PRA Declassified

From Tim Canan

Hey Hugh,

Hows Cat Piano coming along? and do you guys have anything else going on other than the cinematic computer game stuff?

Update on the short me and Levi are working on, we’ve got as much as we can done before we get some voice actors, it’s the cartoon about the killer broccoli. Finding voice actors is easy, finding good voice actors sucks some sort of horrible mess a monkey makes in boredom.

Also, I’d like to know your thoughts on what i should do next? right now I’ve almost got enough money for a good computer set up that can easily handle 3D animation. But I’ve got no clue as what to do except make more shorts, which is fun and all but i don’t feel like I’m going anywhere.

anywho, cheers for the support and such.

Tim

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We get a lot of school kids and their parents asking us about how to get a career in animation, so I thought I’d write a bit about a young animator we know, who’s doing just that straight out of high school. Eddie and I first met Tim Canan when we were judging a student film festival for high-school-aged kids, and we got to see some of the work he had done as a 16-year-old with an equally talented friend and collaborator Levi George. Their works, Garbage Day and Scaryville were far from polished, but they definitely had something special about them.

Tim and Levi have a number of advantages in common with the founders of my studio at their age as well as other impressive animators i see coming up. They started developing their skills at a young age by making short films that were impressive. They have a lot of initiative and a willingness to learn through creating their own opportunities if necessary.  They put a lot of thought into how their work can be improved and ensure that the next piece of work they make will be better than the last one.

Last year, after Tim finished school, I suggested to him to apply for a trainee animator position I saw advertised on the Blue Rocket website. Blue Rocket, a terrific Tasmanian animation studio run by a friend of ours, was crewing up for a Flash animated series titled Pixel Pinkie.

Tim got the job, and at only 17 and having just finished high school, made the move to Tasmania to begin his professional animation career. Having good examples of his work probably helped. I also put in a call on his behalf and wrote a letter of recommendation that might have helped too. Another big skill you need is the ability to identify, engage and network with the right people who can help your career. He’s since come back and his skills, knowledge and experience have increased immensely.

Tim sent me this email last week to give me an update on some original stuff he’s working on with Levi (who is now studying animation/multimedia at the University of South Australia), as well as to ask me for some advice on what he should do next. There really are a couple of paths for him to think about.

Filmmakers

Tim and Levi are both very creative and come up with great ideas. One path they could choose is to become filmmakers (directors and producers) building a career out of creating their own original work. The originality in their ideas makes them sell suited for this, and their next steps would be to create some of their own work that gets attention and builds their skills, experience and profile as filmmakers.

However, it is a hard path and speculative. There isn’t a lot of funding for filmmakers at that level, and a lot of their projects will have to be creatively financed until they get the runs on the board to attract investment for more ambitious projects. We started out in very much the same way self financing much of our own work for years until we had a body of work impressive enough to apply for funding to make better short films that got us closer to oir dream of making features and TV series.

Fee for service work

The other option for Tim is to keep finding work as an animator for other producers. There are a number of studios in Australia producing Flash animated series like Blue Rocket, such as Flying Bark, Pacific Vision, Media World, Funny Az Hell, Suzanne L Ryan Productions and Kapow Pictures. There’s usually at least one series being produced by one of these studios at any given time.

It’s hard to get work from these studios without any experience whether straight out of High School or University, but now that Tim has some professional work on his showreel, his chances are a lot better should something come up. To do this, it’s important for him to get on the radar of all these producers and keep his finger on the pulse of what’s going on. Often it’s a lot of the same animators migrating from one studio to the next. It means you have to be prepared to move interstate every so often and live in a different place. Although the work itself might not be as rewarding as making your own films, you don’t have to worry about how to finance something or how to pay yourself.

A Bit of Both

For our studio, we adopted a path that was a bit of both original work and fee-for-service. We have produced short films that get us closer to the feature films we want to make, as well as do fee-for-service work in advertising and video games. Even producing a couple of episodes for a TV series. For Tim and Levi, it’s about working out where they eventually want to be, and how to take the opportunities that come to take them closer to that goal. With evidence that they can create good work that will only get better, I think they’ve made a good start to finding sucess.