Overview

This semester has been really eye opening. We got to hear from some truly incredible speakers and learn from all different parts of the Industry. The insight into companies ranging from close to home to giants like ILM is so inspiring and invigorating. I feel the opportunities we’ve had have been really valuable and something we are going to remember long into our careers. Just having that little sneak peek into how different people live their lives has made me think more about all the possible directions that I could go in after leaving. One thing that has really stuck with me is the idea that people (even the most impressive) get their gradually. No one just lands a job at ILM or Pixar out of chance, it’s a slow build of progress that we can achieve if we keep at it and keep on putting as much effort and time as we can into getting better.

In saying that, this module has been really daunting. It is so intimidating to think of the number of people we are competing against for these positions. And on top of this the sheer scale of how good the speakers were can make you feel like it’s impossible to get there. This is something I think I really have to work on, and I feel like that fear has impacted me this semester and slowed me down.

Looking only at the showreels, website and CV, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about marketing myself this semester and I have had to think about what impression do I want to give the world about me. I feel like there is an overall style to the material I’ve produced here and hopefully this is a step in the right direction to marketing myself correctly.

My CV

Here is the end result for my Cv after following the feedback given to me by Greg after the Interview. My main issue was re-structuring the layout.

Kerry McCormick CV

Interview and Feedback

So I had my Interview with Greg and Ross Morrison from Black North/Enter Yes. I have to say that while I wasn’t initially nervous about doing the interview, the whole set up of working down a list and standing out in the hall made me very nervous and in the end I ended up being extremely nervous and shaky in the interview. I don’t think I did myself Justice in it at all. I know this as when I went and did an actual interview for placement I was very calm and collected, and not nervous at all. That makes me worry less as I know that In a real life situation my nervous won’t hold me back. I think it was just the intimidation of the whole ‘school like’ situation.  I wrote that I was applying to Billy Goat Entertainment…

• Tell us a bit about yourself

Here I stammered a little but gave a reasonable answer. I talked about My connection with the course and the Animation Society.

• Do you have anything to show us

I showed my showreel and they asked me a few questions about the giraffe project and my Aquatic creature sculpt.

• They asked me what the hardest part of the showreel was

I said it was crunch due to it being our first time at moving through the production pipeline and how much we’ve learnt since then.

• Where do you see yourself in Five years time

I talked about my love of creatures and how I would be happy if I could work my way into creature design and creation.

• Finally If we had any questions for them

I asked about if they were intending to journey into VR at all with that being so prominent in the gaming industry.

FEEDBACK

My feedback from Greg was as follows

• Good opening Answer
• Didn’t come across as nervous
• For the showreel Include more rotations
• Work more at my sculpts (more detail)
• Talk more about Billygoat

 

 

Showreel Second Draft

 

Conann’s Feedback

I got a bunch of feedback from Conann for this showreel.

• Liked the pan down shot
• Create my own background for the mountains instead of Jenny’s
• Redo the animation
• Shot goes on for too long
• Shot of Giraffe rotation goes on for too long
• Don’t center rotation of giraffe
• Include all my maps at the other side
• Texture fade in is nice
• More of Crunch
• Try to elongate the day/night scene of crunch (may need to re-render)
• Hav background fade into colour like the Aquatic Creature
• Light Aquatic creature better
• Have face shot first so it makes more sense
• Don’t include Wireframe of Doghead
• Fix up textures on doghead
• Maybe add fur or something
• Place zbrush sculpts on ground plane (feet are messed up)

EDIT

Greg’s feedback on showreel from interview

• More rotations
• Try and spend time on a sculpt to make it much more detailed. Keep practicing so it looks less lumpy.

 

Render Scenes

Here are some of the scenes that have been rendered so far. These animations were sent to me by Anna and I’ve been rendering them.

Final presentation

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There is our final presentation minus a few of the videos. I Am going to select some of the slides to talk about here below.

