In the summer of 1997 I had a real problem.

I had just come back from an exhausting trip to SIGGRAPH (the annual CGI conference held by the Association for Computing Machinery in Los Angeles) where I had hoped to find a crew of talented young animators for an exciting new project that I was certain would change the lives of everyone involved with it.

After a gruelling week in which my colleagues and I talked to 219 budding computer animators, we had to admit defeat. Not one of the young hopefuls had any real animation on their showreels and there was hardly an animal to be seen in all that work. To be brutally honest, most of the so-called animation on the reels was not animation at all, but what we referred to in those days as flying logos and dancing products the main thrust of commercial digital animation at the time.

In the mid-90s it seemed that there was no communication between the very different worlds of traditional drawn animation and its electronic cousin, computer animation. A few traditional animators had crossed the great divide between paper and pixels John Lasseter at Pixar was perhaps the most notable and the newly-fledged CG animation department at Industrial Light and Magic had just produced about 12 minutes of computer animated creatures that had taken the world by storm.

In fact it was precisely that film Jurassic Park that had inspired Tim Haines, then...