I’ve just finished 3 weeks of pretty heavy freelancing, back in the advertising industry.

I’ve genuinely surprised myself with how ‘at home’ I feel in the advertising / motion graphics world. It’s been over a year since I was in After Effects doing some heavy mograph, and all that muscle memory is still there. I’ve gotten better too - I’m faster and more able to dive into the nitty gritty of frames and tangent handles. I think it’s a tolerance that comes from diving deep during other projects from last year, such as character animation, game dev and 3D modeling.

I’ve come to the realisation that what we think of as the ‘work’ - pushing keyframes around, actually animating etc. - is about half the job. The other half is all the other stuff:

  • communicating with the client
  • keeping your workflow clean and flexible enough to accomodate the big changes that inevitably come your way (no matter how much you try, you’ll always have to go backwards a few steps in the pipeline - this is simply a fact of life)
  • keeping your stamina high enough to care about each frame at the end of the project just as much as you did in the beginning
  • maintaining your health and sanity and relationships throughout the job

and so on.

Tip on sourcing music with clients for a project: imagine it less like archery, and more like golf. You will almost never hit the bullseye and find the perfect track right from the get-go, so don’t beat yourself up when you don’t get it.

Instead, provide several options, and when none of them is the right track, ask good questions!

Which one is the closest to what they had in mind? What don’t they like about this track, what DO they like about it?

Eventually you’ll get there. Luckily in this case they ended up digging themselves and giving me the exact track they wanted.

I went to a local game dev conference last week: Impact! It was really neat, lots of educational talks and cool games to check out, it felt like I was learning stuff I would’ve known if I went to school for game dev. I’m starting to see some familiar faces that I recognise from other events which is nice, I love getting to know the local community.

Next up for me is getting back into working on my animation reel, and making more games! I got accepted into Limit Break and I’m working with Ed Swain, a senior animator at Jagex once a month for the next 6 months! I’ve also got an opportunity to show off Garb at The Sparkies mid July, so I’ll keep working on that as well.

I’ve got this hare-brained idea to do a ton of game jams to get better at game dev. Not exactly sure how that’ll look, I’ll write more about that another time.

Lastly, I hit a new deadlift PB today - 107.5 kg! Felt super dizzy and almost fell over after I dropped the barbell which was new. Feels good!

P.S - I’m reading ‘The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist’ by Brendan Keogh right now. It’s dense but I’m enjoying what I’m getting from it.