them before sending, but I was in a rush) – so I’ll have to do them again. Also, the drive with the master on I took in to be dubbed onto tape didn’t work either, so I’ve had to get a new drive and do a new master.

No problem – and actually quite a good thing because although I spent £60 on a new firewire 800 drive and took a night of rendering to create my uncompressed SD master, doing it that way made it a lot easier for Stanley’s to copy it – so the cost is going to be about £250 instead of about £550….


In other news, I’ve decided to have a go at 3d printing – via www.shapeways.com – if you’ve not heard of this, it’s a way of creating real plastic objects from your 3d designs. Basically you send them a model and they return it as a real object – for a price. The price seems pretty reasonable, so I’ve decided to give it a go. If it turns out well, I think this is going to be big… I might even start inventing some products… might be fun!


The European elections are taking place with the government falling apart – quite literally – the cabinet is looking more like a colander with people quitting left, right and centre.

We’re all supposed to be angry about the expenses scandal, but I can’t muster the energy to be outraged – I’ve never met anyone who didn’t stretch what was possible on their expenses and although it’s clearly something that needs sorting out, it’s a symptom of bad organisation and the fact that we don’t pay politicians enough rather than dishonesty, I think.

There are lots of things that were wrong with the culture to cause this and lots of people doing things they shouldn’t have, but it sounds as though all the civil servants were telling them it was all fine right up to the point where they all got told it wasn’t – and that’s a bit rubbish.

Strange though it may seem, I don’t think they’re a crooked lot – I think they generally try to use everything they get to it’s best advantage and they’re keen to push the limits they’re given, but then we wouldn’t want politicians that didn’t, would we?

Anyway – what’s interesting to me is that this whole thing has caused an explosion in little parties – maybe I should make a documentary following some of the no-hope candidates around before the election next year (or next week, which seems more likely)…. It’d be interesting to explore what democracy means when you’ve got no hope of being elected…

Mind you, I vote Lib Dem, so what does that tell you?

A short week this week – but I’ve managed to do quite a lot of work on modelling and animating my trilobites. I’ve really gone for bright colours – without any scientific reasoning beyond the fact that trilobites are the first creatures with true eyes, and developed into such amazing shapes – so I’m treating them a little like reef fishes.

I’m doing some quite impressive shots – so I’m ending up with lots and lots of creatures in each shot, which really taxes my machine – and slows everything down. Still, I’m having lots of fun with physics simulations and crowd behaviour, so there are some interesting techniques being used.

Website
My SEO (search engine optimisation) work earlier in the year does seem to have placed me higher in internet searches, and it is driving visitors to my site (around 70-80 per day ) but it’s not generating any enquiries. The enquiries I got from 200 or so visitors garnered using Google’s sponsored links generated roughly an enquiry every day, so there’s a definite difference in quality of visitors.

It seems the searches are less targeted and a lot of them are image searches. It’s no bad thing to have people viewing my work in this way, but it would be good to be getting some actual work from it!

All I’m getting right now is a lot of people emailing looking for work experience….

Maybe it’s a sign of the times.

I’m really getting somewhere with the documentary now – it’s almost the right length and almost the right shots. It’s also looking pretty interesting… I think we could have a good programme here.

Meanwhile, how to colonise the stars has been sold to an airline, so now I have the rather rubbish task of doing all the fiddly and expensive stuff – like creating tapes of the various soundtracks the distributors need…. It’s a real pain, and something I should build into my editing to make it easier – but I don’t.

Anyway, when I took the hard drive into Stanleys, they couldn’t get the info off my hard disk, so it looks like I’ll have to get a new one and do another copy….
I also got a bit more information on why transfer from disk to tape costs so much – or rather how I can make the transfer cheaper and easier. basically, I have to use uncompressed video and a firewire hard drive…. So I’ve ordered one and maybe that’ll give me a better chance…


Things have taken a lot longer than I thought they would this week, and lots of little jobs have made things a bit slow. I’ve got a logo I’m supposed to be designing and it’s taking ages – mainly because I don’t seem to be able to incorporate all the complexities into a simple enough design for the clients. That’s always the problem with logos I guess – there’s so much to communicate with them, but it all has to be clear and simple.

That’s why people charge so much I suppose (although I don’t – I don’t do the kind of logos that require masses of research and focus groups – it’s just not worth it!)..

Anyway, I finally got into the animation for “the trilobite hunters” documentary - and spent most of Wednesday trying out a technique for doing one particular shot which took ages. Basically I wanted a shot of a mountain rising out of the ground and the rocks inside it fracturing…

There’s an easy way to show this, but I decided it would look rather nice to model hundreds of breaking rocks as they shattered into pieces and create the animation as a simulation (rather than animating each piece one at a time). The problem is, it’s very difficult to get the rocks to break realistically, and it takes ages to simulate the effects on hundreds of rocks at the same time.

I don’t think the result is as good as it could have been – I had to abandon my idea of having sand pouring in from the top layer to flow over the broken rocks because it would have meant hundreds of thousands of particles flying about and even a quad core 8gb machine couldn’t handle it….

still, it's good to be doing a bit of experimental animation again - so often you end up just doing the same things over and over again the same way because you've got no time to play with new ideas!

festivals
Ok – I’ve now pitched “how to colonise the stars” to 10 or so festivals. I have no idea what to expect. There are a couple of festivals dedicated to scientific programming, so they’re the ones I’m thinking I’ve got the best chance with. Still, anything (and nothing) is possible.

I did have a bit of good news. My distributor’s just returned from Mipcom and gave me a call to say they’ve had more requests for screeners for “how to colonise the stars” than for any of their other titles. That’s about 45 channels considering buying it – which is good news – and one airline has already taken it up.

That’s even though they’ve decided to market it as SD rather than HD. It seems as though HDV is no longer good enough for the HD market.

