Graham Skellern on Visionary Leader Ian Taylor

Founder Ian Taylor was determined that Animation Research Ltd would stay put in Dunedin because that’s where he wants to live. From the deep south of New Zealand, his innovative company has taken on the world and changed the way people watch sport on television and other viewing platforms forever.

Animation Research’s talented team of 35 has livened up, even revolutionised, the viewing of golf, cricket, yachting, motor sport and baseball — and soon rugby and rugby league — with its 3D, data-driven graphics over live pictures from the Virtual Eye sports division.

There’s the famous wagon wheel which shows where the batsman’s runs came from in his century; there’s the lines of the ball to show whether the cricket umpire made the right lbw (leg before wicket) decision; there’s the tracking graphics to show how far the professional golfers drive the ball or how good that putt was on the European and United States PGA tours; and there’s the data on driving lines, acceleration, braking, gear shifts and driver G-forces in motor racing.

Animation Research made America’s Cup sailing exciting. As well as other animations, the firm relays a configuration of the courses and lines through them to show who is actually leading, and how far to the finish line.

The Dunedin animators are presently busy completing simulations of Team New Zealand’s recently launched second generation AC75 boat named Te Rehutai.

“Our team is taking the live feed and putting the data and graphics over the pictures and sending them back to the golf course and out to the world within half a second. That’s amazing,” said Taylor, who founded Taylormade Productions in 1989 and Animation Research a year later.

“What we are doing is explaining to people who are sitting at home how good these players and sailors are. That’s why they are the couch potatoes and are not out there participating. We saw an opportunity to make television coverage better.

“With the graphics, we can display the players’ phenomenal skills and achieve a greater understanding of the game for viewers. For instance, we can show the line a putt took on the green and get the reaction: ‘Holy shit, he did that’,’’ Taylor said.

“The World Wide Web is the electronic highway that allows us to do what we do and to go out into the world from Dunedin,” said Taylor.

Animation Research has become one of Australasia’s leading computer graphics production companies — amongst other projects are Formula One racing car and air traffic control simulators, and the latest, virtual reality videos for taking the fear of MRI Scanning away from children, and the educational platform the Land of Voyagers on thevoyager.co.nz

Land of Voyagers, to be gifted to primary and intermediate schools, tells the incredible story of Ma¯ori migrating across the Pacific Ocean — the largest body of open water on the planet — to NZ. Taylor said: “We weren’t told the story at school. They didn’t have any technology, but they had innovation and vision — they understood the ocean stars, they were celestial navigators.”

Taylor, born in Kaeo in Northland and brought up in the East Coast Raupunga community of Nga¯ti Kahungunu and Ngapuhi descent, was genuinely surprised at being named the Visionary Leader in the Deloitte Top 200 Awards. But he’s very proud of what his team has achieved. He said: “The idea of a

The thought leadership is all over the place. We have innovation in our DNA.

Ian Taylor

singular leader doesn’t make sense. I can see all the people who have joined me in the footsteps. Without those footsteps, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

“Thirty years ago we sent Paul Sharp and Stu Smith to the United States to write the original codes for the America’s Cup on a half a million dollar machine — there was no computer big enough to do the job in New Zealand.

“They are still working in the business, and now you can do the job on an iPhone. The whole company is built on software developed by the amazing professor Geoff Wyvill and his students in the Otago University computer graphics laboratory. Geoff produced the first ray tracing software package in the world.

“I was just a singer in a rock and roll band. How would I know and think about something like digital data and turning it into pictures that people understand? I’ve had the privilege of being the storyteller. The team wrote the story and I get to tell it.”

And tell it, he does. “My vision was finding a place to live in, Dunedin, and creating jobs that are really cool so they will stay forever.

“When you make the decision to run a business, it’s really important to find other people who share your vision. It also helps that they are a lot cleverer than you. If I failed, then I would be making fish and chips. We have two guys who started here and their children are now working parttime while they attend university.

Taylor, who has another saying — “bugger the boxing, pour the concrete anyway” — was the ideas man and he would confront his team with suggestions such as walking the golfing fairways as if you were there; how do we use flash technology to track the ball in cricket or who is in front in the America’s Cup; or Airways New Zealand is looking for someone to build a new air traffic control simulator.

“The team had never done anything like that but their (deadpan) response was: ‘Don’t see why not’. We set out to build one of the most amazing simulators in the world, and it was a multi-million dollar contract for a little Dunedin company that had never built an air traffic control simulator before.”

It all began when Taylor played a gig in Dunedin as the lead singer for the popular 1970s band, Kal-Q-Lated Risk. He dropped out of a business degree course at Victoria University in 1968 to join the band.

The Kal-Q-Lated Risk opened for the Beach Boys on their tour of NZ, was a finalist in the Loxene Golden Disk Awards, and released 11 singles and one album.

