Animation. We live in interesting times when it comes to animation. Worlds are colliding, fields are overlapping. In our business, we wrestle with animation on a few different fronts. First, there’s the whole “new tools are making internet animation companies competitive with traditional motion graphics houses” line of thinking. We sort of buy into that – there are definitely times that we think we can offer something to our client on a budget level that’s different than, say, hiring a major motion graphics house. The thing is, those guys can go buy and learn Flash too, so they generally got that going on for them.

Next, there’s what we like to call the confluence of industries. Actually, I don’t know that anyone’s ever actually used that term, but that’s what it is. Here in digital internetland, animation is coming at us from all sides. You have the motion picture and television animation stuff – the Methods and Digital Domains of the world. Then there’s game animation, which is a whole different suite of tools, owing to the fact that their animation does more than just play a series of pictures in sequence. So we wrestle with game animation and the tools there, and how they relate to the games we make, and where the game industry is going. Then you have scientific animation packages, mathematical modelling stuff, things like that. And, finally, you have the real world architectural modelling, product design stuff.

All of these schools of animation and suites of tools have something to learn. All of them are applicable to what we do in some way. None of them especially talk to each other. We have to talk to all of them.

We spend a lot of time wrestling with what this means for our projects. The answers aren’t all there. But we do believe there is some interesting confluence beginning to happen, and we do believe every field has something to teach us. Therefore, we employ animators from all walks of life – from the music video world. From the science world. From the product design world. They don’t get along that well, but they’re working on it. Ha.