Zareh Nalbandian

I’d like to start by thanking you Chancellor, Vice Chancellor and President, Deputy Vice Chancellor, University Secretary, Dean of the faculties, members of the University Council, Chair of the Academic Board, the staff, the family, friends and graduates. And before I start, I want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we’re on, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and their Elders past and present. That’s most of my speech – that took a while. A few months ago, I returned a missed call on my mobile from an unknown number, something I wouldn’t normally do. You can imagine what a surprise it was when Chancellor of the UTS, Catherine Livingstone AO, answered and introduced herself to tell me that she’d just left the university’s Council meeting where they decided to offer me an honorary doctorate of the university. Catherine was very congratulatory and said I would receive a letter with details from her office in due course. After the call, it took me a few minutes to fully comprehend the news and accept that I was to be acknowledged in this very special way. I immediately told my family, colleagues and friends and was high on the news for days to come. The funny thing is, because it was so unexpected, I don’t think I ever completely believed it, and when days, then weeks passed and a letter didn’t arrive, I thought it might have been a prank.

Can you imagine the embarrassment of that? Of course, the letter did come, and I’m ever so proud to be here today and thank the university and all of you for this honour and for your welcome. I will say that it’s probably a good thing that you’re all already graduating today, or that you have graduated, as I deliver this talk, because I didn’t even finish senior high school. And I’d hate for you think that just because I’ve had a rewarding life in which I’ve pursued a career that I’ve loved, built a great company, continued to learn and grow and contribute to my industry and society without doing any of the hard yards that you have, that means you all might have wasted 3-5 years. I don’t’ want you to think that at all. 

The truth is, I always felt I’d missed out on the joy and fulfilment of attending university, graduating and providing myself in academic. But I was the son of an Armenian migrant family who were refugees of the Armenian genocide, who’d fled and settled in Cairo where my sister, brother and I were born and who had, again, migrated to Australia in the 60s for the safety of our family, and to give me and my siblings the opportunities and life that they had not had. So, I grew up in Sydney’s inner west, went to a great selective school – Canterbury Boys’ High – did very well, was especially passionate about music and language, but nevertheless, felt displaced in a not particularly diversity-embracing environment. This is the 1960s. Ultimately, so much so that I decided to leave at the end of year 11 to enter the workforce and pursue my interests in photography and cinematography. I did vicariously experience aspects of university life, though, through my close school friends, but never directly as a student. 

So, given my background, in 2012 I was asked to join the Vice Chancellor’s Industry Advisory Board at UTS. I was truly excited to finally participate in a meaning way, directly with a university, and having always had huge respect for the university’s accomplishments and great success over the years with employing many of its graduates, I was pleased to be able to play a part in the university’s and the Vice Chancellor’s emphatic commitment to forging partnerships with industry. I think that’s one of the great things that distinguishes this university from other institutions, and the reason we have forged such a strong and productive partnership over the years, and most recently resulting in the establishment of the UTS Animal Logic Academy of Animation and Visualisation. I thought I might use this opportunity today to talk a little about my experience and philosophies in building a company founded on creativity and innovation, and hopefully give you some insights as you embark on your varied careers. 

I co-founded my company, Animal Logic, here in Sydney’s Crows Nest in 1991. It started with a dozen likeminded artists and technicians who wanted to produce great creative work without the shackles of a corporate environment. Our mantra was, ‘Do great work with great people and good things will come.’ That was our business plan, and it hasn’t changed since. For me, it was an exciting time of emerging digital technologies, having grown up in an analogue world of film production and effects. The ability to render images on supercomputers and see your work realised almost instantly was incredibly exciting and revolutionary. To give you some context, though, it was also a time where there was no internet, and the most sophisticated form of long-distance communication was the colour fax machine – I don’t know if any of you even know what that is today. And my mobile phone was the size of and weighed the same as a brick – literally. And you could only make calls on it; that’s all it did. It was a phone. Having previously started a software company called Discrete Logic, Animal Logic was the logical name for a sister company, a design and animation company harnessing the power of computers. Our innovation didn’t stop though with software and computers. With Animal Logic, we created a workplace that was non-hierarchical and where everyone was involved in making things. We quickly achieved success, creating award-winning design, effects and animation for big, global ad campaigns, initially in Southeast Asia and eventually in the US. 