Lucky I’m now working in full HD for the next projects I guess…


My next documentary – the vegas, bug digging one without a name – is now coming on faster. I’m actually getting to the stage where I can see the whole production. And it’s even a bit over length – which is great considering it was shot over just a week. I always like to be able to trim down rather than pad out whatever I’m working on.

I’m hoping to have a rough edit by the end of next week, and start working on the animations.

It’s about time too…

And another piece of good news is that I’m going to be able to use the new version of Max, so things should be faster and smoother.

Max 2010, I can see already is a great step forward in subdivision surface editing – if that makes any sense at all to you….



I also got a chance to visit a big animation studio this week (Darkside Animation). It’s always good to see how the other half of the industry live… and how they work on very large projects (projects which I can’t tell anyone about right now, but which will hit the limelight later in the year). Anyway, the one thing you do notice is the very specific skills of the animators – each person seems to specialise in a small part of the process – very different from my work where I do everything from modelling to texturing animation, rendering and editing…

I can see why they work the way they do, and they certainly produce very good work, but I’m pretty convinced I’d rather work my way because I can bring in specialists for certain areas of a production when I need to, but at the same time I do have a pretty good overall understanding of every part of the job, so I can be flexible.


Pirates
There’s been a lot of discussion on documentary forums about the decision by the courts to imprison the owners of Pirate Bay – the bit torrent site which allows users to swap everything from music to films…

The discussion was mainly around whether it was right or wrong that people can now download pretty much anything they like regardless of copyright – and as my living depends entirely on copyright, I’ve got a bit of a vested interest.

However, it seems to me a bit of a pointless argument – copyright is on the way out. It’s not dead yet, but it’s not going to survive the internet revolution, and the best we can do as filmmakers, writers and animators is look for ways to make it work for us.

I’m not entirely sure how that will work out – or even whether TV and film will eventually become things that only get produced by people willing to do it for nothing… However, I’m pretty sure there will still be production one way or another because if there’s one thing that will stop file sharing dead in its tracks, it’s if there’s nothing being produced to share….

I’ve had a pretty disrupted couple of weeks, with the Easter long weekend and Lisa’s trip to Krakow meaning I didn’t have that many working days – Plus, a couple of short notice deadlines suddenly appeared meaning I had to do some newsletters for Pinnacle, an illustration for a company hiring nannys and a couple of reviews (although the reviews do mean I’ve now been able to play with up to date copies of Lightwave and Softimage!).

Anyway, having decided that fine editing is best done in half day stints because it’s so demanding, I’ve made some pretty good progress with the Vegas documentary…

Which I may be going to call “Bugdig”, “the search for Bristolia Insolens” or “the best way to dig a hole”… hmm… not sure.

However, I’ve now got it to the stage where the first half is now in manageable, playable segments. Each of the stories involved has been laid down and sliced into 1-2 minute scenes.

What I have to do now is assemble these into an overall story that makes sense. Which should be fairly simple. I’m not sure if having scenes of 1-2 minutes is going to work or whether they’ll feel too bitty, but we’ll see.

The second half of the documentary is more a single strand so I’ll be able to edit in a more linear way.

Either way, I can see it beginning to take shape now, so I’m a bit more positive about it. I’ve written and recorded the script for the second half, and now need to start building the shots around it.

Overall, it’s looking good – running a bit over time, but only because I’ve included a lot of material I can cut out later. It’s better to have more than you need rather than less….


Withoutabox
I’ve just signed up to withoutabox and I’ve discovered how easy it is to use. I’m launching my latest (finished) project (how to colonise the stars) at a few festivals – just to see how I get on and how difficult it is.

Early results seem to suggest it’s rather easy with all the hard work being done by the website. All I have to do is make some DVDs and put them in the post – which even I should be able to do.

I’ve given myself a budget of a couple of hundred pounds to spend on entry fees, and applied to about 10 festivals all in all (in a bit of a rush because for some reason I don’t understand, all the deadlines seem to be may 1st).

Anyway, this has really pointed up just how little I know about the whole documentary selling business. What are good and bad festivals? What happens at festivals anyway? who goes? Should I go if my film is chosen? What kind of films appear? I’ve got this feeling that my project is a bit too traditionally made and not arty enough– but again, I really don’t know.

All this stuff I’m reading about pitching meetings and getting industry people to attend your showings – I really don’t know anything about it. The top five documentary commissioners (if that’s even a job title, which I’ve no idea) in the world could walk right past me and I wouldn’t recognise them or know their names – should I? should I have a list of them in my top pocket along with a pile of ideas to throw at them if I ever bump into them at the groucho club (ha! I know what the groucho club is at least)?

Do I need to turn myself into some kind of frantic, coked-up cross between a film nerd and a used car salesman just to get… to get… umm…

And there’s the rub.

What exactly do I want to get out of the documentary business? Sure, I’ve got this great idea for a documentary I want to make – but nothing’s stopping me making it apart from time… and sure, I’ve got a few series I’d love to get off the ground if a broadcater came up to me and offered me a slot – but that’s not going to happen without immersing myself entirely in an industry I think is a bit… well, crappy…

Hmm.. I guess what this whole festival submission thing is about is just seeing where it takes me. When I finish my current project – the trilobite digging one, I’ll want to put it into some festivals because that will be one way the guy funding it will be able to see it’s a successful project.

When I do the feature documentary I’ve got in mind, festivals will be crucial – I’ll be shooting high and looking for cinematic release, but that’s a way off yet – and I need to insure myself all the way along the line so that if at any point it doesn’t hit the mark, I haven’t wasted a lot of time on it with no return at all.

And there are ways of doing that – ensuring that the research phase, the filming, the editing all pay for themselves as parts of other projects… but I’ll take you through that as it happens…

Right now, I’ve made a small foray into the festival world just to see what’s out there….

I’ve had a pretty disrupted couple of weeks, with the Easter long weekend and Lisa’s trip to Krakow meaning I didn’t have that many working days – Plus, a couple of short notice deadlines suddenly appeared meaning I had to do some newsletters for Pinnacle, an illustration for a company hiring nannys and a couple of reviews (although the reviews do mean I’ve now been able to play with up to date copies of Lightwave and Softimage!).

