"...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.
Would be cool if there was a middle ground between risking destitution by claiming a share of the income made and giving up your fair share of the billions made in return of a modest salary.
Not 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?
>> 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.
I have seen every episode dozens of times (I have young grandkids who love it which has caused me to appreciate it beyond any other kids show I have ever seen). It’s certainly visually wonderful, with some really beautiful, innovative, and wonderful animation sequences (Sleepytime, Rain, Faceytalk come to mind). She is not giving enough credit here to the writing and messaging that is really IMO responsible for this show’s success. Lots of animated shows are visually amazing, but they don’t bring the beauty that Bluey does…which to me is wrapped around the amazing father that Bandit Heeler is to his kids…and it’s immersive into childlike imagination and world. That is the writing, the meat and potatoes, the animation design is the gravy.
A certain 19th century German thinker wrote abundantly on that issue :-) It's not just creative endeavours.
The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.
What 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 ;-)
I 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.
Funny. 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.
I just don’t see _as much_ self-directed ambition or obsession? Going to a meetup in Seattle or SF in the early 2010s there were serious obsessives. Masters of domains like Go or JavaScript and someone from Sequoia at the Startup Weekend. Always flocks of folks looking to start their next business. That same bug just never hit here?
This I find weird, surely there are people who can sense opportunities unlockable by tech and Australia is not at all easier or any less expensive than the U.S., I still can’t quite put my finger on it. For me there’s still a magical cultural element to a place like SF, and to an extent – Seattle, when it comes to creating new opportunities.
Australia 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.
I live down the street from Amazon's relatively nice suburban office (you couldn't pay me to step foot in Seattle).
Let me save you the trip, you don't want to work for Amazon at the money they pay. They would have to 1.5x it or maybe even double it to make it worth the suffering of working there.
Life is short-- work somewhere else, or failing that, on your own thing :)
As someone who’s from Brisbane but spent the last 7 years in London you’re 100% correct. Brisbane is the best city in the world. I’m excited to eventually move back.
"I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world"
Personally the 3 times I visited Brisbane, were all in all quite neutral for me, not great, not bad. But friends had way worse experiences and when I found a iconic backpackers book, "No shitting on the toilet", I had a good laugh about those passages:
"A friend of mine would never leave a place until he’d had a good time there. Another friend would not leave a destination until he had learnt something encouraging about the people and their culture. Both are currently stuck in Brisbane."
So .. I would have been stuck there as well.
So please no offense about your home town.
I love Queensland. And Bluey. And would give your hometown a chance again.
But I do know people who never ever want to go there again. (But it also has been some years.)
Oh I can 100% see where all of that comes from too.
I think a lot of Brisbanes secret beauty is well hidden from people just visiting. The temperate rainforests, glasshouse mountains, some of the best beaches in the world all within an hours drive. The strange birds, the general attitude of the public. I think it's all quite nice. My only personal gripe is that I think it's far too hot in summer!
I'm also extremely biased though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Brisbane does have an awful lot of mediocrity too, but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!
As 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.
For 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.
I 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.
I 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.
> 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
Don’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
As 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..
Readit News
"...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.
That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security
I have seen every episode dozens of times (I have young grandkids who love it which has caused me to appreciate it beyond any other kids show I have ever seen). It’s certainly visually wonderful, with some really beautiful, innovative, and wonderful animation sequences (Sleepytime, Rain, Faceytalk come to mind). She is not giving enough credit here to the writing and messaging that is really IMO responsible for this show’s success. Lots of animated shows are visually amazing, but they don’t bring the beauty that Bluey does…which to me is wrapped around the amazing father that Bandit Heeler is to his kids…and it’s immersive into childlike imagination and world. That is the writing, the meat and potatoes, the animation design is the gravy.
The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.
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 ;-)
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.
I just don’t see _as much_ self-directed ambition or obsession? Going to a meetup in Seattle or SF in the early 2010s there were serious obsessives. Masters of domains like Go or JavaScript and someone from Sequoia at the Startup Weekend. Always flocks of folks looking to start their next business. That same bug just never hit here?
This I find weird, surely there are people who can sense opportunities unlockable by tech and Australia is not at all easier or any less expensive than the U.S., I still can’t quite put my finger on it. For me there’s still a magical cultural element to a place like SF, and to an extent – Seattle, when it comes to creating new opportunities.
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.
Let me save you the trip, you don't want to work for Amazon at the money they pay. They would have to 1.5x it or maybe even double it to make it worth the suffering of working there.
Life is short-- work somewhere else, or failing that, on your own thing :)
Personally the 3 times I visited Brisbane, were all in all quite neutral for me, not great, not bad. But friends had way worse experiences and when I found a iconic backpackers book, "No shitting on the toilet", I had a good laugh about those passages:
"A friend of mine would never leave a place until he’d had a good time there. Another friend would not leave a destination until he had learnt something encouraging about the people and their culture. Both are currently stuck in Brisbane."
So .. I would have been stuck there as well. So please no offense about your home town. I love Queensland. And Bluey. And would give your hometown a chance again. But I do know people who never ever want to go there again. (But it also has been some years.)
I think a lot of Brisbanes secret beauty is well hidden from people just visiting. The temperate rainforests, glasshouse mountains, some of the best beaches in the world all within an hours drive. The strange birds, the general attitude of the public. I think it's all quite nice. My only personal gripe is that I think it's far too hot in summer!
I'm also extremely biased though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Brisbane does have an awful lot of mediocrity too, but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!
‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut - 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 - March 2025 (215 comments)
Also:
Bluey, and the hierarchy of distractions - 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 - Jan 2024 (430 comments)
The second part to this is a fine example - 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.
Pond Scum - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2VibU-NeEI
hear hear.
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.
Edit: yeah part 3 https://goodsniff.substack.com/p/creating-bluey-tales-from-t...
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
The Voices of Bluey w/ Uncle Stripe https://www.20k.org/episodes/thevoicesofbluey
The Organic Sound of Bluey w/ Sound Designer Dan Brumm https://www.20k.org/episodes/thesoundofbluey