Colm over at InFactAh is organising a Christmas Blogger get-together tonight in the Market Bar in Dublin from 7pm onwards and all are welcome. I’m going to be there and there seems to be a nice group of others signed up so it should be a good laugh.
I went to the blogger meet-up this time last year and, once I’d managed to find everyone, I had a great night.
Hope to see you there!
It’s been about a month and a half since I set up my Portfolio site and I’ve been watching my stats with a curious eye ever since. So far I’m realising that I have no clue about how to get high rankings in Google, I know nothing about meta tags or keyword density or optimisation, although I see them mentioned everywhere. If you type my name into google I think my portfolio site doesn’t appear until half way down page 3 of the results and that’s not even a link to the actual site, it’s just my CV document. As for other terms like Irish Animation or Freelance Animator or anything else that might bring a possible client my way, well I don’t think I even make the charts. So basically, until I can wrap my head around all that technical stuff and get some idea of what I need to do to get my site up there nobody’s going to find it right?
Well, actually no. Thanks to this blog, I’m getting some traffic. Even with my rubbish marketing of my portfolio site it’s still getting quite a few hits every day and if I look again at the google search, gingerpixel.com is the number one result for anyone searching for me. A large portion of my traffic comes from people looking for animated related searches even though I don’t blog about animation too much. So, I’m thinking that maybe that ought to change. Now I’m not saying I’m never going to blog about anything else ever again…I’ll still be taking photographs and moaning about Eircom and boring you with stories about Eve…but expect to see a little bit more about the animation stuff. Just a little heads up.
Now, on a whim, I decided to go searching for other Irish animators who are blogging. I expected to find loads because there are just so many Irish animators all over the place. You’d be hard pressed to find an animation or games studio anywhere in the world that didn’t employ at least one Irish person. Thanks to wonderful colleges like Ballyfermot and Dun Laoghaire Irish animators have a pretty good reputation. So, I was a little disappointed when I didn’t find as many as I’d thought I would. Anyway, I’ve put together a little list of those I did find and if anyone can point me to any that I’ve missed please let me know because I’d love to add them.
Donnachada Daly
This one was an easy find since he’s been on my Blogroll for a good while now. He’s an animator at Dreamworks and has worked on Shrek, Madagascar, Over the Hedge and Flushed Away. I visit his blog pretty much daily to see his latest drawings of those wonderful curvy ladies.
Conánn Fitzpatrick
Although he’s not in animation anymore he did work for Sullivan Bluth back in the day. He has some amazing paintings on his site of Irish seascapes. As well as some other work that show his animation roots.
Aiden McAteer
Aiden is another animator who’s left Ireland for pastures greener this time in London. He did work on one of my favourite cartoons, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends while he was living here though. His blog hasn’t been updated in awhile which is a pity since I was really enjoying his sketches.
Dermot O’Connor
Dermot hails from Arklow and was another Bluth animator who left to find his animation fortune in the States. He’s a Flash animator nowadays and has some really clever games on his site. I remember playing his Gulf War game a few years back but I had no idea it was created by an Irish guy.
Garrett O’Donoghue
A fellow ex-Ballyfermot student Garrett’s got some wonderful doodles on his blog, he’s more into the layout/storyboarding side of things but it’s still the animation business. He was down in Limerick until recently and is now over in New York. It’s sad but so many of the animators I managed to locate aren’t in Ireland anymore.
Fran Power
Well, strictly speaking Fran has a blog but so far he hasn’t gotten past the first post which is a pity because I love the animation I’ve seen on the main site in particular Santa’s Kingdom (must be the time of year).
And that’s all I could find. Great blogs but just nowhere near as many as I’d hoped and not a single female among them. In fact I couldn’t find any indication that any of the 7 girls I graduated with are still in the animation business. Mind you, it’s harder to find girls because we have a bad habit of changing our names.