Anyway, having decided that fine editing is best done in half day stints because it’s so demanding, I’ve made some pretty good progress with the Vegas documentary…

Which I may be going to call “Bugdig”, “the search for Bristolia Insolens” or “the best way to dig a hole”… hmm… not sure.

However, I’ve now got it to the stage where the first half is now in manageable, playable segments. Each of the stories involved has been laid down and sliced into 1-2 minute scenes.

What I have to do now is assemble these into an overall story that makes sense. Which should be fairly simple. I’m not sure if having scenes of 1-2 minutes is going to work or whether they’ll feel too bitty, but we’ll see.

The second half of the documentary is more a single strand so I’ll be able to edit in a more linear way.

Either way, I can see it beginning to take shape now, so I’m a bit more positive about it.


Withoutabox
I’ve just signed up to withoutabox and when I’ve got time, I’m planning to launch my latest (finished) project (how to colonise the stars) at a few festivals – just to see how I get on and how difficult it is.

Early results seem to suggest it’s rather easy with all the hard work being done by the website. All I have to do is make some DVDs and put them in the post – which even I should be able to do.

I’ve applied for a couple of free festivals already and I’ve been invited to submit to one in Paris, so we’ll see how that goes.

This week I’ve been writing articles – a new 3d artists magazine has appeared which is great news because it looks like good regular work – and fairly flexible.

I’ve also been doing another feature for a magazine aimed at school children and focuses on general science issues – which is also good news because means there’s potential to partially fund the research of some of my documentary ideas by writing features about the same subjects. That means I can justify spending more time on them… which has to be good.

I’m almost there with the boat safety video – although the last few bits are taking a long time…

Aside from that, I still haven’t got the edit done for the debut of my latest documentary project at 10x10 next week. And there’s a problem.

Because the safety video and the documentary are on different disks, I’m having to swap every time I swap projects. Now, Premiere ought to be able to take this on board, but it can’t – each time I swap, I have to re-locate all the footage files before premiere will load. And that’s a pain.

Worse still, when I tried to switch back to the documentary this time, it wasn’t having any of it – it keeps asking me where all the files are, then when I locate them, it crashes.

I do hope I can solve this because there’s a couple of months of editing work in those files!

I managed to get precisely nothing done to my documentary this week – except that I’ve volunteered to show some of it at the 10x10 documentary evening in London on the 7th. It’s a great forum to show your half finished documentaries, and get criticism from other documentary makers. However, you need something that’s in a good enough shape to watch, and right now, what I’ve got is a collection of clips and snippets of voiceover. I’ve no idea what I’m going to show or when I’m going to get to edit it….

The main reason is that I’ve had a couple of jobs come in that I really needed to spend time on. One is the yacht safety video from last year, which now needs a few tweaks (tweaks which are taking far longer than I thought they would). The other is that following last week’s autodesk press launch, I got an email from the editor of a brand new magazine for 3d artists. He was looking for freelancers and had some reviews which needed doing for an issue due to go to press on Monday.

it started off as three small reviews, but by today, that had grown to four pages of copy – two of which are on Softimage – one of the most complex pieces of software on the market which I’m not up to date on and which didn’t arrive until Friday afternoon.

Deadlines aren’t always this tough, but sometimes events conspire against editors and freelancers….

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t done any documentary work this week!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve gone to two software company dos – Adobe’s and Autodesk’s. These are both well worth attending for me as the companies tell me all about what they’re adding to the new releases of their software… it’s very enlightening and it’s also a good chance to catch up with people I work with or for, but only ever see at press events.

They’re also usually a chance to eat minaturised versions of proper food arranged painstakingly and artistically onto little china spoons or cut into bite sized cubes…

Plus I get to hear about all the free foreign trips other, better connected journalists are getting to go on, and, in recent cases, see how the credit crunch/recession/depression/global armaggeddon is affecting the various bits of the industries I’m connected to.

The answer to that last one is that it’s affecting them pretty badly, or at least most people are expecting it to. The media seems to be locking down right now with nothing much going ahead anywhere (although I’m not close enough to it to really be able to say that with any authority).

On the other hand, I’m choosing to see a couple of positive sides: Firstly, everyone in the creative industry has a whole list of personal projects they’d really like to be getting on with if it wasn’t for all this damned paying work.

Now the paying work is drying up, those exciting projects should be coming out of the closet and everyone in the industry should be working for free on what really fires them up…. At least if they’re not having to get jobs as waiters, that is.

Secondly, if you’re able to be a shark (see my previous blog), there should be new opportunities appearing around every corner as things change suddenly.

Personally, I’ve taken a quick dart back towards writing articles and proposed a few pieces for magazines which should support me for a couple of months (along with all the other bits and pieces I’ve got on).

Voiceover
I’ve recorded the first part of my voiceover for the Vegas documentary. It’s a big test for me as it’s the first time I’ve done my own voiceover work (or, the first time since I did a couple of packages for BBC radio 5 years ago and had my confidence as a presenter shaken by a producer who quite rightly didn’t think I was up to the job).

Anyway, my two big personal projects for this year, really do depend on me being able to be a strong and credible presenter, so recording the voiceover for the vegas documentary is crucial

What do I think of my performance? Well it’s hard to judge. I’m not at all sure I’m any good, and even if I am, I still need to find a tone of writing and a tone of speaking that work together. I feel a little like I’m PRESENTING too much and need to be more energised and conversational. At the same time, I feel I need to slow down and enunciate better – and I think the two are contradictory. You don’t have conversations at 60 words per minute, do you?

Anyway, until it all gets edited in, I won’t know. In fact I still won’t know then until other people hear it.

I guess the real problem is that even if I do get to be good at presenting, I’m going to be critical of myself as I edit, so I’m not going to have full confidence in the project…. Hmm… I need to get over it.

