A Strange Day

四月二十五日（金曜日）
A.M. Marketing lesson by the boss of Premium Agency
Today was completely unusual. In the morning, instead of our usual trainers , the 社長 Yamaji-san himself become our trainer for Game Producing. The topic was "Marketing", so I guess it makes sense that the 社長 would know more about this topic than either Kawashima or Murase. Interestingly, our usual lecturers seemed nervous in his presence.

Marketing is an interesting subject for me since it's a topic I have never studied before. Here's the basic marketing process:

R -> STP -> MM(4P) -> I -> C
(Research, Segmentation, Targeting, Position, Marketing Mix, Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Implemenation, Control)

I learnt that marketing is not so effective when your product is highly superior or inferior to other products, but makes a big difference if your product is roughly equivalent to its competitors. At the end of the day, marketing is not about selling a product after it is made, it's about making a product that will sell.

An interesting fact the 社長 brought up was that in the 1990s, Japan was ahead at gaming innovation, but western markets have outgrown and overtook Japan since year 2000. He also talked briefly about how he felt the future of gaming would progress - toward more unique human user interfaces, more networking functionality and 3D VR displays, which is entirely predictable by extrapolation.

P.M. Animation Workshop by Ichiro Itano (板野 一郎 anime artist, director, producer)
This one is completely out of the blue and not on our training schedule. PA has invited this famous animation director to give a workshop to the staff. Itano is best known among anime fans for highly stylized aerial combat and dogfights in many anime, particularly the Macross series and the "Itano Circus" of multiple missile trails.

Ron and I had the privilege to join the PA staff in this 45-minute long workshop by the 50-year-old expert animator. He talked about his experience as a junior animator, working for 100 yen per frame of drawing, and how he handled situations when senior keyframe artists created erroneous and inconsiderate keyframes which made the job of an in-betweener difficult or impossible. As a junior animator, he could not tell his senior that the latter was wrong, so he came up with creative solutions, some of which were rejected. Apparently, he was recognized for his creativity and was promoted in rank much quicker than was possible in the industry at that time.

The workshop was interesting for me despite my poor grasp of Japanese. Itano-san posed several in-betweening problems which he had faced to the audience, and some of the PA staff came up with rather creative solutions. I had fun trying to solve the tweening problems, even though I was not an animator.

The final word from Itano-san was that one has to think creatively outside the box, beyond what people would normally do.

Mini-project
After the workshop, it was back to work on the mini-project. I hit some technical problems with Maya character rigging, and I'll have to spend the weekend to redo it, plus animate the character for our mini-game. It was going to be a raining weekend anyway, so I've go nowhere else to go and nothing much to do except work :(