Our April 2016 Animation Company Update

April 12, 2016 2 Replies

I thought I would send our April 2016 Animation Company Update a little earlier this month. As some of you might know my wife and I have a little baby girl due May 1st, so incase she decides to come early I’m trying to clear my schedule towards the end of the month as much as possible. I have also had a ton going on with the company, so there is plenty to update all of you on.

Bink:
We are getting into the final stages on finishing the first episode. We are still working on final lighting tweaks, and surfacing/fur adjustments before we start final rendering. To give you an idea on how long rendering can take we rendered a test frame, and it took 3 hours for it to render. If you do some quick math based off of this you come to a very scary answer. Our short is only 30 seconds in length, and we are doing 24 frames a second. For all you artistic people like me who suck at math, there are a total of 720 frames in the entire 30 second short(someone please check my math, seriously I’m bad). If each of those frames take 3 hours to render it will take us 2,160 hours to render them. Which means it will only take us around 3 months to render everything. Yikes!!! The good news is not all frames will take 3 hours, and our amazing lighter Graham Cunningham is working to bring down those render times. We will also have multiple computers rendering the frames which will divide the amount of actual time it will take. With all this said we are currently aiming for a middle of May release.

Articles:
Other exciting things going on around Bink is we are getting some attention from the press. We already have two articles which are being written, one planned for a later date, and 2 which are interested but want to see the short first.

The first article which will come out is from my alma mater’s Alumni Magazine. They like to do articles about their alumni, and what they are doing after college. We are expecting to see this article out near the end of April, and I will be sure to share it with all of you when it comes out. Check out The University of Toledo Alumni Magazine to see past articles they have done on other alumni.

The May 15th issue of 3D World Magazine will have a feature article about Bink which I’m very excited about. They are the world’s best-selling magazine for CG artists which will give Bink, the company, and the crew a lot of great exposure. They also want to do a second article in the next issue(June) which will be a tips and tricks article about the animation of Bink. Having both these articles will give us exposer both before and after we release the first episode. I’m excited to get to share Bink with as many people as possible.

Both Animation Magazine and Cartoon Brew said they are interested in doing an article about Bink, but want to see it first. I also plan to reach out to other magazines to try and create as much excitement as possible around Bink.

Project-MMM:
The animated web-series we are working on for our client is coming along nicely. We are almost finished with the animation for the first episode, and about 30% done with lighting. We have also started work on the 2nd episode, and currently working on modeling, surfacing, rigging, and storyboards. I am directing and producing this first episode, but for the 2nd episode I will be focusing only on the producing. I asked Jared White if he would take on the directing roll, and he happily accepted the responsibility. He has been writing the stories, so he already has a great understanding of the world and its characters. I’m looking forward to seeing where he will take it.

Logo:
I had a new logo designed for the company. While I still plan to use the more detailed logo in situations which allow higher detail I wanted something simpler for use in other situations. For example printing a fully colored logo wasted a lot of ink where this newer simpler logo is more ideal in this situation. I was using the silhouette cut out version, but this did not feel very clean and professional to me. I brought Samadara Ginige on board to redesign the logo, and I think she did a great job. Let me know your thoughts on the new logo.

Store:
If you are subscribed to the companies Newsletter you would have seen we now have an online store to sell merchandise(if not you can subscribe at the bottom of the company’s website). I have a few things on there now, but plan to keep adding to it. I setup the store through Spreadshirts.com, since I did not want to worry about keeping inventory.

The goal for the store was to give people a way to buy company merchandise while keeping the costs as low as possible. The markup on each shirt is at most $2, but mostly around $0.33, and I only added a markup to keep the sales price ending with $xx.99. While I think my little animation company is amazing I’m not expecting thousands of people to flock to the store to buy our merchandise. In order to make money off the merchandise I would either have to buy in large quantities to get the bulk discounts which would allow me to keep the prices low, but increase my margins. Or I would have to increase the price of the shirts to increase the margins, but who wants to buy a $50 t-shirt? I instead decided to keep the prices low, and not take much(if anything) on the sale. If I find a certain shirt is selling in high quantities I might buy it in bulk to decrease my costs and increase my margins, but for now I just wanted to offer some cool Eric Miller Animation merchandise to those loyal fans(thanks Mom and Dad).