The last couple of weeks feel quite bitty – as though I’ve done lots of work, but it hasn’t really got together into anything substantial.

I’ve got a little further forward with the documentary – and I’m now writing a first draft of the commentary. This started off being quite tough to do, because I haven’t really edited yet – I’m at the stage where I know what all the stories are that will combine into my finished programme, and I know broadly what shots and voice clips I’ll use to tell those stories. It’s now time to write the first draft of the linking narration.

However, once I really convinced myself that this wasn’t a final version of the narration, writing became much faster. I know I’ll have to add to it and change things, but that will come much easier I think, once I’ve got a roughly working programme.

I hope….

Anyway, my plan is to finish writing the narration next week and record it using my own voice. This will be a bit of a test for me. I’ve half decided to go with my own voice for the narration this time, because the whole programme feels like it needs to be me talking. I can’t quite explain why, but my previous two productions have felt like they needed a dispassionate narrator, whereas this one somehow feels as though the camera is more part of the action…

So, this is a test of my narration skills as much as anything, and it’s a test I need to do because I’ve got a couple of other projects in mind (one of which I did a treatment for this week). And these other projects will NEED to have me as a narrator.

I’m actually really excited about the project I wrote the treatment for, but it’s big and ambitious ( a feature length doc – which has elements of a drama to it) and most significant of all, it will depend on my ability to be a convincing narrator….

More of that later….


Still no work
Still no work from either of the mailouts I’ve sent – which is a bit worrying. Still, it’s promising that despite having turned off my advertising I’m still getting (around) 50 visitors per day to www.anachronistic.co.uk.

The recession has hit
Ok – there’s no getting around it. The recession has well and truly hit me. Having decided at the beginning of the year to plough money and effort into advertising my work in an attempt to grow my business, I find myself at the beginning of March with little to show for it.

By putting a huge amount (£40 per day) into advertising on google (my best source of business so far), I’ve got one job, and a few positive enquiries from January, but nothing at all of any use in February.

I can’t keep up that level of spending, so I’ve taken the decision cut it right back. Which in turn means no chance of getting the work that is out there.

The other strands of my advertising are more positive, but not any more promising. I’ve now had two email mailing lists compiled:

One of 2,000 museums to which I’ve sent a note letting them know I’ve written a guide to commissioning animation. This is a very “soft sell” – I’ve offered them a feature they might find interesting along with a note that they can contact me if they need any animation done for future displays. From this, I’ve got lots of people saying how much they like my work, and that they’ll keep my details for the future – but no actual work right now.

The other, of 500 aquariums to which I’ve offered a very specific animation idea – to create a “virtual fishtank” containing animations of extinct, or un-exhibitable sea creatures. It’s a much more direct offer (albeit one at quite a high value), but the response was pretty similar “love your work, but haven’t got any money” was the overwhelming view.


Although the responses I’ve received have all thanked me for sending my email - I also did a little checking, and am worried by the legalities of sending out mail unsolicited – (something I hate doing – but running I’m a little short on ways to make people aware of my work). It turns out that generally, you can send out emails to companies as long as you give them a valid email address to respond to and tell you if they don’t want your emails. You also have to not disguise who you are.

The one problem is that you can’t send emails to named individuals. Only there’s no way of knowing whether you’re talking to a company or one individual trading as a company, so it’s all a bit confused.

Anyway, this means I have to worry about the legal side of emailing, but it doesn’t mean I can practically do anything about it.


In addition, the company I’ve employed to build up my website traffic by writing a couple of articles about my work and putting them on sites which link to mine have come back to me with the articles to check – and they’re awful! They’re really badly written and say absolutely nothing of any value. I wouldn’t be happy having my work associated with them at all, so it doesn’t look as though that avenue is going to work either.


To make matters worse, my website stopped working this week – somehow it’s code became corrupted (possibly as a result of someone hacking into it), and it’s taken 3 days to get it working again and I’ve changed all my passwords.


All in all, I’ve been a bit despondent - there’s not a lot of work out there. By the looks of it, there isn’t going to be for a while, and I have to re-think my strategy. And this is not going to be a cheap year – either professionally or personally…

Solutions!
I’ve worked out that if I finish the documentary project I’m on now, and manage to keep the monthly newsletter I write for Pinnacle (there seems no likelihood of that going under – in fact it may expand) and I get a few more pieces from magazine articles, then as long as the images I’ve got on stock libraries keep generating income, I’ll make enough to survive.

This also depends on the tenant in my property in Manchester starting to pay his rent again (he hasn’t been able to pay for 6 months now and the council are being scandalously slow in processing his benefit claim. I may have to evict him.


So what else can I do? –well, my new plan is to develop a series of emails making different offers every month to different sets of people… the next one will be a very low-cost offer (just a few dollars for giving video footage a certain “look”). It’s not something I can make a lot of money at – more of a “loss leader” but my thought is if people aren’t buying high-cost projects, might they go for something much lower cost initially?

There are a few other low cost, small projects I can pursue – like writing articles and doing one off illustrations… but I still need to get the work.


Relentlessly optimistic
Ok, so to be optimistic about it. The good thing about having no paid work is that it means I should have the time to work on some of my own projects that nobody’s going to pay me for anyway. Having no other work means working on personal projects isn’t taking time away from paying ones, so if I’m organised, I should be able to do some of the things I’ve really wanted to do:

A feature film documentary idea about something I think is really important… and a children’s animated series. Both, huge undertakings, but if other work is short… I’ll do a breakdown of just what it would take to get these projects off the ground…

Hmmm….

how to edit AVCHD

how to edit AVCHD
It’s not easy to edit footage from the new breed of memory card camcorders – even those editing packages which can edit AVCHD do so very badly. Playback is slow and jerky and editing is a nightmare. It’s like stepping back 10 years to the old PCs that could barely handle DV.

There’s a set of solutions, but they all really involve re-compressing your footage in a friendlier format. The best I’ve found is neo scene.

