Our history

Character Matters didn’t become one of the continent’s leading computer generated animation studios overnight, they’ve been working hard at it for 15 years. Those years have been spent developing technology, nurturing creative talent and producing engaging animation and lovable characters in the commercial, short film and feature film arenas.

The company was started in 1993 in Harare, Zimbabwe. At that time 3D animation was a relatively unknown discipline worldwide let alone in Zimbabwe. All this was started with just 2 Commodore Amiga computers, custom written software, CLI scripts and a fax machine. Clock speeds on the Amiga’s were altered to reduce rendering times from 20 hours per frame to a more usable 8 hours. These frames were then edited onto tape frame by frame, 25 frames per second, resulting in a 20 second commercial taking a full day to compile to tape.

In Mid 1994 Character Matters started shifting from Amiga pc’s to generic x86 clones where the soldering iron proved an even more valuable ally in reducing rendering times, resulting finally in a commercially viable outfit. By 1997 Character Matters had a virtual monopoly in television advertising, producing 250 projects of various sizes that year with 3 people.