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)