It costs $130 but works fine. It also increases the colour range of your images (which has no effect until you start applying colour correction, when you’ll discover you can alter the image over a wider range without loosing detail).

The downside is disk space. My 70gb of footage (a lot to start with) now takes up 360gb, so I’ve had to buy a new hard drive just to edit it. No big deal, but worth remembering. It took 2 days to process all the footage, turning it from unfriendly avchd files to more playable avis.


Cutting
With that done, I load my footage into Premiere, and get going. It’s not bad. My 8gb quad core PC can play back the 1920x1080 footage pretty smoothly (although scrubbing is a bit crap, which is a problem). It also takes about 4 minutes to load up due to the 8 hours of footage I’ve loaded in.

A new kind of editing
Up to now, my documentaries have been talking heads based with a bit of computer animation and stock footage thrown in. I’ve been able to research the subjects in advance and I’ve got an idea in my head before I started to edit how the story would be told.

I’ve also been cutting around the interviews, so bringing out the important moments of them has been the first stage in my edit.


This new doc is something different. This time I’ve been following people round and basically filming what they do. The story is something I’ve got a vague idea about, but it’s all going to come together now.

What’s more, there are two distinct parts to the doc – the first being the fossil show we attended and the second being the dig we went onto afterwards. In some ways they’re different films, but I think I see a way of bringing them together… at least I hope I do.

First steps
Ok, so I’ve got 8 hours of footage – a few scraps of interview, lots of shots of people walking around and looking at things and hitting things with hammers.

How do I start?

Well, I could just plough in and start picking out bits of the footage I like. But that would mean I was completely lead by the footage I’d got – I don’t think that’s entirely right because there’s always underlying stories that need to be pulled out and aren’t immediately obvious from the footage.

For example, I know that two of my main characters got very excited on the last day at the show because they heard a rumour that some illegal Brazillian fossils were being offered. They went off to look for them, but found nothing.

So “in the can” I’ve got lots of shots of people pointing, and walking about, followed by them getting in a car and driving off. There’s a story there, but without some work it’s not told naturally by the footage.

On the other hand, I can’t write the story and then cut the clips around it because that would be ignoring the truth of what really happened.

What I’ve decided to do is make a list of the main strands of the story as I noted them when I was filming, and create a Premiere timeline for each one. I then make another timeline for each day of filming and dump all the footage from that day into it.

I work through each day of footage, and cut and paste any shots that are relevant to each story strand into that strand’s timeline (some clips appear in several strands).

From there, things are a bit more manageable. Each strand now contains between 5 and 30 minutes of footage, and I can work with it in chunks, cutting it down to shots I can use and arranging rough sequences. Each strand is organised into scenes so I can cut between the different stories thoughout the documentary.

Where the interviews and snatched dialogue don’t tell the story, I’m adding title screens with notes to myself about possible voiceover scripting. None of these will feature in the finished programme, but they’ll mean when I come to write the script I’ll know what I’m doing.

That’s the theory.

I’ve got some way into it now, and have the fossil show segment pretty well covered. I’ve still got to tackle the dig itself, and I have a feeling that will be a big harder. There’s only really three strands of story to this I think so the chunks will be bigger and harder to manage…. But we’ll see.


Mailout
The mailout has been done – 2000 museums contacted about my animation work. More specifically, given them a link to my article on commissioning video documentaries (specifically 3d animated ones) for museum displays.

I was a bit nervous. Even though I’m aiming to provide them with something they can use, there’s always a worry that if you approach someone without asking first, they might feel you’re spamming them.

Out of the two thousand emails, I got probably 200 returned as invalid addresses for one reason or another (that’s to be expected). I also got a few people emailing saying they were the wrong person to talk to, but that they’d passed my details onto the right person.

In addition, I got several positive responses from people saying thanks for the pointer to the article, and that they’d keep it in mind for when they were next building a display that might need animation.

Number of complaints: zero.
Number of actual jobs given to me as a result: zero.

I’m actually quite positive about this. All in all, the mailout cost me about £80 (for the list of names) and I think there may be a few people considering using my work who will get back to me later. I’m not sure I’ll get anything, but it’s pretty positive.

Next mailout
So I’m planning to do more mailouts. This one was quite “soft”. In other words, I wasn’t saying “buy this” I was saying “here’s some information about how 3d animation works in your industry – if you can use it, great – and you can always get in touch if you like.”

The next mailout will be a little more defined. I’m going to approach aquariums with an idea for a video display featuring extinct or deep sea fish. In this one, I’m going to talk very specifically about prices and ideas – giving people an offer they can choose to go for instantly if they want to.

And the next one…
I’m then going to talk to corporate video producers giving them a very specific low cost post production offer – i.e. that if they send me a video, I’ll apply a set of effects to give it a set choice of classy “looks” at a set cost per minute. Something they can easily get their heads around and use without feeling they’re making a big investment…

I’m very new to all this promotional stuff, so I’m just trying out ideas right now.

We’ll see what the results are.


Responses
Responses to my google advertising continues to be mixed. I’m getting 10-20 contact emails a week, but very few actual serious offers of work. Most of those I am getting are quite local too – which is odd. There’s no more reason for someone who works nearby to use my work than someone in (say) mexico, but for some reason, people are more likely to contact me if they live nearby.

I’m not desperate for work – I still have this trilobite documentary which will keep me busy for a while, and if I pursue it, there are magazine articles waiting to be written. However, it’s a little worrying that putting as much effort (and cash) as I am into advertising doesn’t seem to be paying off right now.

Be a shark

Still, I am in a bussinessy mood right now, so I’m coming up with lots of strategies to get my work in front of people. Although I still don’t like the whole “meet and greet” thing – I’m not considering going out in person with a portfolio right now. It just feels like a waste of time… and not one I feel comfortable with…

I am getting mailing lists done. I’m advertising in trade journals (like the Knowledge – the UK’s most important contacts book for TV). I’m also getting links from other sites to my website. I’ve got several one-a-month emails in mind to send out to people in different industries who might use my work…. So maybe this will help me buck the ressession.

