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Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director
- dang 1y agoRecent and related (ok, maybe a bit much, but the new article looks good too!) ‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410874 - March 2025 (313 comments) A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339206 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339206 - March 2025 (215 comments) Also: Bluey, and the hierarchy of distractions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510482 - Sept 2024 (14 comments) How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875399 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875399 - Jan 2024 (430 comments)
- amiga386 1y agoThe art director's graduate animation project (as mentioned in the article) from 10 years ago: Pond Scum - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2VibU-NeEI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2VibU-NeEI
- bombcar 1y agoFor me, at least, this shows the same emphasis on Story (talked about in part 4) - the animation is decent if not great, but the character does exactly what you expect him to at the end, and that's Story.
- aaronbrethorst 1y agoI now avoid jobs that pressure everyone into thinking a good show or project can only be created at the expense of everyone’s well being. Even if the IP they’re offering you a chance to work on is exciting (and unfortunately I’ve seen way too many times now how this can be used as a bargaining chip to mistreat people). It doesn’t have to be that way. You can make something great without killing your crew. hear hear.
- jazzcomputer 1y agoI came across a game studio a few years ago here in NZ that does it right. I worked in a hot desk place that housed their studio in a space - they were never working past 5.30, had amazing staff reviews (they did them in a space where I could overhear them), have a good IP, good wage packages, excellent internal mentoring, a good gender split, recruit diverse staff. I'm pretty sure there's a few other studios here too which are good. I'm just sharing this 'cos, well... it's nice to hear the positives.
- unsnap_biceps 1y agoIf you're willing to share their name, I'd love to take a look at their games and support a positive place.
- jazzcomputer 1y agoRunaway Play I also hear good things about Dinosaur Polo Club
- unsnap_biceps 1y agoFunny! I have played both the games Dinosaur Polo Club has released. I'll take a gander at Runaway Play later this weekend. Thank you for the pointer!
- ekianjo 1y ago> You can make something great without killing your crew. You could get many counter examples of projects that did very well and where everyone was in crunch mode for the last 6 months. There is no rule out there and one team being successful once doing things one way is not a proof of anything
- diatone 1y agoDon’t think Catriona was commenting about whether or not it’s possible to make something great period. More that greatness doesn’t excuse not treating people like human beings
- ggm 1y agoAs a brisbane resident, seeing aspects of my city skyline lovingly created for kids TV is fantastic. I like to imagine small people the world over seeing the story bridge or "the zip water heater" state government building or the brown snake and to them it's just Shelbyville without a monorail but to anyone from Brisvegas..
- meander_water 1y agoAs someone who struggles to make anything that looks good, I am fascinated by designers ability to take a brief and bring it to life using their own unique artisic voice. The second part to this is a fine example - https://goodsniff.substack.com/p/creating-bluey-tales-from-the-art-891 https://goodsniff.substack.com/p/creating-bluey-tales-from-t... I've always wondered how they managed to make the show look and feel Brisbane, and this delivers.
- unsnap_biceps 1y agoSemi Related 20khtz episodes that are delightful: The Voices of Bluey w/ Uncle Stripe https://www.20k.org/episodes/thevoicesofbluey https://www.20k.org/episodes/thevoicesofbluey The Organic Sound of Bluey w/ Sound Designer Dan Brumm https://www.20k.org/episodes/thesoundofbluey https://www.20k.org/episodes/thesoundofbluey
- jppope 1y agoAmazing story, and what a narrative voice! The whole thing pulls you in and pushes you off, it builds you up and breaks you down. I loved this
- einpoklum 1y agoNitpick: > * it was the beginnings of social media in the early 2010s* - IRC + NNTP newsgroups were already popular by 1989. - Myspace was quite popular by 2004. - Facebook was popular by... 2006 I guess? and that's just a few platforms I can mention.
- aikinai 1y agoYour perspective of “popular” is incredibly far off. Popular among people in your circle of socioeconomics and interests is not that same as popular among the general population.
- edejong 1y agoYour position is indeed supported by the data presented here: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media
- jasonfarnon 1y agoquite the opposite. look at the almost exactly linear growth of the 2 biggest sites, fb and youtube. there is nothing special about the early 2010s, no acceleration in growth.
