16 Years Later. Surviving, adjusting & change. Part 1. There’s nothing Creative in a studio

Over several posts I’d like to talk about how business has changed, how I've changed running the business and how we’re currently producing work. It's going to be quite frank and open, eventually discussing process and the current version of the studio.

16 Years ago, in a room above a pub, after many years of working for other companies and freelancing around the globe.. we decided to form a production company.. specialising in motion graphics and animation. The motion graphics landscape was very different… nothing was easy.. After Effects wasn’t what it is today.. (and what it is today could be the part of a completely different post!). We worked shifts in pubs of an evening to gather the money to buy machines. During this time.. we made a showreel, I tell this to everyone I speak to, make a showreel… don't try and get work straight away.. make a showreel. You need to eat and have a roof over your head… sort that out and make a showreel as once you get work you’ll never again have the time to make the showreel you want to make. Once the work starts coming in it becomes your obsession to make the best you can possibly make, it consumes your every waking hour. Its my biggest regret, I never paid enough attention to those around me, work isn’t everything, it took a pandemic to make me realise this. Ive always enjoyed working hard, directing the team, creating beautiful things but as the years have gone by I’ve realised the creativity and ideas in my head have never come from being in the studio, they’ve never really come from brainstorming or meetings, they’ve came from conversations with friends, days out, films. Theres nothing creative about a studio. I thought about this for a long time, I don't think I've ever had a creative idea in the studio, Ive had lots of technical ideas, ideas about workflow. I’ve created beautiful renders, I've watched people animate really beautiful things….. but the ideas for all of those has never came from the studio. They’ve came from holding hands walking by a lake, watching the light descend over the water, having a drink in a dimly lit pub watching how the low light reacts with its environment, imagining how that would look on camera/render, listening to stories, listening to someone else’s voice that isn’t your own.. allowing those words to power the pictures in your mind and create a story, to inspire the CG that is yet to come. Over the past 18 months this has changed how we now work. We try and spend as much time out of the studio as we do in it, we still need to be fed, we still need to live but we choose what we want to work on, after over a year in a pandemic we realised bigger isn’t always better,  peace of mind and happiness is more important to fuelling creative projects. We’ve many more passion projects being worked on for the remainder of this year, they’ve proven a great way to learn and produce new content and learn new things about workflow and ourselves. Once the work starts coming in, you’ll never get to make the showreel you want to make, we’re changing that now.