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ProMotion Studios is a Sydney, Australia based 3D art house founded by husband and wife team James and Kim Neale. They specialize in the design, illustration and animation of their characters and environment. Their recent project, an animated short called Lighthouse has impressed animation fans all over the world. IT’S ART is pleased to bring you this interview with James Neale, one of jury for The Control Of Nature Challenge, and we hope you find his knowledge, experience and success as inspiring as we did.

IT’S ART: Can you give us a brief history of the studio and its philosophy?

James Neale: ProMotion Studios began in late 1999 when my wife and I decided to collaborate on creating 3D illustration for advertising. At the time I was a 3D animator and she was a commercial artist, so our skills complimented each other quite well for that purpose. In our down time between freelance gigs we worked to build a portfolio of 3D renders which we bundled together and took to various illustration agents in Sydney, New York and London. Our work was solid enough to get good representation so we started getting paid work and by the end of 2000 we were pretty much creating 3D artwork together fulltime. Since I was originally an animator, I wanted to show our clients that we could handle that work as well. Once a character is modeled and textured for an illustration, it's not really that much further away to animate it.
We put together a few pitches and finally won a big job for Bridgestone Tyres to animate their Gecko for a series of TV commercials. It was a fantastic opportunity to get some exposure and from that job, we got more and more animation work. During that time, we had been working with several freelancers remotely but we slowly got busy enough to take on permanent employees, which allowed us to tackle larger projects. I suppose it is our passion to create characters with personality, so we're constantly pushing that area of our work to try and build a world class folio of appealing characters.

IA: What makes ProMotion different from other studios?

JN: From my experience in Sydney, our studio is really relaxed compared to others. Deadlines are usually reasonable, no-one has needed to do overtime for about 8 months now and everyone here is really very interested in developing tools and technique, so any downtime is tremendously productive. I'm a big proponent of open source software and I am impressed daily with the community surrounding that philosophy. The artists in the studio have embraced that too, as they can see the vast benefits of that route. To my knowledge, we're the only studio in Australia using Blender in production, which isn't really an advantage in regards to finding artists, but unique software-wise.

Another difference is that we have a solid base of skills in illustration, which gives us an advantage when quoting on work for an entire campaign. Most CG studios don't tend to be able to recognize that illustration is a very different animal, and that the client's requirement for a poster doesn't mean just "increase resolution and click render." A lot of thought goes into our static work, guided by Kim, and it has kept many clients coming back for more.

There is also a cost advantage to the client on a 3D campaign because if we've done the posters, we would have already built most of the assets needed to produce a TV commercial. This means we can vastly undercut our competitor on the same job, yet still able to do equivalent (or better!!) animated work.

IA: One of the recent jobs you've done, Lighthouse, has been praised by a large number of people. Can you tell us about this production?

JN: That piece was a real example of how a short film can be made to everyone's satisfaction, yet be completely enjoyable at the same time. We had such a good experience on that film that we've benchmarked it as the ultimate goal of all projects we win. I did a full breakdown of the project in another article but overall I can say that this film has allowed us to reach a much larger audience than any commercial work we've done and has given the studio a reputation amongst directors and film makers that otherwise would have never heard of us, or cared to. So as much as the film was enjoyable for us, the benefits of production (budget and fun) were far outweighed by the exposure we've received from having done it. We have our fingers crossed for our festival entries so we can reach an even larger audience with it.