- jasonfarnon 1y agosites that myspace and orkut, which were already moribund by 2010, were popular under any normal definition eg alexa ranking. FB had 500mm users and a hollywood movie about it come out by 2010, a year or 2 later it had a billion users. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Sure it got steadily more popular, so what she means is "It was the early 2010s, and social media reached the point that it was replacing all social interactions..."
- JohnScolaro 1y agoWhat a fantastic write-up. As a Brisbane native and software developer I often feel similarly to the author about Brisbane's software dev scene. Brisbane so often feels like a backwater, with the big dogs down in Melbourne and Sydney, and the 'peak of industry' in the US. I'd love to move to Seattle and work for Amazon or something to get 'relevant industry experience' but what I'd really love to do is make a go of it here because - like the author - I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world ;-)
- phinnaeus 1y agoI lived and worked as a dev in Seattle for 8 years before moving to Sydney. I want nothing more than for Australia to have a thriving tech scene but I haven’t seen much progress in that area since I moved here 5 years ago. I still love it and have no plans to go back. I just wish there was more opportunity here and not so much constant pressure to move back to the US for increased salary and challenge.
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoHey there, I’ve been in Sydney 5 years same as you (after a 7 year stint in SF) and feel exactly the same way. If you’re around in the next week or two it’d be great to grab coffee and talk about it! Coffee being the great Aussie connector and all. You can find my email on my profile.
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y agoAustralia in some ways is the opposite of the US. Too much regulation and not enough effort to help people start businesses. It really needs to change and they’re missing a big opportunity to make the start up scene better. Just as long as we don’t do it while throwing out sensible regulations.
- weeksie 1y agoFunny. I lived in Seattle for 5 years before I moved to Sydney, where I lived for 5 years. That was a different era though, tech wasn't the industry it is now and the internet still felt new. I moved down in 2003 and my American accent helped me land a job I wasn't qualified for (having self taught myself some php and java in Seattle, mostly working as a bartender though). In 2005 I started a small software shop with some friends. Back then (2003) the Ruby user's group was too small to get a reservation at a pub so we'd have to partner up with the Smalltalk guys. Rails came out a year or so later and that changed. I got back into web stuff when I moved to the states and have been up and down the stack many times since, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the stuff we did back then. Web 2 was an annoying new buzzword and we were still mostly writing software for kiosks, device drivers in C, bridging that with Lua, and using Flash for the interface b/c everybody else in the space was using shitty C++ Motif interfaces. . . . memory lane. Imagine that Newtown and the Inner West are a lot different than when I lived there, but I do miss that time.
- polotics 1y agoWow the money shot of this I think is the quote: "...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary.""" 88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 percent. Sure there were other people involved, but even if this art director's year of repetitive strain injuries is only worth one percent of the value of Bluey, then still it managed to capture only 0.3 percent of the value. This 99.7% makes the 30% Apple-tax on developers look good. I think it shouldn't. The lesson for me is: creative endeavours are meant to die in our society.
- namdnay 1y agoBut if Bluey (like most shows people will work on) hadn’t been a huge success, he would still have kept his 88k That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security
- z2 1y agoNot at all familiar with animation or the broader industry but could they have at least offered the potential for royalties or some sort of sales based bonuses?
- 2muchcoffeeman 1y agoI believe most of the value of Bluey is captured by the BBC. The whole thing is a real shame for Australia. We’ve had a couple of the best children’s entertainment ever: Wiggles and Bluey. Don’t know why they didn’t negotiate a bigger piece of the pie with Bluey.
- overfeed 1y agoWhy didn't ABC fund the whole shebang? I suspect the BBC has a much bigger warchest to deploy - recalling the ludicrous amounts invested into Top Gear or the numerous David Attenborough nature shows.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago>there’s a huge amount of calculated work and effort that can put yourself in a position for luck to occur. >I truly realised that if you create what YOU want to create, the jobs and opportunities that will creatively satisfy you the most will come out of exuding that energy into the world. This is all about the commercial application of art, but I find it can work for science as well.
- abbycurtis33 1y agoSomehow this is written with an Australian accent.