I feel I’m in a good position to make things work despite the economic climate because as I’m one person with a wide range of arty skills, I can be as flexible as I need to in order to take advantage of whatever comes my way.

One thing I really got from making my film about the evoloution of sharks was that in times of crisis (i.e. the extinction of the dinosaurs) the specialists died out very quickly (or risked doing so) because as the environment changed, they found themselves without a niche they could exploit.

The generalists – those with a wide range of abilities and those who could change instantly from one source of nourishment to another (i.e. the sharks) actually did rather well – because without the competition, they were able to adjust to the new environment and exploit whatever new niches appeared.

Anyway, I’m taking publicity a lot more seriously now, and casting my net wide for different types of work.

Documentary publicity
I’m also considering hiring someone to send my documentaries off to festivals. I haven’t got time to do it myself, and I’ve so far avoided doing this. However, it might be worthwhile now getting onto the whole documentary making bandwagon…

Hmm… one to ponder.

Fossil hunting in Vegas

The trip
I’ve spent the last week in America following a group of fossil hunters round and making a documentary about their visit to the world’s biggest fossil show and their attempts to dig up a rare species of trilobite…

How did it go? Well….


Vegas

I left London in the biggest snowstorm in 18 years. The snow made the whole of the South East grind to a halt, but for me, the worst problem was the post. Two deliveries I was expecting before I left didn’t arrive – one (a wireless microphone) I could do without, but the other, spare batteries for my new camcorder were essential.

I ended up with a practical, but annoying solution. I had to buy a new camera at the airport just to use as a charger and spare battery. Hopefully I should be able to re-sell it on ebay once I get the new batteries, and not loose to much money.


We arrived in Vegas late, and the place really is larger than life. Everything’s bigger – even the queue for the check in desk at Caesar’s Palace for which we had to stand and wait for an hour and a half before being told they’d “lost” two floors of accommodation.

This seemed a bit careless to me, but still, if there’s one thing that really works in America I’ve found, it’s the ability to make up for it when things go wrong. They instantly offered Lisa and Sam accommodation in another hotel, an upgrade, and free beauty treatments…. I, of course, am working, so stayed only for one night before jetting off on my desert adventure.

There was really just time for dinner and bed as I had to fly out at 6 the following morning.

Pheonix
Met up with Enrico and Luc, two of my fossil hunting companions and documentary stars at Vegas airport for the hour long trip to Pheonix where we immediately got in a car and headed for the fossil show in nearby Tucson (I say nearby – nearby in American terms, so a 3 hour drive. Nearby like Birmingham is Nearby to London).

Tucson
The Tucson Fossil show is a strange event. All the rooms in several of the town’s hotels have been taken over by fossil sellers – each with their own stall or shop marketing everything from pieces of meteorite to shark’s teeth to dinosaur fossils smuggled illegally out of China or Brazil.

There’s an ambiguity about fossil collecting – in that lots of academics and museums don’t like private collectors and accuse them of removing and damaging important finds. Also, most countries have strange and complex rules about what can and can’t be collected.

However, at the same time, academics and museums don’t have the time or resources to collect much, and a fossil left in the ground once exposed by the weather will quickly erode and be destroyed. In addition, if you took away all the finds made by private collectors from museums, there would be very little left at all…

For this reason, filming is a little dicey. Some stallholders (in fact most) are delighted to be interviewed and to show off their wares. Some are secretive and suspicious. Looking pretty amateur with a small camcorder and mic, and promising not to use anything I didn’t get a release form signed for seemed to placate most of them, but some of the most beautiful collections were pretty much off limits for me and my camera.


The group, Carlo (the collector) Jason and Jake (the diggers), Dave (the fossil preparer) and Enrico and Luc (the scientists) make a good team, and everyone there is enthusiastic. But there’s often confusion about what’s going to happen next, so it’s very difficult for me to plan my shooting. We change our minds two or three times about which day we’re leaving the show.

I’ve taken the decision that this is a rollercoaster. And you ride a rollercoaster, you don’t try to steer it. Instead of coming up with a set of things I plan to shoot to make the story I want to make, I decide to film everything I can, and hope it fits together into something that makes sense.

It’s a documentary and I’m documenting. It means I have to think on my feet and make sure I get the covering shots that will make any potential story I end up wanting to tell work. It’s quite scary in one way, but freeing in another. I have to work for the moment – thinking of ways to combine shots into sequences over which narration can be played before I know what the narration is going to be. I have to constantly ask myself what is happening right now and how can I make it into a sequence of shots without pre-judging what’s going to happen next.

Carlo is rushing from stall to stall, and constantly calling for me to catch up – but I have to get outside shots, and wide shots, and have people sign release forms….

I discover the microphone is making a strange ticking sound, but it’s too late to do anything about it. I’ll have to rely on being able to remove the noise in editing. I also find I’ve lost the screw which attaches my tiny hand held camera to the flycam – a weighted device for steadying my shots. I have to gaffer tape it in place and tear it off each time I need to change the battery or memory card.

Vegas (again)
Eventually we leave Tucson (coincidentally just when we’d originally planned to) and head back to Vegas. I’ve got a plane ticket, but I go by car instead – taking the opportunity to film as we travel.

After 5 hours on the road, we arrive at Stacy and Jake’s home in Vegas, and Lisa and Sam come over for dinner. This trip is filled with late nights and early mornings, and Carlo asks me to meet them at Caeser’s Palace (where Lisa, Sam and I are staying for tonight) at 6 am. They turn up at 7:30, giving me a chance to take a look around the Strip.

Time here doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference - whether it’s 6am or 6pm on the Las Vegas Strip, the lights still flash, the music still plays everywhere, and the streets and casinos are still full. It’s as though the whole city is dedicated to stopping you from thinking or acting for yourself. “do this now!” screams everything.

I can’t escape the feeling that Vegas is taking up valuable space which could more productively used as desert.


