Big Mac Migration

Last Friday I finally gave into the Mac pressure. My last apple ( besides an iPod) was my apple IIe in High School . After that I went to Amiga, and broke down to buy a PC 2 years after Amiga went belly up. So for almost the last 15 years I have been a windows pwrson and our company was a windows shop. I have always had problems with PCs but they were mostly due to the cheap nature of most of the other consumers who kept pushing for faster and cheaper, where Apple always keeps high quality control. Dispite these problems and the huge amount of video and designer peer pressure I stayed PC. I just couldn't see loosing that right mouse button. So OS X comes along and then the switch to intel chips. Those moves and Paralells so I can still run the windows apps I have to allowed me to migrate. Well that's not giving enough credit to Microsoft for releasing Vista which was the final straw that broke this deal for me. 3 of our 5 new Vista based Laptops at the company can't connect to our Windows based network with any regular consistancy.
The last few programs we run that don't run on Mac at least run on Linux and our tech people in the Animation Dept (Brian) have been testing that for a while. So a year from now I would guess our Windows based company will be all Mac and the remaining systems will be a party of my computer museum which also includes an Amiga 1000 and a few Newtek Video Toasters, or they will be relegated to jukebox like my old SGI O2 was for so many years.

The Toll screens at Tiburon

I try and use my cameraphone to videotape the screenings of the films I make. This proved very helpful the first few months of "The Toll" because we re-edited the open and re-timed a few other edits to allow for the laughs to play thru. W.C. Fields was a master at the re-edit to allow for comic timing.

Tiburon film Festival

My first time to Norhern California. Tiburon is on the bay with a great yacht club, a downtown market area that is like a small coastal New England town with less parking but more ferrari dealerships but great wine tastings all around.

Get out of my own way

Many years ago I was told to get out of my own way because my indecision on some growth opportunities were slowing business. So today we added Mark Samber, a longtime business associate who started and ran a very similar company in the late 90s. Mark will stick to business and growing our very good partnership basis and allow me to concentrate on the Creative part of the company.

I have often been told that I did my career backwords. This is the way most people do it

1. Intern
2. Work for a big firm
3. Freelance
4. Start your own firm
5. Consult for other firms

Well I went from Interning to Freelancing to Starting my own firm. Skipping the working at a big name place wasnt in the cards for me because I didnt want to leave New Hampshire where I had a great family base to help with my kids. I have noticed that people who have even spent a year as VP of Animation Development at XYZ studio get their projects funded a bit easier than I have.

How Did I start

I am an eager self starter that started working professionally in my 2nd year of college. I had 2 kids by the time I graduated and didnt want to leave New England for Tinseltown or Gotham. So I started freelancing as an cameraman, editor and eventually an animator. after a few long projects for series on PBS and Discovery Channel I took a job as the head of CGI at a stop motion animation studio named Wreckless Abandon. 2 years in to the company they had to lay off everyone while they were waiting on the next big gig so I went into my garage and started what became Hatchling Studios.

Hatchling is now 25 people strong and the largest animation studio in the state (ok so its a small state). in 2006 we released our animated CGI short "http://www.thetollmovie.com/" which has now won 12 awards. We have also created a web series starring Billy West http://www.endurancechallenge.com/, which has been invited to over 10 film fests and won 2 best of awards. Now we sit working on our day to day commercial gigs as we keep developing more animation and live action ideas, and we work and wait untill one sells.

Starting the studio and why do the blog

I have been asked many times how did I start my animation studio and a few times I have been asked to articles and even a book about my experience. I have never been able to spend enough time concentrating on one thing to get more than a small 2 page article completed.

I am no John Lasseter (though I would love to be) But I did start an animation studio 3000 miles from LA and I hopefully have some wisdom and insite as to how you too can create something outside the norm in the area you want to live in.
So I start this blog at my companies current state, and I will work my way back to the beginning. trying to post backdating the info.


I hope it educates and entertains you.



Thanks

Marc

Even freebies have a value

Since Mike now had a sales partner they got a bigger volume of work and started to hire freelancers locally and my workload was finally picking up with video companies and Ad Agencies in Boston and north to NH.

As in any business you need to establish yourself. If you dont have a name from a previous job or a rich family you need to start with small jobs, spec jobs, and jobs that you beg the producer to let you do.

Back in 1996 I finally got my first gig for Discovery Channel because I had bugged the producer so much and one day he was caught in a deadline and the regular Animation Studio couldn't meet the deadline so I was in. Now the Producer (Lance W) and I had done a long project for PBS together in 1994 (Yeah I was 24 and I had a 5 person crew working under me to produce 114 shots for a series called "Presence of Place" it was a big high for me) Discovery had their approved list of vendors and I was not on it. I bid on the job at $6,ooo thinking I was going to make some real cash. But I could never crack them. I found out that the company that was getting all the work was charging closer to $20,000 for the same work and the other producers didnt think I could do the work at the quality they needed. This was amazing to me that they would rather wait another month to get a job done and pay 3 or more times what I was bidding.

So make sure you dont underbid yourself, you will have to learn the art of negotiation and reading people. Sometimes they want to know your worth it, othertimes they want o see yo usweat. And it always seems no matter what you have for credits you will have to do things for free to show you can accieve a different style, or speed or technical skill, and give it away for free a lot. There is a old term among women who work on the streets on London "Close your eyes and think of the queen". I now its an odd phrase but it has alwats stuck with me. I learned it at one of my freelance editing gigs at a company that I re-edited old documentaries and training videos to remove dated references and corporate propoganda so they could be re-sold in the educational market. Now what a video about London Prostitutes is doing being sold to schools is a whole other question.