After four years with the band and a stint of compulsory army training at Waiouru, the jobless Taylor was drawn back to Dunedin. “When I had been in the Risk, we travelled all over the country and the best place we played in was Dunedin — the Ag Hall and Ocean Beach Hotel.”

Taylor worked as a forklift driver at Speights Brewery — “our smoko room was a bar and we had our first beer for morning tea” — then as a presenter on the children’s TV programme Play School while completing a law degree at Otago University. He was about to become a lawyer when he was offered a full-time job as a presenter on the children’s magazine programme Spot On.

Taylor worked as a presenter, producer, writer and director for TVNZ between 1977 and 1989. He produced documentaries including Pieces of Eight, the inside story of the New Zealand Rowing Eight at the 1984 Olympic Games; Aramoana, a documentary told by those directly involved in the David Gray shootings; and Innocent Until, the inside story of the defence team for David Bain at his first trial.

In 1989 Taylor was offered a current affairs job in Wellington but couldn’t bring himself to leave Dunedin. Instead, he formed Taylormade Productions making regional television commercials and corporate videos.

When TVNZ closed its Dunedin studios, Taylor bought them with a $500,000 bank loan. Taylormade produced the children’s television show Tiki Tiki Forest Gang where the studio was run by animals and a rogue computer; and Squirt, featuring New Zealand’s first motion-captured co-host Spike the Penguin. The Animation Research team still works in those original studios in Dowling St.

Animation Research was founded when Taylor met Emeritus Professor Geoff Wyvill who ran the Computer Science Department, and computer graphics laboratory, at Otago University.

“I walked in and thought ‘this is incredible.’ On a handshake Geoff gave me three of his best students to see what we can do,” said Taylor. “Geoff is the most unassuming and honest man I know, and he’s worked quietly in the background. He would ring me up and say: ‘I’ve got someone who is really good and would work well at your place’.”

Wyvill believed: “A computer is not just a better paintbrush. A picture has meaning and the idea behind the picture can be coded into the computer. We can represent a car reasonably well, but how do we represent a thunderstorm?

“Computer graphics draws together skills from mathematics, engineering, psychology, photography, film, painting, and sculpture. We learn to see better and to visualise what cannot be seen. We create animation both as art and as scientific illustration.”

Taylormade Productions formed a joint venture, Animation Research, with the university in one of the first attempts to turn academic intellectual property into a commercial activity, and then later Taylormade bought all the university shares.

The original students, Craig McNaughton, Paul Sharp and Stu Smith, are still working at Animation Research 30 years later. McNaughton and Sharp were members of the Otago University team that won the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest — the first time the Olympic Games of computer programming for students was won by a non-United States university side.

Wyvill is a director of Animation Research with Taylor, Clive Broughton and Michael Guthrie, while Sharp, Smith and Wyvill are shareholders, along with the family interests of Taylor and Guthrie.

Animation Research quickly set the pace. Its first of many 3D productions was a title sequence for the TVNZ series University Challenge, and it created classic television advertising images — the Bluebird waterskiing penguin, seagulls on a Cook Strait fast ferry, and gannets forming a koru.

Its first award-winning commercial was computer-generated images featuring a United Airlines 747 flying over Paris, the Grand Canyon, Rio de Janeiro and Hawaii. And then the trendsetting sports coverage with 3D animated graphics was born. Animation Research still does computergenerated flyovers of the cities and the sporting venues and their surroundings to provide context.

The “don’t see why not” philosophy got Animation Research through a tricky situation during the Covid-19 lockdown.

“We had a problem,” said Taylor. “Our golfing contracts were worth millions of dollars and they would go to zero in 24 hours if golf started up and we couldn’t be there. In six weeks we found a way around it that has changed our business — we cover sport remotely.

“Our air miles were massive flying teams to golf tournaments in the United States and Europe every week. We had to do something about that, and it was Covid-19 that made us change the way we do business.”

Animation Research’s head of innovation John Rendell trawled the net and found all the tools he needed to build a new platform and stitch together a system that placed the graphics on the live pictures and sent them back in an instant — all from the office in Dunedin.

“If we said originally we would be doing it all from Dunedin, we wouldn’t have got the contracts. Talk about leadership and vision. Here’s a guy (Rendell) who came here when he was 18 and had no degrees and his headmaster had rung me, saying ‘we can’t teach him, we bore him’.

“If John didn’t find the solution, then everything was gone. We don’t have a singular leader. The team members form the visionary leadership, and I’m up there as part of them. I think of those celestial navigators crossing the Pacific — we have innovation in our DNA,” said Taylor.

I’ve had the privilege of being the storyteller. The team wrote the story and I get to tell it. Ian Taylor