This is the first of many post documenting my journey into starting an animation studio. It all has to start somewhere, so I started by creating a presence. Once I have that established, I’ll have a good foundation to build my studio on. Let’s roll…
Finding a name
The first thing I needed to do was come up with a name. After knocking around a half dozen ideas, I came up with Brick Martini. Why Brick Martini you ask? Well two reasons. The first being that I plan on animating Lego minifigures, so Brick. The second being that Martini sounds classy. That and the fact that the domain name was available made it the winner. Brick Martini it is!
Getting a email account
Having created the coolest name in animation, I needed to create an email account so that I could communicate with the rest of the online world, and sign up for a bunch of free stuff. Off to Google. A few mouse clicks later, I had myself an online identity. And no, I’m not going to list the email address here, it’s a new account and I already get enough junk mail. I actually set up 2 different email addresses, one for the website, and one for more business like things.
Establishing a domain
So with my newly created email identity, I wondered on over to Namecheap (I’ve read good things about this place – so I decided to take a chance). I signed up, entered my credit card and walked off with two new domain names. Why two? The first one is BrickMartini.com, the website I will showcase my animations on once I start creating them. The second one, BrickMartini.studio is the website you are currently on. On this site I am documenting my journey.
Setting up a website
Feeling a little cocky at this point with my new email and domains, I started setting up my website. I grabbed a “pocket pc” off of Amazon for $185. It’s not much of a machine, but it will run this website just fine. It came preloaded with Windows 10, I fixed that by erasing the drive and loading Linux, the LAMP stack and WordPress. Don’t worry if you don’t understand any of that. If you’re a casual reader, it does not matter. And if you are actually interested, it will be explained in future post on the subject. Anyway, you’re looking at the result of that effort. I’ll worry about the other website once I actually have something to put on it.
Social media
My next steps are to get online and establish a social media presences. I haven’t decide what that means for me just yet. I want to expose my animations to the world, but I don’t want to spend all my time wrapped up in socials. So we’ll see where this goes, and I will up date this post with my decisions and actions.
That’s about it for this post. Welcome to my studio, and if you decide to follow along, I hope you enjoy the journey.
