NK's Journey as a Character Animator: February 2009

Hm, seems I'm doing once a month posts at present. I'll try to be a bit more frequent to document my journey in more detail.

Ok, so most of my time has been drained with job hunting at present, with a few drawing exercises slipped in here or there. I've decided to timetable out my time a bit more and give myself more time to work at 3D, animation and drawing. Reason being, that at the end of the day, they are my career priority, and I need to keep improving to increase my chances of getting work in this area.

I admit that after a fair bit of cold canvassing and reading creative arts job ads, I got a bit disheartened and accepted that I would probably just have to get what my friend calls a 'survival' job to start with. I mainly thought this because most production companies I've talked to weren't really interested in entry level people and because most 3D and animation job ads demanded a few years of industry experience.

So to pass some time and to increase my chances of getting a survival job, I've done a handful of one-day courses in hospitality including getting and RSA, RGC, and some barista, waiting/function and bar skills. Seeing as i don't really hang out in coffee and alcohol/gaming venues, the classes were actually quite interesting and I learnt a fair bit.

But nevertheless, I have still been applying for creative positions or admin roles with production type companies, and I have continued my cold canvassing. And it has borne some fruit. In January I had an interview with a medical company who makes education medical creative stuff. Last I heard, they still hadn't filled the position so there's still some hope there. And the exciting news is that I'm having an interview this Thursday for an animation position with a gambling type gaming company. I'm half stoked, half scared ' cos I'm having a 2 hour long interview. yes 2 hours. Eek - I'm not sure what to expect. If anyone has had interviews with creative companies, could you please let me know what kinds of questions they asked and what the interview structure was like?

I'd really love the job because I'd like to get a start in the industry and I think I'd learn heaps on the job. I think it could only serve to propel my learning and improvement.

As for exercises that I have been doing - well I've mainly just been doing drawing at present and I've decided to start with the fundamentals. The thing I believe my drawings lack are what Disney call 'solid drawing' - 3D-ness. I'm literally doing the prescribed exercises from some books to boost my drawing skills confidence.

I admit that I haven't really been doing much 3D lately. But I'm getting back into it now. Once again, I want to start from the fundamentals (especially in animation) and build up my confidence. I also plan to gradually improve in other areas of 3D. Particularly modelling which, next to animation, is the thing I want to be 2nd best at, and I'm also fairly interested in lighting. But yes, everything.

I'm also hoping to start some 2D animating too. I think there's lots of ways to go about it. I'm going to start off by working with what I have, and then later I'd like to follow professional protocol of the pencil drawn and Flash drawn animation approaches. For the latter, I was delighted to stumble upon animators from an Animation studio in sydney (during my cold canvassing) who teach traditional animation - but using a WACOM and flash. The course is only 3 hours a week and I want to do it as soon as they get that up and running.

And one final point, I've decided to put my DVD send-out on pause until perhaps May. At present I'm just going to email production companies a follow-up link to my site/reel after I talk to them over the phone. I'm planning on entering my reel into the Digital Access Internship Scheme around May, so by then I plan to have a lot of fresh animation work to put into my reel. Consequently, it seems more worth the oney to put out DVDs at that time.

So to sum up, I need to be a little more disciplined with all this if I want to make a career of it. And the following posts should reflect that.

I thought I'd share photos of my 3D prints from 2007-2008 with the web world. I don't know much about the technicalities behind it all, but I can tell you that you will need to keep your geometry very clean and then convert them to STL files before they can be printed. I can point interested parties to more information on request.

I wanted to thank Albert Morrissey for smoothing and converting to STL my 2007 characters, and for taking the time to convert the 2008 ones and then teach me how to do it on MODO when for they turned out to be reversed. The only bad part about STLs for those who don't know, is that they take a very long time to be made and they're farly big. I'm glad I learnt that for myself as it increased my appreciation of the process and the help I received along the way :)

A side note on MODO. From my little play with the trial version last year, it seemed like a pretty cool piece of software, and later down the track once my animation skills are a bit more up, I'd love to play with it further.

Without further ado, here our my cute little characters: