Creativity Base

It’s been great being a part of the maturation of Tomorrow Studio, South Australia’s first ever digital media business incubator, as its first birthday officially rolls by. From launching a bold idea brimming with promise, the SA Government’s Department of Trade and Economic Development can now take pride in the the tangible outcomes for start-up businesses they’ve helped facilitate. South Australia’s digital media sector is indebted to you.

When we moved danimations into the Tomorrow Studio in Adelaide back in June last year, we could not have predicted how attached to the initiative (and the community growing inside of it) we would become. As one of the original wave of tenants, we’ve seen businesses come and go, but more importantly, we’ve seen our own attraction to the place shift from the dangling carrot of Government-subsidized rent to the more valuable ready access to business partnerships and opportunities to learn and grow.

Emma Sterling & Dan Monceaux in the Tomorrow Studio

Entering the Tomorrow Studio (and enjoying the low overheads) allowed danimations to tool up to offer new services, and position ourselves well in the emerging market of online video service providers. It also provided us with a very attractive and functional premises in which to hold meetings and generally operate. As months went by, we got to know our fellow tenants and built trusting relationships with the more compatible businesses. As you would expect in a space populated with businesses in start-up mode, not all collaborative projects have had happy endings. From our own successes and failures, and those of others, we have identified and realized present and future business opportunities that we simply would not have been exposed to otherwise. We’ve also made some wonderful, new, creative friends in the process.

Moving into the incubator dragged Emma Sterling and I out of our home-office, and into the beginnings what has become a burgeoning and vibrant digital media community. Our commercial collaborations really fired up after we presented a workshop to fellow tenants on the merits of developing a video showreel to promote your business. Intelligent Software Development then contracted us to deliver a promotional video for them, in under a week.

The delivered product attracted our next job, for a start-up engineering firm WirebyClick. We worked with Extra Artists’ (now Soda Cube) on the Wirebyclick video incorporating 3D animation for the first time, satisfying another client and developing a collaborative workflow with our studio neighbours.

Fellow neighbours Proactive then saw our work and contracted us to deliver a video to help them market their product, Proactive Vue. Again, we delivered on spec, on budget and on time and in the process developed some new production techniques.

Since then, we have included the skills of SodaCube and those of Awesome Fighter Animation in several more commercial tenders. On a more exciting front, we are also embarking on some speculative ventures with Boomerang Books and Cresell IT independently. Another great thrust of creative energy has already been invested in the Triple Threat Animation project, along with fellow artists Awesome Fighter Animation and games developer I Love Biscuits. With a focus on developing entertainment-based intellectual property designed for online commercialization, you can find out more about that project after it officially launches at AVCON on the 23rd of July. What do you know? Adelaide’s premiere video games and anime event is a studio tenant too.

The experience of calling an industry-specific business incubator home for the past twelve months has been (for the most part) overwhelmingly positive. We’ve grown and developed faster, and with better integration into the digital media community here in SA than we possibly could have while working from our home. I sincerely hope that news of the Tomorrow Studio’s many virtues and success stories spreads far and wide, and that the model is transposed to benefit emerging business and cultural communities in other sectors in the future.

Dan Monceaux

Locals in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia will recognise that we’re in the early stages of an unusually wet winter. Since we’re placed in one of the less fortunate corners of this arid continent of ours, I never view rain as a curse and instead take great delight in seeing the foliage and watercourses flourish in times like these. In the past fortnight I’ve also taken pleasure in catching another symptom of the season, the awe-inspiring rainbow, on several occasions- recording them with whatever devices I had handy at the time. After proving popular on Twitter, I thought I’d break the Creativity Base blog-post format, and post this triptych of recent rainbows for your enjoyment. Of course, we have the divine science of refraction to thank for these gifts, and if you’d like to read some more on rainbows, Wikipedia provides a pretty good catch-all for the curious.

Shot on Emma Sterling’s cellphone, I tweaked the saturation to bring up the rainbow colour intensity in the above image.

You’ll notice in the above double rainbow, the colour band order is reversed in the outer, feinter rainbow.

This one was snapped through the windscreen on my cellphone while driving. At the rate cellphone cameras are improving, i won’t be bothering with a digital point n’ shoot by the last quarter of 2010… but that’s another blog post! Enjoy the rainbow season, everyone!

Dan Monceaux

The animation production and consumption communities have been steadily conditioned to ultra-slick, glistening, epic-budget animation, produced by the likes of Pixar, Disney, Dreamworks, Aardman and the other major studios over the past 25 years. It is important for animators as artists and craftsman in their formative years not to get hung up on emulating these ‘big box’ aesthetics. Afterall, the key to effective animation is mastering the illusion of movement, and that can be achieved without ever turning on a PC. There are countless opportunities to explore analog techniques and hybrid methods awaiting the curious animator. In fostering resourcefulness in animation (rather than resource dependency) and daring to create new styles or revive lost methods there is an exciting frontier ahead of us.

Studio animation has always been eager to hide the hands of the magician (read ‘animator’) with only a few exceptions. Animation legend Chuck Jones’ classic Warner Brothers cartoon from 1953 ‘Duck Amuck’ is a popular example of breaking the format’s conventions. In this rightly lauded short, Daffy Duck gets tangled up in a fierce argument with the animator as to where, what and why he exists. The page, the animators tools, and the true ‘God’ of the animated cartoon is revealed, with comical and extremely memorable results.

The British claymation series Morph produced back the 1970′s also combined the animator with his clay puppets in Morph’s world, without compromising on the performances of the claymation characters. Morph would often turn to his animator for advice when things weren’t working out for him, and the line between worlds of imagination and reality were beautifully blurred. In embracing the animator and his or her hands, a distinctive look and feel can be created, leading once again to much more memorable experience for the viewer.

The internet has afforded us the opportunity to share and enjoy a resurgence of alternative animation techniques, if not yet embraced by mainstream broadcasters, production houses and ‘old world’ markets’. I stumbled upon this video today, which shows a playful combination of physical and drawn animation technique. Have a think about which animated films and cartoons have stuck with you and why- if you’re anything like me it’ll be the animators who took risks and broke new ground that left a lasting impact.

Dan Monceaux