Drop in the Ocean

Australia is just a drop in the ocean.

At almost every university talk I give, someone asks a version of the same question: which studio in Sydney, or Melbourne, should they be trying to get into first. It's always framed as if the answer has to live inside the country. That's the part I try to unpick before I answer anything else — the question is too small before it's even finished being asked.

Your market is not your value

Here's the mistake I see people make constantly: they quietly let the size of their local job market set the size of their own ambition. If there are only a handful of studios in your city, you start believing there are only a handful of jobs in the world worth having. That's backwards. The market is small. You are not the market.

What feels completely ordinary to you where you are — a skill you take for granted, a way of solving problems you've stopped noticing you even have — is not ordinary everywhere. It's also not unique to me. Australia has spent decades quietly exporting VFX and games talent to studios overseas who go looking specifically for that experience, because what's common here is scarce there. The demand is real. Most people just never test whether they're the supply.

What it actually cost to test that

I'm not going to pretend the timing was ever convenient, because it wasn't. My wife and I left for London in January 2008, right after the Hollywood writers' strike had gutted the industry — Framestore, Double Negative, all the majors had just retrenched most of their staff. Arguably the worst possible month in a decade to land somewhere new and start knocking on doors.

For a while, it looked like the whole bet was wrong. The work I'd hoped to walk into simply didn't exist. I had to take freelance jobs I wouldn't have looked twice at back home, at a small shop with none of the pipeline sophistication I was used to, and be genuinely okay with that. It wasn't the plan. But it kept me in the industry and in the country, and that turned out to be the only thing that actually mattered.

Four or five months later, The Mill headhunted me for their Los Angeles studio. Around the same time, Pixar reached out about a Visual Effects Technical Director role. Two of the most respected studios in the world went looking for someone with my exact experience, unprompted, while I was working out of a corner of a small London shop — proof, if I needed it, that the thing I could do was worth more outside my own market than I'd ever assumed inside it.

The price, and who shouldn't pay it

I want to be straight about the cost, because "just go overseas" is easy advice to give and much harder advice to live. Visas are real. Money runs out fast. You land with no network and have to rebuild one from nothing. There's no guarantee the timing works in your favour — mine very nearly didn't.

None of that is a reason to stay put by default. But it is a reason to be honest about who this advice is actually for. If you've got a genuine reason to be exactly where you are — family, a role that's actually growing you, a market with real room left in it — staying isn't a failure of ambition. The advice was never "always go." It's "don't stay somewhere just because leaving feels harder to picture than staying." Those are two very different reasons to stay, and it's worth being honest with yourself about which one you're actually operating on.

So, where's your ocean?

What's the version of "Australia" in your career right now — the box you've stopped noticing you're standing inside? Have you actually tested what your skills are worth beyond it, or have you just assumed the answer without asking?

You won't know what you're worth somewhere else until you put yourself in front of it. The only real risk is never finding out.