California – the marble mountains
We’ve received information that our original dig site – a town famous for polygamy just outside Vegas is under snow, and so we can’t dig there, so we set off early for California where a more sparsely populated fossil bed allows us the opportunity to search for one of the world’s rarest trilobites.

We reach there around lunch time, and it’s not snowing. But it is raining… something it continues to do on and off for the next two days.

During that time, we find very little, but eat a lot of cold beefburgers and get very wet.

We stay in a couple of really expensive hotels (expensive mainly because we turn up late to book in and have to take whatever’s going) and eventually get rained off the mountain.

That said, I think we’ve done well. We do find one of the rarest trilobites in the world, and there’s a lot of material shot for the documentary. I think I’m beginning to see a story forming in all this….


Vegas (again)
Back to Vegas again, in time for dinner at New York New York – which Carlo is paying for because he didn’t find the “big find” of the day. Several of the team accidentally order the wrong meal in the chaos and end up with a huge steak and a massive lobster each….

It’s Sam and Lisa’s last night so they’re off doing touristy things and don’t join us. Plans change about four times during the evening and I end up leaving to go and stay with Lisa at about 10:30 leaving Jake on the roulette tables. I hear later that he left about 5 minutes after us anyway….

Somewhere outside Vegas
Our last day is spent two hours outside vegas – in the place we’d originally planned to dig. The snow’s gone. It’s a sunny day and the digging is easy – plus, we’re eating slightly better since the remaining steak and lobster form last night are packed away for lunch. There are lots of fossils in this mountain and soon most of the team (including me) have made finds.

It’s a great day to be out in the mountains, but from a filming point of view, it’s not so good. The fossils here are common ones and there’s not the tension of the previous digs. Jake and Jason, the professional diggers see this as an amateur dig site – lots of fun things to find, but nothing really special like the $10,000 trilobite they found yesterday.

It’s clear to me that the climax of the documentary was yesterday, and I’ve got to find a way to put today’s dig before it in the film – without explicitly saying that it happened in that order. I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to make the ending a damp squib.

Hmm….


Home
At the end of the day, it’s agreed we’ve had a good trip. I think I’ve got everything I need – at least I better had!

Over dinner, Carlo starts talking about wanting to dig up a Triceratops. A triceratops is a whole different ball game from a trilobite – for a start, it’s the size of a truck – and for another thing, virtually everywhere you’re likely to find one is filled with men with guns.

Still, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was serious.


New website
Before I left for Vegas, I managed to find time to re-edit my showreel adding in all my new footage. It looks great, and I’ve chosen the Blue Danube as the music. Take a look at http://www.anachronistic.co.uk/content/animation-and-visual-effects-showreel.htm

I think it’s working really well….



I returned to find 20 contact emails from my newly re-done 3d animation website http://www.anachronistic.co.uk/. Great – the new site is generating lots more enquiries than the old one.

However, emailing them back, I start to discover the news isn’t so good… about a quarter of the contacts return as unavailable addresses – why someone should take the trouble to fill in an email form with an incorrect address, I’m not sure.

Worse still, of those that don’t get returned, none of the recipients have got back to me. Ok, I’ve only given them 4 days, and it’s over a weekend, but I’m surprised to have received nothing at all…

It’s a little worrying – are my emails getting through at all? Are they being labeled as spam? Are people just ignoring them?

My solution is to email back with a “read recipt request” so I know if the emails have been read. The results of that, I’ll post next time….

Mass emails
While I was away the company working for me on researching an email list of museum curators got back to me.

This list is part of my publicity plan for my new site: I’ve written an article giving museum curators tips on commissioning 3d animation for their exhibits and hopefully when they come to do it, they’ll commission me! I’m using the list to contact about 2000 curators by email just to let them know the article’s there.

Is that spam? I don’t think so – I’ve been careful to target people who ought to be interested in the article and I’m offering them something for free that’s useful whether or not they decide they’re interested in my work.

Nevertheless, this kind of promotion makes me nervous. I made a big mistake a few years ago when I first did a bulk mail. A rogue server somewhere in the world picked up my email and duplicated it, delivering hundreds of copies to each recipient. It couldn’t have gone more wrong!

I hope I’ve insured that this can’t happen this time, but if you do anything on a big scale, there’s always the potential for disaster….


Shark story
As for my shark documentary, it’s definitely being sold illegally, and definitely by a company that’s gone out of business. The receivers have said they’ll give us the profits, but it’s a shame not to have been able to nail those responsible and at least get an explanation out of them!

What happens next, we’ll see…

Ok – it turns out my documentary is available in WHSmiths, un-edited and packaged with a book in a very neat looking bundle and as part of a series of videos on all kinds of subjects –whether these are done without copyright, I’ve no idea.

It’s still looking very much as though whoever released them has done so without the permission of Electric Sky, my distributors, and I’ve posted off a copy to them so they can take action….

What they can do about it, since the company publishing the DVD has now gone into receivership, I don’t know…

New year, new website
I’ve now got my new website set up – due to a very helpful company http://www.agdesignpro.com/ who I found on Elance – as part of my new year resolution to do more outsourcing.

The new site (at www.anachronistic.co.uk) is written in html, and optimised as heavily as I can for search engines.

I’ve learned a lot in the past few weeks about how to create a search engine friendly website. Including the whole CMS thing…

A CMS for those who don’t know, is a website within a website which only I can access, which allows me to add and remove content and new pages. The new pages will appear in the same style as the old ones with all the text and images pasted in correctly.

In other words, I can update my website at any time from any computer without knowing how to code or layout HTML. Brilliant, and surprisingly cheap to do.

So all the text (and there’s rather more than I would have liked) is in, and today I finished creating a new showreel which I’ve now uploaded….

I’ve chosen the Blue Danube as my music which I think works well….

Anyway, results:

Ok – it’s early days, the new site’s been up for a week (with the new showreel having gone in today), so none of the search engines have indexed it, and that means my visitors have stayed roughly level – OK, they’ve increased slightly from about 275 per day to 300 or so.

