about making strange frame

I’ve been ranting on the Hawaii Tech blog because building a business is not simply about money, it is about building a community and enriching people’s lives. I tried to edit it into a more useable form:

You need to come to the local high schools here and take a look into the eyes of these kids and their parents. Most of the jobs are in the waning tourism industry. The unemployment rate is over 10% here (East Hawaii) and growing – Where is their hope for a better life? Where are their options?

When we started this production the economically prudent thing to do would have been to do the production in Eastern Europe. Due to the cheaper labor and other costs, our $2.5 million feature would have cost under $1 million and we had an offer from the government of Bulgaria putting up 1/2 of the total!

But that’s not the reason I developed this style of animation and this production pipeline. It is not the reason why I go to high schools and the local colleges to teach workshops and classes. The reason in a nutshell: I want to create something sustainable here so that the youth (including my own) can be inspired and our best and brightest can be encouraged to stay here. Think Globally. Act Locally, eh?

The UH Student who now does most of my high end Maya stuff – I hired him back when he was 16 at Pahoa High. His mom couldn’t keep him in the same house for more than a few months at a time. He built his own computer, but had no place to plug it in most of his time in high school. He was helping out by bagging groceries at $8/hr! Now, 3 years later, he is writing render engines, paying his way through college with his wages from my company and, recently, was flown to the mainland to compete in a software competition.

I’ll never forget when I hired this 14 year old Hilo High School student for an internship in digital design. Her mother came to me with tears in her eyes saying, “When I was her age I could draw as well as her and I drew all the time, but there were no opportunities here, so when I graduated I joined the military, then came back, got married, had kids, and never drew again. Thank you for my daughter. Thank you from me.”

Almost all my employees and interns have stories like this.

With a whole lot of creativity, passion and brains, we are creating a small miracle here. We hope to make it grow bigger.

In this past holiday season, one of my animators gave me a gift and on the card he wrote: “Thank you for giving me the job of my dreams.”

Dudes, that’s what this is all about.

The Making of "strange frame", Part 1