There were a few more animators who had News pages that they update occasionally but I didn’t think they were strictly blogs so I haven’t included them. One blog I follow isn’t by an Irish animator but I want to mention it because it’s about the making of the Cartoon Saloon‘s first feature animated film, Brendan and the Secret of Kells, which is happening down in Kilkenny. I drool over the character designs on a regular basis and this is a film I can’t wait to see when it comes out: The Blog of Kells
As for the Irish Animators I’d love to see with a blog, (or even a webpage in the case of the first three)…on my wishlist would be:
Jason Ryan
Eamonn Butler
Richard Baneham
Niall O’Loughlin
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Update: Ask And You Shall Receive
I got an email from Niall O’Louglin this morning and it seems he has just started blogging! I definitely need to start wishing for more stuff. So I can now add Niall to my list:
Niall O’Loughlin
You may already know of Niall through his hilarious and uncanny caricatures of celebrities. He’s been on the Late Late Show and his work appears regularly in magazines and newspapers. But he’s also been an animator since he worked with Sullivan Bluth back in the late 80’s. So go check out his new blog and leave him a comment. I’m really looking forward to seeing what he posts.
Well, I wasn’t going to say anything until (or is that unless) I actually finished, but I’m involved in this crazy NaNoWriMo thing. If you don’t know what that is it’s a mad November tradition when thousands of people around the world sign up and attempt to finish a 50,000 word novel in a month. So, that’s where my writing has been happening of late (I spent the last few weeks of October trying to prepare but in the end it’s turned out that I’m winging it anyway). Even writing this post I’m thinking “hey, this is about 300 odd words I should be adding to the novel.” Sinéad rumbled me though so I’m risking jinxing myself to blog about it.
I’m going to hazard a generalisation here and guess that a lot of bloggers harbour a secret wish to write a novel. I know it won’t apply to everyone but I’m guessing there’s a lot of us. I hate admitting it, mostly because it seems like everyone and their maiden aunt is working on the next New York Times bestseller these days and, let’s face it, until you’ve done it you’re just one of a million wannabes. Sinéad’s post about blogging and writing struck a chord with me because I know that I’ve been using blogging as an excuse to avoid writing anything longer. A blog post is quick and you get instant feedback and you move on to the next subject, like a quick writing fix. Actually sitting down day after day to extract something long enough to call a novel is a totally different animal.
So NaNo is my way of seeing if I’ve got it in me to write something of that length. I’m not even going for something of quality because what I’m writing so far is awful! I’m so glad I don’t have time to go back and read through it because it’s making me cringe as it’s going down on the page. But hey…it’s going down on the page and that’s progress. OK, I’m a little behind…you need to hit about 1700 words a day to make 50,000 by the end of the month and I’m about 2000 words behind schedule. I’m not finding it easy at all, every word is like blood from a stone and avoiding the word count button is proving almost impossible, but I’m still optimistic. Check back with me in a couple of weeks and we’ll see if that’s still the case.
I have to tip my hat to Ann Scanlan who is also NaNo-ing. She has put me to shame since she’s already gone past 30,000 words and it’s only the end of the first week! Ann…when do you sleep?
I was trying to remember how it was when the World Trade Centre towers were hit five years ago; before we had the terms like “9/11” or “the War on Terror” in our vocabulary, when my co-workers and I stood in the canteen at work and watched the little tv in the corner not really understanding what we were seeing. On the day that it happened it was more about who it was happening to. Since then it has slowly become about who was behind it and the response and the blame and the war. In my random searching I found The 2996 Project.
It was set up by blogger DC Roe and his idea was to assign each of the 2996 victims who died during the attacks, either on the planes or at the towers, to different bloggers who would find out all they could about their assigned person and write a memorial for them. More than 3ooo bloggers have signed up and a list of the participants with links to their posts can be found here. The instructions were for the bloggers to stay away from talking about the terrorists or the reasons behind the attacks and mostly they do. There’s a huge diversity of information, some people were easy to eulogise while others had little more than a photo and a job description to remember them by. There’s a lot of talk of them being heroes who died for their country but I’m struck more by how ordinary they all were.
Note: It seems that the blog has been swamped…if you’re having trouble loading it or it’s down, try again a little later.
One year ago today I started this blog. I was seriously sleep-deprived and was trying to juggle returning to work with breastfeeding and sleep-training a ten-month-old. I didn’t get out much and my only sanity some days would come from reading other bloggers who were going through similar things. So I decided to try and start one of my own, never thinking anyone would read it. At best I hoped I could use it to keep in touch with old friends and teach myself a little bit about having a webpage.
A year on and I’m still here. I’m even managing to post regularly sometimes. I’ve met loads of fellow bloggers, written over one hundred posts, been interviewed on the radio and even been nominated for a blog award! All from this little page.
So Happy Birthday blog 🙂