I feel weird writing about this on SMAC. While this blog has mostly about music and events, over the 6 years I've also written about video games, comic books, toys, TV shows and food. Basically, the full spectrum things I enjoy doing with my free time. But over those 6 years, I don't think I've ever done a post on what I do during work time. Well, that's about to change...
Back in the golden age of SMAC (2009-2011) I was working as the creative director of a kid's TV channel. It was a pretty swell gig. I got to make cute stuff for children across South Africa, worked with nice people and was afford a lot of time to myself to design posters or animate visuals or write about my adventures on this very blog. As such, I did about 500 posts over this period.
Then around mid 2011, I quit. A few month's earlier
I'd toured the US with Johnny Foreigner and now I'd been invited to join the kids on a tour through Europe. Realising I wouldn't get another month off to go throw myself around a stage with 3 lovely ghosts, I made the call to bid my dear dayjob farewell and
fly over to London for a month of amazing rock and roll adventures. What was i gonna do when the tour ended and I had to come back to South Africa? Cool Your Jets!
For years I'd been talking about starting a company up with the super talented illustrator, designer, animator and mega-friend Matthew McFarlane. We dreamt of starting up an entitiy that would allow us to really let our imaginations run wild. A platform to create the best illustration, design and animation that we could. Unfortunately, (for a few years at least) that idea remined just that, a dream.
For most of my time in kid's TV, McFarlane was living and working in the UK. But in 2011, with Matt moving back to SA, at the same time I bowed out from my previous job, it seemed the stars were aligning for us to finally make good on our talk of starting something up. Enter Cool your Jets.
The birth of CYJ coincided quite directly with this blog dying. We started on our first proper project in June 2011 and from there a steady stream of jobs came rushing in. Great for the company - not so great for being able to sit and blog about comic books. This torrent of exciting projects was so relentless, that we didn't even have time to launch the company officially. And so, for two years, Cool Your Jets operated like motion graphics ninjas. Executing devastating hits, but doing so from the shadows. We were off the radar, an insider's secret, unknown to the general public. That is, until now.
After two years, we're finally ready to let the whole world know that we're out here! We've set up a website, collecting some of our favoruite projects of the past two years, and cut a brand new showreel of our animation work. Which is really what this post is all about, so without any further ado - here's the 2013 Cool Your Jets Autumn reel!
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