Please check out the store and let me know what you would love to see in it!

Well, this about covers everything we have going on. I hope you enjoyed the update, and please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for me.

If you have not already, please join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog. Also, if you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

March 17, 2016 Leave a reply

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Another busy week at Eric Miller Animation Studios. If you have been following our other social media accounts you might have noticed our new title logo for Bink. It was designed by the very talented Rachel Wan who also did the original concept art for Bink(both images below). I was very excited to get to work with Rachel, and once again very happy with her beautiful work.

We are getting very close to completing the first episode, and we finally got the fur on Bink to work properly. The thing with CG animation is while part of it is artistic there is also a very large part of it which is very technical. At larger studios they often have specialized people to setup the pipeline, and make sure everything works technically, but at smaller studios artists often required to be masters of both. I was very fortunate to have artists who are both extremely artistically talented, but also have a decent understanding of the technical side.

The software we use often does not work the way it is expected, and this forces us to trouble shoot the issues which is what slowed down the process. The bigger studios also build tools to make sure all the different programs work well together, but we are using the software pretty much right off the shelf.

In this 30 second episode of Bink there are only 5 shots, but since we are aiming for such a high render quality it will take awhile to render each one of these shots. To add to this we have glass, fur, and reflections which always increases render times. Depending on how things go it might take us until the end of April to wrap everything up.

We are also in full production on Project-MMM. We hit a bit of a hurdle at the end of last week when the animator working on the project informed me he could not continue. This made my Friday a bit hectic as I scrambled to replace him. I decided it be best to bring on a few animators and split up the shots to move through everything quicker.

The process of bringing on a new artist is not without its own challenges, and added work for me. It involves emails, and phone calls with potential artists trying to find the right people who are also interested and available. Then once you have someone interested I have to prepare a Non-discloser agreement before I can share any details with them. Once I get the signed NDA then I can send them over more details about the project. If it is something they are still interested in helping out on I then prepare a contract for them, and send it over to them.

Once they sign the contract then it starts the process of getting them setup on the show. First I need to get them access to our file system, then adding them to our asset management software(shotgun), then sending them guides on how our file structure is setup, where to find all the files, and were to save them. Also I need to get them up to speed on the animation style, and all the characters’ personalities.

Multiply this by the number of artists I’m bringing on, and considering some of them get through half the process and decide not to take the position you might imagine it can be very time consuming. It often takes a few days for each artist depending on how quickly the artist gets back to me after each step along the way. It is times like this I wish I had a Human Resource Manager to handle this process, so I can focus on other parts of running the business.

Speaking of, I need to get back to work, but I will leave you with some Irish inspiration.

“May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back, May the sun shine warm upon your face, The rains fall soft upon your fields and, Until we meet again”
~ An Irish Blessing

“As you slide down the banister of life, may the splinters never point in the wrong direction!”
~ Irish Blessing

” You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.”
~ Irish Proverb

2014 Year-End Review: The First 6 Months of Running an Animation Studio

December 29, 2014 4 Replies

I would like to get in a habit of doing an internal review of how my company did at the end of each year. It will be my opportunity to see what I have been able to accomplish in the last year, or not accomplish. Things can get pretty busy while running the day to day of a business, and it is easy to loose track of where you are, and where you are going. By looking at where you have gone in a year’s time you can get a better idea of how things are progressing, and see if you are heading in the right direction.

If I go back a year from now things were very different for me. My wife and I recently moved into our first house, and were in the process of trying to get settled in. At the same time my wife was 8 months pregnant with our son and on bed rest due to some complications. There was a fear that our son might come early, and we were hoping we would at least stay where he was at until 2014. I was still working at DreamWorks Animation as a production supervisor on the movie Home!. At the same time I had been planning my exit to start my own company, but it was 1/2 a year away before I would actually set off on that voyage.

