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?