Hi Everyone,

Hell it's been an age since I've written one of these things, but I thought it about time since I've pretty much been a none entity on DA recently.

So here's the crack, the past couple of months have been hectic almost nightmarishly so. First off in mid May I finished my contract at Rare which unfortunatley, because of the recent redundancies at the company, wasn't renewed. It was a real shame I learned alot at that company and it gave me a fantastic opportunity as a foot in the door for my future career as a professional animator, it was also hinted that if things were different (economically) myself and my boyfriend Alex (who worked as an animator there with me) would have been hired permanently, or at least that was the original plan. I will really miss all the friends I made there and will definatley keep in touch with the guys I hung out with. It was a fantastic experience I'll never forget and a great first year in the industry.

By the time I finished Rare Alex and me had already sent out about 17 job applications (mostly speculative) either directly or through agencies (oh my advice about agents if anyone is thinking to do the same thing is AVOID, they don't do anything that you can't do yourself and in some cases they put off companies because the company has to pay them a finders fee) and we hadn't heard anything back. Games companies are notorious for just ignoring applications I later found out, in some cases, it may be months after you sent the original application before you get a reply, if at all. So we were pretty much jobless and both starting to panic about what to do next, shelf stacking at Tesco's supermarket was discussed and even *wince* selling our souls and reapplying as mobile phone sales/shop assistants to pay the bills in the mean time till we got back on track.

However it turns out that that old saying "it's not what you know, but who you know" turns out to be pretty much bang on. Our mate Jez (who we used to work at Rare with now works at one of the companies we applied for) gave us a call to catch up and see how we were doing about finding a job, when we relayed our tale of woe, he decided to take it upon himself to pester the head of animation daily until he cracked and finally checked out our showreels (apparently he gets dozens daily so no wonder studio's never gets back to you, also the bastard agency had sent our reel to him even though we had sent direct and told them not to send there, and he was pretty much ignoring all agency applicants) And apparently because we're possibly the most spawny couple of animators known in existence we both got offered interviews and an hour after jobs.

So here we are at TT Fusion full time bone fide Animators with a permanent contract, I actually can't believe we got so lucky to be hired by the same company again. At the moment we're doing a little bit of animation for the new lego rockband but we've mostly been helping export cutscene animations into the game engine as it's due for beta soon and it's all hands on deck. I'm really enjoying it so far everyone's extremely friendly and everytime there's been sun it's been pretty much half the studio down to the pub on evening for a chat and a pint, it's a great studio and everyone seems to be buzzing about the projects there making and really enjoying there work which is great. Also my head of animation is pretty cool too, Matt, he's really enthusiastic about animation which is great and he's done some awesome projects in the past (he was a stop motion animator before he got into games and worked on the corpse bride as well as other projects) in fact there's quite a few stop motion veterans that were ex cosgrove hall/aardman animators so there's quite a pool of traditional animation talent here which is exciting.

Holy crap I've managed to ramble through my entire lunch break, 100 internets and my deepest sympathies and apologies to anyone who managed to get to the bottom of this ridiculously long journal entry without their brains seeping out of their ears, as I refuse to edit or spell check it because I need to go out for a smoke before I get back to work..... er don't smoke kiddies.

Cheers x