In the late 90s, we broadened our vision for the company, adapting leading edge technology, moved to a new headquarters at Fox Studios and embarked on visual effects for several Hollywood Films. I still remember the day I was introduced to a couple of young directors named Larry and Andy Wachowski, who came to town to make a little film called The Matrix. Animal Logic went on to design and animate the iconic Matrix code and the movie went on to win an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. And over the years, we’ve had the privilege of working with so many great directors, from Baz Lurhman and George Miller in Australia, to [name] in China, to Oliver Stone, Zac Snyder, Lorden Miller in the US, and that’s just to name a few. 

But the next turning point for Animal Logic was in 2002 when we embarked on a movie called Happy Feet. We had a relationship with George Miller, because of the Babe films we’d worked on together, and George came to me with this idea for Happy Feet, describing his ambition. So he wanted to do what he did with Babe – if you could airlift an entire film crew on the ice in Antarctica and train penguins to dance, and we could animate their faces and do the same digital manipulation just like we did in Babe. Well, you know, crazier things have happened in Hollywood, but that wasn’t going to happen, and obviously it wasn’t possible. But no one had tried to make a near-photo-real animated movie before, so we took on the challenge. Note: we hadn’t made an animated movie before, let alone a large-scale, visually complex, technically ground-breaking epic computer animated movie. I remember colleagues from the US calling me, saying, ‘You don’t know what you’ve just taken on, what’s involved.’ And you know, they were right. I didn’t. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to move forward. 

After a crazy four-year journey, we made the first 3D animated feature film out of Australia, we released a hit movie, and it won the Oscar. But as a result, we developed a huge amount of innovative digital tools and techniques, production processes and we built our animation pipeline with which we’ve gone on to produce many ground-breaking animated films like Legends of the Galaxy, [inaudible], The Lego Movie, Lego Batman, and most recently, the live action hybrid movie Peter Rabbit. We constantly talk about creativity and innovation being critical to our success, especially in a more and more homogenised and competitive world, but what does being creative and innovative mean practically? Animal Logic is at the intersection of art, technology and commerce – all three have to be in balance to be able to innovate creatively and technically, to survive and to grow as a business, and we always have to do the hard work of proving the idea creatively, researching the feasibility of achieving it technically, and knowing that we can support it commercially. That balance is absolutely critical. But we also have to be prepared to take risks and to sometimes fail, and in my view, a no-blame culture is fundamental to fuelling creativity and innovation. If we live in fear of failure we’ll never try, we’ll never take a chance, we’ll never expose ourselves to risk, and therefore we will never innovate. And we have to accept failure as a cost of our success. Failure has to be built into our strategic planning, our budgets and our work schedules. I love the mantra of, ‘Fail often, and fail fast.’ It’s great. It means, of course, try to innovate all the time, be prepared to let go of bad ideas, and don’t ever be wedded to yesterday’s idea. 

In the same vein as accepting failure, it’s important that we also embrace constant change. My motto here is that the only constant is change. Get used to it. With globalisation, automation, machine learning and a rapid development of AI, not to mention global warming, we have to be able to adapt to change. We need to embrace it and use it, not fight it. Then, there is that threshold which I love to call not knowing what you don’t know, then knowing what you don’t know. Think about it. You need the mix of both to be free enough to be truly innovate, and yet understand how to wrangle the practical hurdles of a new idea, getting it across the line, getting a new idea across the line. If you know too much, you probably know all of the risks in front of you, and if you know too little, you don’t know how to actually achieve success. It’s a really sweet spot in your lives that you’ll find in your careers.

 To succeed, you have to be curious, you have to be driven, you have to be committed. You have to be prepared to fail, get up and try again. You have to be passionate, you have to be hungry and believe in your ability to win, sometimes against strong odds. For me, what’s critical is being prepared to think freely. It’s being open to constant change, it’s being flexible and adaptive in your thinking. It’s always being excited by news ideas and it’s challenging the status quo. It’s being open to new ways of doing old things, and doing the exhaustive work required to develop your ideas into a meaningful proposition. And finally, it’s being able to communicate, pitch and sell your idea to other human beings. And importantly, you must give back to your community, to society, to do your part in making the world a more socially just and decent place. No amount of success in industry will be meaningful if society is broken and our planet is destroyed. So, to conclude today, I want to make a very important point. AI and automation won’t readily replace true human creativity innovation, nor will they advance social justice. You, the graduates here today, are in a privileged position. You will have the most important jobs of the future. Leverage that privileged position you have and go make a positive mark on the world. Thank you very much, and good luck.