Concept vs Final results

Our Design for the character and how he turned out were fairly on the nose. We tried to keep him as close to the designs as possible.

The control room design changed quite a lot, mainly with the introduction of the green lights. These ended up playing quite a vital part.

While as you can see here the control room colour palette for NASA is mainly blues we thought that the green would go better with the red as well as bringing in a real SCiFi fee

 

Animation

Here was the book reach shot. I have a number of problems with it

Firstly The 17 frames is so short it practically give no time at all for the action. Second the hand covers too much of the book. Just grabbing the end would suffice.

This will be immediately followed by the secret door opening. Here is how That was first put together…

Alec discussed the zoom in with us and said he would rather the shot remained stationary, and instead watched the door open, have bright light fall from it, and then cut to a shot of the queen’s silhouette at the doorway.

This is the render of that shot with the corrections. The door however moves to quickly and so the impact of the cogs turning can’t be felt. I’ll slow it down.

This is the shot slowed. Before it you can also see the corrected book pull shot rendered.

The Interview

What to Expect

Greg gave us a lecture on what to expect in the Interview. Here are some of the key points that I found really helpful.

I imagine this question will be reasonably straightforward when it comes to being interviewed, the main trouble will be fitting in all the information you can that will make you sound like a positive asset to their company.

This was actually something I was really looking to know and so its interesting that the approach should be to just state what their open position is. On top of that we also get to talk about our key skills.

Animating the Hallway scene

For our opening shot initially we wanted for the camera to zoom out from the portrait of Churchhill. However as time has moved on we realise that our concept work is not up to scratch for the portraits in the hall. Therefore we need to have the opening focus be on something else. So instead we are tying it into our idea of the Guard on Tinder and zooming out from a crown logo on the back of his phone.

Animation wise Matthew acted this scene out and I tried to follow it pretty closely. The character will be idly flicking through his phone, will hear the queen’s approach, look up and fumble/juggle with his phone then salute holding it in his hand.  This is the progress so far…

Flicking on his phone

For the Queen’s walk I tried to take into consideration the overlapping action of the crown’s bobbing and so put together a very simple rig to allow me to move the body and the head separately.

The Juggle

we really want to try and make the juggle look as realistic as possible so I had to think a lot about where he would be looking and how he would approach an action like this. Because its so fast I had to look at how Matthew’s acting worked slowed down. The action is also pretty exaggerated so I wanted to tone it down a little as William’s animating style is fairly realistic.

The other Guards

We had lots of plans for how we wanted the other Guards to act. The idea was to have one spill his cup of tea, maybe incorporate the corgi in somehow. Unfortunately I had a lot of issues with my computer and so the Animation progress was majorly slowed down. Fortunately the issue was fixed so I had time to create a couple of salute animations for those characters.

Laura Livingstone

Our sixth guest speaker  Laura Livingstone, is a producer at Ntropic. Laura was Originally from Armagh and studied in Dublin. Her view on the Industry was definatley one we haven’t heard before and it was very different from all the speakers so far. . In her course in Dublin she was the go to producer for all the projects. After her course she moved to Spain and Germany then on to LA interning. She explained when projects fell through and she was broke and jobless. She took chances and went for interviews when she knew she wasn’t qualified enough for them. She basically locked herself away and learnt for herself. Eventually she ended up getting a job in visual effects and post production and got to work on Iron man which was what ended up getting her her foot in the door.

She had worked for many companies within the past few years, her future plans are to get back into feature films.

recent work history –

Worked for Atomic Fiction.
Worked for Zoic- a lot of episodic television. Faster, better, cheaper.
Work with entropic now. CG that she is doing is for companies like apple.

Find artists that you admire and ask for any opportunity  to shadow or work for them. This is certainly one of the main things I noticed about Laura was that she was so determined. She not afraid to put herself out there and does so repeatedly.

Best places for companies to find out: be honest with our regards to skill. Look for an entry level job.