For this edition of Murmur I sat down to chat with Joseph Spademan, Head of Animation at Manchester’s Doodledo and chewed our way through a range of topics – from his start at Doodledo, to the emerging challenges facing new and seasoned animators alike.

Fortunately for Joe, and for everyone who loves Doodledo’s fantastic work, he found his early break into the world of animation after deciding to go freelance, and it was a fruitful decision, albeit with some drawbacks that every freelancer encounters at some point in their career.

“It was amazing, very exciting as I got to work with different agencies and travel. I did quite a lot of work with agencies in London and got to travel to Sweden and Copenhagen and do some stuff which was really cool.”

Joe soon discovered that his passion in animation lay more in creating things, making them move and learning new tools. He felt that he had less of a love for the daily challenges of organising and managing his own business, and managing his most precious commodity – time. This early lesson highlighted the need to keep afloat financially as he was still making a name for himself as a freelancer. So Joe took on a second ‘regular job’ for a few years in customer services to help with the finances, while spending every other minute of his free time working on his creative freelance hustle.

Joe makes a point of highlighting the positives of getting what we call ‘a proper job’, namely people skills and relationship building. He values positive and open-minded attitudes to team-work and approaching strategic challenges with a creative mindset, he took lessons that he’d picked up in all areas of life and applied them to animation. After a spell of 7 years spent as Head of Motion at another Manchester Agency, Joe took to his role at Doodledo as Head of Animation in 2019.

His current role involves working with quite a diverse range of clients – from explainer demos with Sign-In App, shortform content for a Netflix Childrens TV series to partnerships with Glorious Creative on Shining a Light on Suicide. I ask him what the main challenges are when it comes to delivering high quality animation whilst meeting client expectations.

“I think that the two biggest questions we like to get answers to early on – and once we have an idea of the client’s aspiration – are the same ones in almost every project really – they’re how much time you’ve got and how much budget the client has got for you to be able to invest in the projects. They’re the boundaries that we begin crafting our solution from.”

“In an ideal world where all our needs were met, then you could sort of labour and spend as long as you want on projects and unfortunately, that’s not the case. And so that limits it, but that limit is where we harness our collective creativity.”

These limits however come with structure.

“When I was freelancing – I was by myself spending a long time working in a sort of ‘silo’ situation, whereas when you’re working a company like Doodledo you’ve got people around you, and there’s a great synergy, people have different ideas, different perspectives, different places that they’ve come from, and skills, and we can bring those together to make animation that is new and exciting.”

With a great team of people it seems that problems like time and budget restraints can be overcome. Joe stresses that there aren’t always easy or quick workarounds to problems, and that sometimes it’s just about coming together and putting in the effort.

All that effort goes towards creating a very successful and varied portfolio. Their projects range from live-action short films, to 2D motion graphic explainers, to 3D animated short films. I ask Joe what gives Doodledo the ability to create such a wide range of projects.

“I think we’ve had varying perspectives on whether Doodledo should have a house style or not. You watch a Pixar film and you can kind of tell it’s Pixar, you watch an Aardman film and you know that it’s Ardman. But philosophically I think we are in the opposite place… We take the brief and the essence and work out what it is we want, or need to communicate, what’s the story we’re telling, who are we telling it to and what’s the desired outcome. It’s a structure that allows lots of creativity built on strategy”

The variety of work produced at Doodledo is also a testament to the wide range of talented individuals who make up its creative team. Joe is proud to list off the names and specialities of those in his immediate vicinity, from great character designers, frame by frame animators 3D sculptors, and all round animation gurus, it seems that the offices of Doodledo are full to the brim with enviable talent.

With such a wealth of talent how does a project’s look and feel take shape?

“Something we always ask clients for is their brand guidelines or a brand book, or logos, the rules of play for working with them as a company and then we see which of our skills or which of the big members of the team are going to mesh well with that and then how do we bring something new and different in. We don’t like to plateau, we like to challenge ourselves and every single project we work on shows that.”

It’s an approach that I think is perfect for some clients who require a good deal of adaptability and who aren’t afraid of being open-minded with their concepts. Joe tells me that it’s important not to feel overprotective of your ‘special sauce’ and that there’s opportunity in celebrating the differences in the work of your collaborators.Manchester, he says, is a city of skilled collaborators and seems very happy to be in that milieu.