Hi, I’m Jamie and I head up the Image & Motion team here at Fluid. While the bulk of my day is working alongside our team to produce eye-catching, innovative content, I also have the opportunity to wear a number of different hats as part of my role. As you’ll see below, my typical week is anything but monotonous…
Monday
As with most people, the first thing I would do in the morning is make sure I’m up to date with emails and Teams. This leads nicely into the first of our twice weekly Image & Motion catchups. We wind up a short, informal weekend round-up before it gets too off-track, and move onto the workload for the week.
We have a wide range of expertise across the team, from more traditional photography and video to CGI, animation and special effects. This ‘swiss-army-knife’ of skillsets gives us the flexibility to tackle projects in a number of different ways, while also requiring a delicate balancing act on resource.
I’m on to production for the rest of the day, with some visuals for Inspired, one of our retirement sector clients. This client uses our architectural CGI visualisations of their properties and facilities to sell the dream of their high-end retirement developments, both in the early planning stages and in later marketing materials. In this case, they really want to emphasise the open, green spaces and outdoor activity areas they are proposing as part of a site expansion – and would like to add some beehives! Beehives are a first for me but that’s far from the strangest thing we’ve had to visualise.
While these render, I finish the day with some small edits to an existing video interview.
Tuesday
We have a farm at Fluid. Not the ‘oink, oink’ kind, although it can be noisy. I am of course talking about our render farm – a collection of tech that we’ve invested heavily in and something I’m very proud of. It helps us turn around CGI content much quicker and also doubles as an impressive source of heat. Well today it’s misbehaving, so I put on my IT support hat and spend an hour getting that fixed so we can finish rendering an animation of a Cambridge Building Society character doing some juggling.
I have a couple of calls in the afternoon to discuss two potential projects that couldn’t be more different – a 2D character explainer animation and a 3D roomset visualisation for a printed brochure. It’s not often that an agency of our size has the kind of expertise to take on this range of projects in-house, so it’s always nice when we surprise people with a “yes, we can do that!”.
That extends to emerging technologies like photogrammetry, and augmented reality too. Both of which I finish the day putting a together a proposal for. This is something that I’m particularly excited about as it has the potential to revolutionise how this client produces marketing assets.
Wednesday
I have a bit of time on production this morning. I’m progressing some ‘sexy’ product renders for Liniar, a PVCu systems manufacturer in the window and door industry, that will be going on the shiny new website that our Website & Systems team are currently developing. Drawing inspiration from moody automotive photography, these are much more stylised than I expected images of windows and doors to be, but I love it
! In our team call we have a pretty lively discussion on how to replicate a particular effect in 3D – I say lively, but I can see Dan, Bec and Patricia’s eyes glaze over as they often do when the CGI jargon starts to fly around. It’s ok though, as Dan and Bec will be off for a photoshoot in Paris soon…
Thursday
We have our Accountability meeting and our ‘Heads of’ catchups, every two and four weeks respectively – both of which have fallen on today. The first involves one of my other hats, where I’m accountable for the Fluid studio continuing to be a fantastic place to work - from the IT infrastructure to making sure the coffee machine stays stocked (which is bloody hard with this lot!).
I’ve overseen the refurbishment of the boardroom, addition of our funky meeting pods and multiple tech overhauls. This week’s priority? The fridge filter needs replacing and Anneliese has dropped one of our brand new bowls…
Our ‘Heads of’ catchup follows this and it’s always good to have time with my fellow team heads. We meet with Sarah and her Support & Delivery team to discuss a myriad of Opportunities and Challenges that arise from client work across the agency. It’s great to get an alternative perspective from other teams and this week we all seem to have similar levels of excitement about upcoming client opportunities.
Friday
If you’re on a diet and easily swayed, you might want to work from home on a Friday...
Today it’s Maccies and I’ve given in (after conveniently forgetting my healthier lunch).
I’m getting ahead of myself here though as Friday morning plays host to our weekly Fluid team-wide catchup and as always it’s really nice to hear what the other teams have been up to. Ed and Phil also have news of an exciting new client win, which seems to have become an increasingly regular thing recently.
I round off the day, and the week, with some post-production on images that I rendered overnight. I’m a stickler for detail, so I find it quite cathartic to touch up the last details on a final render and ping it across to a client to close off another week in my life at Fluid.