New Years Honors: Sir Ian Taylor

Ian Taylor says he might have ended up being a downcast rock singer if it weren’t for a reunion in 1989 that led him down the road to founding his Animation Research business 30 years ago.

That meeting was with University of Otago professor Geoff Wyvill, who told Taylor that the future lay in going digital.

“I had no idea what he was talking about.”

Wyvill gave Taylor his top four students and together they created a company that has revolutionized the visualization of golf, cricket, boating, motorsports and baseball with data-driven 3D graphics over live imagery from the division. of Virtual Eye sports.

“I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t met Geoff, this would never have happened.”

Taylor credits the team behind him with being named a Fellow Knight of the New Zealand Order of Merit and recognized for their services to broadcasting, business and the community.

“This would never have happened without those people.”

Taylor, who describes himself as a storyteller, shared the good news with his team Wednesday and says he wanted them to hear it from him first.

“It’s just wonderful.”

You will celebrate with a traditional barbecue, which you celebrate every New Year with friends and family in Wanaka. “We will just do what we did last year.”

Taylor pondered whether he wanted to be called “sir,” but said it was about accepting the honor.

“If you’re going to say yes you have to respect the honor that it is. I am very honored to accept it.”

But he says he’s been Ian for the past 70 years and that isn’t likely to change.

“I imagine I’ll have a joke for a few weeks and then it’ll go back to Ian.”

Taylor was born in Kaeo of Northland in a house without electricity and raised in the Raupunga community of the east coast of Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngapuhi descent.

His path to success was far from easy.

Taylor dropped out of business studies at the University of Victoria in 1968 to join the rock band Kal-Q-Lated Risk.

After four years with the band and a period of mandatory military training in Waiouru, Taylor, unemployed, returned to Dunedin. “When I was at Risk, we traveled all over the country and the best place we played was Dunedin: the Ag Hall and the Ocean Beach Hotel.”

Taylor worked as a forklift driver at Speights Brewery. later as a presenter on the children’s television program Play School while completing a law degree at the University of Otago. He was about to become a lawyer when he was offered a full-time job as a presenter on the children’s magazine show Spot On.

Taylor worked as a presenter, producer, screenwriter and director for TVNZ from 1977 to 1989. He produced documentaries including Pieces of Eight, the inside story of New Zealand’s Rowing Eight at the 1984 Olympics; Aramoana, a documentary told by those directly involved in the David Gray shooting; and Innocent even, the inside story of David Bain’s defense team at his first trial.

In 1989 Taylor was offered a current job in Wellington, but did not dare to leave Dunedin. Instead, he formed Taylormade Productions, doing regional television commercials and corporate videos.

When TVNZ closed its Dunedin studios, Taylor bought them with a $ 500,000 bank loan and made television shows for children.

Animation Research was founded when Taylor met Wyvill, who headed the Department of Computer Science and the Computer Graphics Laboratory at the University of Otago.

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

The original students, Craig McNaughton, Paul Sharp, and Stu Smith, are still working at Animation Research 30 years later.

His first television advertising images included the Bluebird penguin water skiing, seagulls on a Cook Strait fast ferry, and gannets forming a koru.

This year the company had to address the problem of not being able to travel to sports tournaments and can now cover the sport remotely from Dunedin.

Animation Research received the award for “Outstanding New Approaches to Sports Broadcasting” at the 2015 Sports Emmy Awards for its development of the America’s Cup mobile app.

Taylor was named New Zealand Innovator of the Year in 2019 and in 2020 received Deloitte’s Top 200 Visionary Leader Award.

It is now focused on “Tech for Good”, which is developing technology tools for use in education and healthcare and has played a key role in a collaboration between Dunedin Methodist Church and Animation Research to create virtual learning environments for inmates. .

For the Tuia 250 commemorations, he developed digital simulations of the recreated ancestral journeys made for the commemoration, freely available online.

Taylor has served on the board of Māori Television, New Zealand On-Air, New Zealand Film Commission, IT Professionals New Zealand, Dodd-Walls Center, Callaghan Innovation, and is a member of Ngā Kuitūhono, NZQA’s Maori advisory group.