I was visiting Disney World Florida, with my family when I was a kid. It was my first time in America and the first time being that close to an animation studio. They had a fully operational animation studio in Florida back then and you could take the tour from Disney World as if it was part of the park. It was a major draw for me, and I was pretty excited. My parents were being very supportive in taking the family in the first place. I’d long ago stopped taking family holidays with them in order to focus on making my own films instead. But I wasn’t going to miss this one (they were very cunning). During the tour you end up in a room with one of the experienced 2D animators at his drawing desk talking to the crowd and showing them what he does. We watched his demonstration. My parents, not knowing anything about the process of getting work in the industry, encouraged me to walk up to him and ask him if I could show him my portfolio and ask about a job. I (kind of) knew that it wasn’t the way to do it, but […]
Some time ago I animated this Parkour piece as a one off exercise and it’s been in my animation reel for a while. You can read about it here. But as I was thinking about doing new pieces for my layout / previs reel I realized it would be a great piece to build on. Originally I kept the camera very plain so that the focus of the piece was the animation on the character. There were no cuts, as that could have been perceived as a way to hide cheats in the animation. But for this new piece that wasn’t important. So I could cut as often as I liked, explore angles and even use slow motion. It’s a work in progress and I intend to come back to it. I want to spend some time playing with the layout of the buildings, improve the textures, add motion blur, depth, focus, foreground elements passing the camera and possibly even light and render it. I had fun playing with Maya’s new Camera Sequencer to put this together which made speed changes very easy. It has a great tool for batch playblasting what ever shots you select in the sequence which […]
I’ve been doing a lot of spit and polish on my portfolio recently while hunting for work. Half of the shots in my Layout / Previs reel are new thanks to the release of Skylanders Giants.
