Act3animation is a studio that likes to move between the genres from time to time. Their processes, their pipeline, are similar to those studios that fill their downtime between the paying jobs, with short films, like Blur Studio’s ‘Gopher Broke’. “So it came as a surprise to some to find out that we were doing just that,” says Thomas Schober, the Executive Producer at Act3animation, “making a short film, with writers and storyboards, and they thought we were just a game film company.”
Producing work based in very contrasting arenas of animation has brought with it praise from the many different client bases in the industry. Melbourne-based Act3animation seems to have rung praise from the game and short film areas, and they now want to generate interest from the feature playground.
After thirteen years of doing TVCs, titles and series for broadcast, Act3animation began to find their foothold in gaming cinematics. Their milestone was in 1999 when game developer Blue Tongue wanted a full CG cinematic done for E3 in the theme of ‘Starship Troopers’. “It was a job that fell in our laps,” adds Schober. “A phone call, you know, ‘Can you do a one-minute trailer for E3 in full CG?’, when we’d never even thought about that side of the industry. So why not, it sounded like a lot of fun.”
There were very few problems finding teams to work on these kinds of projects. “This work had a pretty high level of satisfaction attached to it,” Schober adds. “We weren’t animating bananas for a cereal brand with three creative directors above you. We were finally working with people called game publishers and game developers, doing some cool stuff. This was suddenly a very exciting shift in what Act3 did to bring in the cash-flow. Everybody suddenly enjoyed coming to work.”
Within the local industry, the Act3animation team became the ‘game animation guys’. Thomas admits the company can sometimes be pigeon-holed within the industry as exclusively a game FMV studio, as “game animation can be seen by film people as a ghetto.” After the ‘Troopers’ job won AEAF awards for best animation, more similar, larger and more ambitious projects came their way.
