Chickens Assemble

Hello!

This is a brief update as I have been speaking one on one with Isabel several times and finally brought it back to my fellow Chickens and thought people would be interested in some news!

The vision has been rekindled and some fat has been trimmed from our original blueprint. The answer was...embarrassingly simple.

We're making an animation studio...but we also want to provide services to ND creatives and individuals.

The business plan has been trialed and shown to be successful in small, boutique studios such as Studio Meala, and Glitch (Glitch most recently had a massive success with The Amazing Digital Circus, jumping from web series to cinema premiere.)

We are currently in progress to bring in an ex-Meala animation director. She was let go unceremoniously because of a clashing start date, after several years with the company and playing a pivotal role in the studio's founding. She has most recently been spending her time producing short films and teaching classes/workshops. She is a prime candidate for our project and has been introduced to the idea briefly and expressed support. Eli will be communicating with them this week.

We are also bringing in an animation producer, an Irish dual citizen (like me) and a trans woman from Los Angeles. Roughly 70% of trans people are autistic, and she has proved herself to be ideologically aligned with the idea in collaboration with Eli. Ultimately this will boil down to whether or not she's available and willing to take a leap of faith.

We have fallen naturally into our current roles, although really there are only 3 of us at the minute, but hopefully soon there will be 5.

Greta - extremely business conscious and aware of trends and hurdles for studios. Has worked higher up with tons of studios in Ireland and has seen them first hand make many mistakes. She is also the most talented designer I've ever met and has a 6th sense for what distributors are looking for.

Eli - Extremely well connected in particular with more underground artist scenes. Extremely talented as well and has a good reputation in the industry. They are our liaison with department heads who would be aligned with our goals. Essentially they are our 'based' detector.

Greg - I'm the organiser. I keep us on track and follow through on proposals. I'm leveraging my contacts and knowledge gained from area co-ordinating the animation union these past two years and now that some of the more attention demanding tasks of running AWI are on someone else, I can FINALLY start putting my proper weight behind this.

Our next order of business will be to get a domain name so we can all have @chickencoop.ie email addresses. This is extremely important as studios, screen ireland, etc, have a bias against normal @gmail etc email addresses. In general it looks much more professional and will keep correspondence neater.

My next post will be an update regarding our blueprint and new email addresses. We are looking at Tog Hackerspace – The Dublin Hackerspace as a potential model for our non-animation studio services.

Cheers!

-Gregory