On April 9th was when I posted my first blog entry “Start Here“, and thus began my blogging journey. Although I started writing it, and rewriting it before then it was on that date it became public. Sure, I had no readers and you could barely find it with a Google search if you knew what to search for, but I still consider it a big step forward. It was the first time my plan to start my own company was out there for others to know about. Writing a blog was also a new challenge for me. I was well aware that I was not the best writer, but I was determined to share my story. I hopped that by keeping at it that I would improve my writing. I can’t say that my writing is any better then when I started(I will let you be the judge of that), but my speed of writing has increased. When I started it would take me days just to write one post. I would often start it one day, work on it a second day, start over on the third day, and eventually get it to a point I was not embarrassed to posting it. Then after it was posted I would often find errors, and go back and fix them, or rewrite it again. I don’t know if I have more confidence now, or if I just don’t worry as much about what people will think if it is not perfect. After all I think that is what people like about blogs, is that they are raw, and unedited. I have gained more readers then that first day I posted. I now get on average around 100 views per post, and have 26 subscribers to my blog. My last post had 160 views, so hopefully I can get more of those 160 readers to subscribe to my blog. The day that I got the most traffic was the day I announced on Facebook my departure from DreamWorks and my plan to start my own animation company. In a single day I got around 900 views.

As many of you know it was July 3 when I ended my 7 year career at DreamWorks to venture off on my own. It seems much longer ago then only 6 months, since I feel I made a lot of progress. Not only was I able to get one project in this time, but I was able to also get a second project. I have lined up several possible projects for the new year, but nothing set in stone. I have a lot of work to do internally next year to help get the company in a better position to find new clients, and avenues that I had not had the time to explore fully yet.

I have been able to make a lot of great contacts that I feel will help me move my business forward. I have also learned a great deal from the experiences I have had so far. These first two projects helped me iron out the kinks in many of my administrative processes, and I am better prepared to start up new projects.

If I was on the TV show Shark Tank they would not care about all of the above, and they would be asking me how the business did financially? Well, in the first 6 months in business I’m happy to say that the company had a total revenue of a quarter of a million dollars. It seems crazy to me that I had that much money come into the business. I would love to say that I got to keep all of that, but the majority of it went to pay the amazingly talented team of artists I work with. Some of it then went to pay for other business expenses including accountants, attorney fees, and equipment. And now Uncle Sam wants 40-50% of what is left for self employment taxes. I will still end the year with a profit, but my wife won’t be quitting her job anytime soon. I also don’t have any projects locked in for next year, so I don’t know how long the remaining money will need to last.

I got to finish the year with a brand new look for my business with the new logo and concept art piece done by Jason Scheier. I’m very excited about this, and hope to get other work like this done for the business. I will be personally updating my website soon with a new look, and putting together a demo reel to showcase the work we have done so far. All in all, it has been an amazing first 6 months, and I can’t wait to see what 2015 has in store for the company.

Whether you have been reading my blog from the very beginning, or just joining my journey, I want to thank you for taking this journey with me. I hope that this year was everything that you hopped for, and that 2015 will be the happiest, healthiest, and most fortunate year for you to-date.

A New Look for Eric Miller Animation Studios

December 23, 2014 Leave a reply

You may have noticed the beautiful artwork at the top of this page. If you remember from my previous post by the name “Logo“, I talked about how I designed my company’s logo, but eventually was going to get someone more talented to redesign it. Well, I was fortunate enough to get my extremely talented friend Jason Scheier to do the redesign as well as do this beautiful concept art. In the above mentioned post I talked about having a reoccurring vision, and that was where my logo came from. I never had the talent to bring it to paper, but I believe Jason did an amazing job at it.

The new logo he provided gives me several different options of what I can do with it, since different situations might require different looks. I’m very excited for the new look for my company, and have already made business cards with the new designs.

I think it would be nice to turn this into a nice motion graphic by adding some movement in the water, wind in the sails, and the ship slowly moving in front of the moon. There will be a lot of fun things I will do with this.

I’m a little behind on my post, since I had some technical issues with my WordPress site. When you are the owner of a company of one, you end up also having to wear the IT guy hat. It is one of those hats that does not fit to well, but with the help of a very nice support forum volunteer named James Huff I was able to get the site back up and running. Thank you Mr. Huff!

