Today we took the kids, some of their friends as well as my nieces and nephew to the movies to see The Grinch. I'm blown away by just how good the animation is in these types of movies. I guess it kind of goes back to something that I've mentioned before where I've grown up with an analogue childhood but a digital adulthood. The amount of computing power that must go in to rendering the animated movies as well as all the coding to make sure that each hair moves naturally and individually is just mind boggling.
Back when I was running up my mobile disco business and trying to leave Coles, I spent a couple of weeks working on commission for a company that was trying to sell 3D animations. Basically I spent several weeks going through the phone book (yes a physical phone book) and cold called businesses to try and get them interested in a meeting where we could discuss how we might be able to make a 3D animation for advertising or educational purposes.
I tried pretty hard for a while and set up a couple of meetings, there was another person doing the same thing as me and as far as I could tell he didn't manage to organise one meeting in the time that I was there. Of the two meetings that we had, the first one the owner of the business I was working for came along and really pushed the 3D aspect hard even when the client was more interested in something 2D. I wasn't happy as we could actually do 2D animation and it would probably be easier and since I was on commission I was willing to do what they wanted. The owner was only interested in 3D which was probably short sighted of him.
The other meeting that I did went really well but they weren't interested in doing anything at the time, they just wanted to see what was out there. They were really helpful in giving us the contact details for other people who they dealt with but nothing eventuated.
After a few weeks I think the owner saw that I was no longer putting in much effort at all and fired me. I don't know if you could call it being fired as he wasn't paying me, he did give me $300 when I was leaving so that at least paid for the fuel that I'd used.
Maybe two years after I left, the second company that I'd had the meeting with started running a really nice 3D ad. I'm guessing that I did have something to do with getting that started and it annoyed me a little but I guess the money I was paid on leaving was probably more than the commission I would have made off one sale anyway.
Whilst I was working there, I shared a small office with the guy who was employed to do the actual animation work. It was interesting watching him work and learning a little about what was involved. I think he was on salary but there wasn't any real work for him to do so he just worked on making things that could possibly help them out in the future. The amount of effort that went into making just a short animation and then the time it took for the computer to actually render it to a quality that was good enough for TV could be several weeks for just a 20 second commercial.
Anyway I didn't really think that the Canberra market was quite ready for 3D animation in advertising and we still don't see a lot of it for local businesses so I don't feel that I missed out on an opportunity there. I never even bothered to put it on a resume as I was still working at Coles and running the mobile DJ business at the time so there wasn't even a gap in my employment timeline.
Bomber
I've worn a few hats
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