In the first of a new series of online diaries charting his journey from disastrous vocational [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[Delete] to career reboot, Craig Crane reveals the highs and lows of trying to get a job in 3D in your thirties

“How the hell did I end up here?” I thought to myself while having a late-night JD and coke in Soho‘s Marquis of Granby earlier this week. The pub was our local back in the day when I had a job as a full-time puppeteer at Nickelodeon. That was just over four years ago, and yet here I am, still with the same crowd of regulars – yet somehow I feel different.

So am I back in London because the lure of kids‘ TV was just too much to resist? Well, no. I may be working in Soho again, but only as the result of an incredible journey from puppets to pixels. No, scrap that… it wasn‘t a journey, as I didn‘t really leave the front door. It was more of a reinvention. I subjected myself to a gruelling and often frustrating regime of self-discipline just so that I could pursue the career I should actually have taken up some ten years ago, before every Tom, Dick and Bournemouth graduate decided that they wanted to get in on the act.

So, what happened in 2002? Where am I now? And what advice can I give to anyone who finds themselves in the same boat: attempting to land a full-time position in 3D at nearly twice the age that most students start looking for their first jobs. Well, let‘s start at the beginning – although, at the time, I was convinced that it was actually the end.

CUT TO
Daytime. Nickelodeon TV, a kids‘ channel in the midst of London‘s Soho media district. Although the Viacom flagship has seen better and funnier days, the old guard are still mostly in place. One of the original presenters, a puppet by the name of Bogey, is called into the office for a chat. Well, not the puppet per se, but his puppeteer. That would be me. It‘s the first day back after the Christmas break.

BOSS
Hi, welcome back. Did you have a good Christmas?

ME
Yeah, not bad, you know… usual stuff: family, kids, socks and so on.

BOSS
Sounds great! Well, we are not renewing your contract. We feel that after some ten years of service, we would like to change the channel around a bit and we have no place in our plans for Bogey or any of your other characters.

ME
Shit.

BOSS
Yeah! So, Happy New Year, you‘ll be fine and have a good show this afternoon.

ME
£$*&*!* *$!%

And that was that: the end of my tenure at Nickelodeon. I had been so lucky to have had a contract last that long, but never in a million years did I believe that it would all come to an end. All those dreams… all those ambitions… all those aspirations… ah, crap.

A BIT OF BACK HISTORY
I had started at Nickelodeon when I was 22, and was already an established puppeteer. In fact, I had even risen to the top of my field as a real-time CG animator, puppeteering characters‘ faces during live recordings by means of digital data gloves. As a result, I had made a lot of good friends in the world of 3D. These friends had nagged me to learn CG as early as 1994, but in my puppet-biased arrogance, I believed that Jim Henson was God, and that pixels were merely a twisted perversion. Really, I only had myself to blame for letting the good ship CG set sail without me.

But back to that fateful day in 2002. The carpet had been well and truly pulled from under my feet, and all I could hear was the Bogey puppet asking me what we were going to do. (One very strange facet of being a puppeteer is that you actually start referring to the puppet character as if they were real… and Bogey was almost as pissed of as I was!)

As you can imagine, the show that afternoon was not easy. But I had already started to formulate a plan: one that involved a few books, a shedload of DVDs and a wife who would hopefully understand that there was a goal in sight. It wouldn‘t be easy, we might lose the house and everything else in the process, we might bicker, fall out and not talk for very long periods at a time – but in the end it would be worth it. At least, I hoped it would.

CUE DRAMATIC AND INSPIRATIONAL FANFARE
Yes, I was going to teach myself CG animation and get a job within two or three years. Either that, or jack it all in and disappear into obscurity. Frankly, I couldn‘t see any other alternatives that didn‘t involve a lifetime of trying to make ends meet while attempting not to amass a large collection of supermarket name badges, forever lamenting the days when I was able to create characters and perform on a whim, capturing the hearts and imaginations of many a child (and the occasional yummy mummy). The first meeting of the year may have gone down like a shit sandwich, but I was determined to make the most of a bad job. I was down, but not yet out!

Unfortunately, deciding to switch careers was the easy bit. What followed was four years of gruelling and mostly self-directed study, attempting to master the dark art of 3D animation. And that‘s a subject for another article – or, in fact, for a whole series of articles. Tune in every couple of weeks while I highlight the good times and the really bad times as I plot my way towards that Holy Grail of CG: a decent and rewarding job.

Craig Crane is now a CG Animator at leading UK effects facility Double Negative. He spends his spare time scuba diving, spleen venting, and searching for the perfect internet radio station. You can read his own blog here