But my old site, in the first 3 weeks of the year ( remember, I’ve only just started advertising at the beginning of the year) generated 6 enquiries.

My new site has generated 8 in the 7 days it’s been up. That’s not bad, and apart from the new sales-centric layout, it’s a result of the little form I’ve created at the bottom making it very easy for people to contact me.

Whether that will help me actually get work remains to be seen….

Still. Onwards and upwards.

The next step is to wait for the search engines to recognise the site and see if that helps, but I’ve also discovered that your ranking on google depends heavily on the number of sites that link to yours.

I’ve written some features that hopefully will attract people linking, but I’m also planning to hire in a company to “build links” basically, they go out and actively find sites with similar subjects to your own and suggest that they link to the fantastic content on your site.

You have to watch out, because some of these companies link you to things called “link farms” which are sites set up just to provide links and Google takes a dim view of this. So the game is to get as many sites with content your visitors would find interesting to link to you as possible. It’s sensible and useful, so I’m going to give it a go.

The tips section of my site (http://www.anachronistic.co.uk/tips.php) contains articles for people interested in CGI and animation for their own projects, so it’s a worthwhile link to have.

And of course, I’ve just linked to it from my blog, so that give me another incoming link!

a new website and a stolen documentary

Back to work, and charged with new ideas. This year is going to be a year for growing and outsourcins. I’m going to try to take on more work (ressession permitting) and have other people working on my projects too so I’m not doing everything myself.

First step towards that has got to be bringing in customers, so I’ve re-instated my web advertising. I’ve also got someone in from elance to re-write my website.

Why?

Because, apparently, sites written only in Flash (as mine currently is) show up on google as just a single graphic. Which seems to be why I don’t get listed on search engines (except when I pay for sponsored links).

To put that right, I have to re-write my site as html and though I could probably learn the skills and do that myself, I’ve decided to start my new year’s resolution of outsourcing by outsourcing my web design.

In my quest for more visitors, I’ve done a little research and had a bit of a think about it, and the results are:

Apparently in search engine optimisation (SEO for short), content is king. In other words the more words you have on your site, the more important and useful google thinks it is.

Also, if you’re looking to appear in searches for targeted things (like “documentary filmmaking” or “3d animation”) you’ve got to keep mentioning those phrases throughout your text – crowbaring in keywords to your text every five minutes (actually more than that – I’ve seen recommendations which say to have at least 250 words with 3 keyphrases repeated 3-4 times each!).

Well, Ok – it’s put a bit of a strain on my writing ability, but luckily, writing to tight briefs in terms of style, content and wordcount comes pretty easily to me since I’ve written for dozens of magazines, newspapers, etc.

Anyway, it turns out I have to write a lot more words in my site than I thought – 250 being a good chunk for each page, so I’ve done an intro, packed with keywords, and an “about us” section – again with keywords woven into it.

I’ve also done a whole section of past projects – detailing about 15 projects where my animation work has been featured, and mentioning key-words for different sections of the motion graphics industry (I’ve also used google adwords keword tool to find out the most popular kewords and tied them in to my own advertising clickthrough rates – oh, yes, this is all very scientific!)

In addition, I’ve written a series of articles – about 1000 words each – aimed at different types of customer who are likely to use my work. These (packed with the requisite keywords, of course), offer what I hope will be helpful advice to people trying to get motion graphics, visual effects and 3d animation into their work.

I’m doing one for documentary filmmakers, one for music video makers, one for web designers, one for museum curators, etc….I’m hoping other sites will want to link to this content – because apart from anything else, links are part of the way search engines judge the quality of your site….

Anyway, more on the new site when it’s up and running in a couple of weeks.


Vegas
In the meantime I’ve also started planning for the documentary shoot in Vegas at the end of the month. This project, funded by Carlo, the hotel owner and trilobite collector, is going to be a fossil hunting road movie – and I’ve no idea what to expect when we start filming!

All very exciting, but I’m going to need some new equipment: primarily a new camera (a small solid state HD camera I can chuck about in the desert without worrying too much), some kind of apparatus to allow me to get steady shots with it, and a microphones system.

After reading a lot online, I’ve opted for the Rode Ntg2 shotgun mic (more on that when it arrives) - £250 including a boom, a shock absorber and what’s known in the trade as a dead cat (a fury microphone cover designed to stop wind noise – unavoidable in the desert).

I’ve also ordered a flycam – basically a frame with weights on the bottom – from India. It’s designed to keep light cameras steady and give shots a graceful floating motion even when you’re running over rough terrain. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’s costing about £130 so it won’t break the bank.

Finally, the camcorder I’m leaning towards is the HF11…. But not decided yet. If I get it, I’ll get a wide angle lens too….

UPDATE: ok – I’ve gone with the HF100 – why? Because it’s £250 cheaper and is basically the same model but without the super high quality mode. As it turns out, the super high quality mode as far as all the reviewers are concerned has made no descernable difference to the quality of images. Saving £250 means I can now add a wireless mic (if I can find one) to my setup.



Can you believe it?

My previous documentary – the one about extinct sharks – has been out for about a year now and happily being distributed by Electric Sky. They’ve sold it to 5 TV channels, and not made me much money, but it’s certainly getting a fair showing.

I got an email from one of my interviewees today. It appears the programme is now on sale on DVD in WHSmiths – probably the UKs biggest DVD selling store.

Great.

I dropped a line to Electric Sky to say thanks.

It turns out they know nothing about it.

This is absolutely shocking! - Somebody, it would seem, has taken my documentary and decided to distribute it without telling me or getting permission. The company (Pinnacle Vision) is now in receivership, so what’s going to happen next isn’t clear. Someone is in deep trouble.

I’ll have to find a copy and take it from there. Luckily, Electric Sky are showing every intention of taking the case on for me (after all, it’s in their interest).

More on that story as it unfolds!