Animoto - a dream job in Germany

Well, I promised to talk a littlebit about my job here in Germany. Imagine a company small enough so that your voice is heard and big enough to get wonderful projects - that is animoto, a great 2D/3D animation company in southern Germany - Munich. I started here in March 2005 while finishing my final exam in university. Animoto called me for a job that actually never happened but since I already got there they put me on another project:

A spot for Disneychannel Germany featuring the elks of brother bear. This was just plain awesome! I had the priviledge of creating 3D effects on a 2D background layer working with an actual ex-Disney-artist right here in Germany. This was like a dream come true. The spot turned out quite well and was very funny if you speak German. Last Friday it won a price for 'best integrated special commercial' from the eyes&ears award (link) which makes me even more happy.

Animoto is small, as I already said, and is changing size every month. Since we were working on a bigger project we had up to 15 2D artist on the spot. I've finished working on animations for Nickelodeon characters playing chess in a flash game last Friday. And we always have some nice character animation going on I'm not able to talk about yet.

this is the desk I'm working on featuring my own laptop and a XSI/Maya-workstation

So, to sum it up, animoto is a dream job. It is not Disney, Pixar or Dreamworks, but is full of fun, good projects, wonderful colleagues and packed with learning experience. Making a mistake is being handled by a team that doesn't blame you... and believe me, this helped me a lot already. Fellow artists here have worked at Dreamworks and Disney on projects from 'Help! I'm a fish' and 'Balto' up to 'Pocahontas', 'Roger Rabbit' and 'Lion King'.

I'm sure that I'm going to go to the States for some time sometime but for now I congratulate myself every single day for being able to work here and even earn money. God has given me this wonderful opportunity here and I hope that I'm going to be a blessing to this company that has given me so much. After all, they even encourage me to do AM... what else could a company do =)

So much for now, their website is http://www.animoto.de/ - like hundreds of other pages we are working so much we barely are able to update the site. We are always watching demoreels so feel free to send in your stuff. From time to time jobs come up that need more artist in a short period of time... so, why don't you just send your reel?

Have fun,

- Alex