We are moments away from finishing the last work we have on the Toys”R”Us projects I have been working on since I started the company in July. I won’t know what to do with myself with all the extra time I will have. I think I will take the rest of the year off to relax, and meet up with some people I was not able to before. Starting in the new year I will be creating a demo reel with all the recent work I have had, and getting things in motion to find my next big client. I certainly have learned a lot from this first project that will help with my future projects.

I’m also planning on doing a big redesign of my website now that I have some beautiful artwork, and a pretty large amount of VFX work to show off.

Well, as Christmas Eve is almost here I will bring this post to an end. I hope you all have an amazing holiday(no matter what you celebrate), and enjoy your time with family and friends. I plan to write one more post in 2014 that will reflect on the year, and all that happened in the first 6 months in business.

Logo

July 21, 2014 1 Reply

The end of last week was really busy, and I did not have a chance to write my blog post until now. I was on set for the commercials I’m post supervising on, so that took up a lot of my time on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It was a great experience to see how everything worked on the live action side, and I was surprised at the number of people on the crew. You would think I would’t be surprised coming from the animation world where there are around 300 to 400 people on a crew, but I guess I thought it be a smaller crew since it’s a commercial and not a movie. I was trying to remember back to my film classes in college to remember what all the different positions on a film crew did, but things have changed since then. For example the focus puller did not stand next to the camera to adjust the focus. Instead he had a monitor that he watched with a handheld device that remotely adjusted the focus. Many of the positions were the same, but they never introduced me to who was doing what, so it was all a guessing game to figure out who was doing what. I tried to meet as many of the crew that I could, and find out what roll they played on set. It was a very good crew, and a great group of people that I would love to get to work with again. The footage turned out great, and I can’t wait to see what it looks like after all the effects and SFX are added. This week my focus is on trying to make sure we hit all the deadlines for the After Effects work we are doing on the commercials. It is a very quick turnaround, but as long as we don’t get a lot of notes we should be able to hit our dates. We are working on a few clips each week, and this will go on for the next few weeks until we finish all of them.

Later today I have an interview with a reporter from the Canton Repository which is the newspaper from my hometown in Ohio. They are doing an article on my adventure in starting my own animation company. I guess not many people from Ohio start these kind of companies. Their plan is for it to be in the paper on Thursday, August 7th, and I will be sure to link to the online version it in a future blog post.

Some of you have been asking about my logo so I wanted to explain the meaning behind it. I have always had these reoccurring “visions” that I would see in my head when I was younger. I always tried to figure out where they were from thinking they must be from something I have seen before. For example, one of them is a closeup of a man holding a glowing orb between his open palms. It is complete darkness besides the light from the glowing orb. It is a very powerful image, and it was so realistic that it felt like a memory more then a dream. The other one was of a night on a calm ocean with the moon close to the horizon, and there is a galleon sailing away towards the moon. There is a cool light coming from the moon, and a warm light coming from the lanterns on the ship. Not only was the imagery so real, but I could hear the ocean breeze, and the ship creaking, and moving through the water. It was as if I could feel the cool air on my skin, and taste the salty air. It was enough to get my attention the first time, but as I mentioned it was reoccurring. I tried to recreate the images with paint, but I was never talented enough to capture the emotion onto paper. So when I was thinking of a logo for my company I was inspired by the ship and the moon. I made the logo with some found images and photoshopped it all together. I’m hoping I can one day get someone more talented to redo it, but it works for now. I thought it would be fun to use this ship theme, and it can develop further as my company grows. They already refer to the people that work on movies as “the crew”, so I figured it would not be that much of a stretch. Haha. If you have been to our home you may have noticed the nautical theme in my office, and now you know the reason for it. You now also know the story behind my logo. Please let me know your thoughts about the logo in the comments below.

If you have not already, I hope you will join me on my journey by subscribing to my blog. If you have any thoughts or advice I would love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to leave me any comments below. Otherwise, be sure to stay connected with me on Twitter (@MillerAnimation). Only Time Will Tell.

The greatest success story or the most public failure

The greatest success story or the most public failure

Logo

Our April 2016 Animation Company Update

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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2014 Year-End Review: The First 6 Months of Running an Animation Studio

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A New Look for Eric Miller Animation Studios

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Logo

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