While I was still in design school, I was approached by a friend who was doing an internship at a design agency. The agency was struggling to find production for an animation that they pitched to Iiyama, and she mentioned to them I was probably able to produce it. I accepted without reviewing anything, and this became my first official freelance project.

Asset delivery was 3 low resolution digital photos of the monitor, shot in an office environment with overhead fluorescent lighting (front, side and back of the monitor), and a scanned penciled out storyboard that was pitched to Iiyama. The storyboard described a spinning metal plate with the monitor product number. Then an icy tundra mountainscape, where the spinning monitor would appear from the distance, show off the gaming contrast mode, and disappear in the distance again. That was all I had to work with.

I had to create a 3D model of the monitor from scratch, using these 3 photos as reference. Working on my Pentium 3 at the time, all rendering was done on the CPU. I managed to create a decent looking 3D model of the monitor that could render a 1024 x 786 pixel image in a reasonable time on my hardware. The ice tundra background with mountains was a lot easier to make since 3D Studio Max R3 introduced NURMS subdivision, and made it easy to create organic looking surfaces and manage face count.

While I was rendering out all the frames for a 360° rotation of the monitor, which took several days, the agency came back to me with another request from the client. If I could make this animation into a screensaver that would fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk, so they could easily distribute this screensaver along with the monitors to expo shows and shop displays. The agency said that I was allowed to say no, this was a big change order. But since I was also working with Flash 5 at the time, I thought I'd give it a shot. Using the image fill feature on vector shapes to create transparency masks with compressed images for the monitor and background, and creating all other assets with vectors, I managed to get it under 1.4MB. I was even able to feature one of my personal 3D models into the animation as a small background graphic.

When I sent the final screensaver file back, the PM called me immediately, and was elated. They asked me how much they owed me. Since I had no clue about the value of this type of work, I said 500 guilders (around 250 euro). I heard the team laugh on the other end of the phone, and the PM said they will make it 800. Eventhough I realised I undercharged, I was happy to be able to buy my first Wacom Intuos tablet with this money. I still have the tablet to this day, it hangs on my wall, with the receipt attached to it.