animatorj

As promised here's a few of my drawrings.

Wow, it's been a really long time since I posted. First of all, I didn't go back to school in September like i had intended. Right after I finished 2nd year, I applied to Mercury Filmworks and was offered a full-time gig working on a new show called "Jimmy Twoshoes".  It's a blast!!!  I couldn't have wished of a better show to start this new career.  It's funny, full of slapstick, and working on it has taught me a great deal in a short time.   Keep your eyes open for this show starting early this year on Teletoon and Jetix Europe.  Anyway, I have a bunch of doodles and sketches that I will be adding soon so come back and visit soon.

I know that I was supposed to post more often. What can I say 2nd semester was really hard. There was barely enough time to rest never mind blog :). Anyway now its done and I've had a few nights to recover and reflect and hopefully I passed all my courses. Without further ado here's what I've been up to.

Our first project was a combo of a panning background, a flying machine, and a crashed version of the flying machine. The panning bg was a lot of fun. Mostly due to the fact that I chose a very organic setting. I decided to use a previous idea that I had thought of for the haunted house and instead use it for the pan.



So when I started to thumbnail for the pan thats where I started. However that soon changed into a location much closer to where the character would live.


Slowly the scene gets more focused on a mushroom village that the character belongs to.

Sorry I haven't been posting as often as I thought I would.  School continues to go well, but It gets quite busy and my schedule rarely leaves me much free time to stop to smell the roses.  My new years resolution is to post more art, starting now.  Keep in mind that the art work is not all from this past semester, but is a compilation of my best work that I have finished and cleaned up.  Next semester promises to be even more grueling than the last, but It should also turn out some really nice portfolio pieces.  Wish me luck, and enjoy the art.

Wow! What a trip!!! My apologies to everyone that may have been expecting day to day updates of our exploits in Montreal. I do have a good excuse. I was drunk :) very very drunk. Well we all were. The Halo 3 party was a huge success and many of us (including Matt and I) didn't leave until we were kicked out at 3am. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let us begin with the days speakers. Matt and I attended Syd Mead's presentation of his life's work in concept design. It was amazing to see his creativity and view of the future from so long ago. After his presentation Matt and I both bought a couple of his Gnomon dvd's and cued up to get them signed. And of course for a photo :)



After a quick break Matt and I split up to pursue separate interests. Thanks to Dawn, whom I met the day before. I was able to attend Pixar's speaker, Andy Schmidt. Despite the fact that he said he was nervous, he made a very good presentation. Ratatouille is Andy's 4th Pixar film and he has worked on many other well knows movies (Iron Giant, Osmosis Jones, etc.) I had a chance to meet him after his lecture to shake his hand and give him a drawn business card. I had to bonk my head though because I forgot to bring my "Art of Ratatouille" book for him to personalize.



Ok, its PARTY TIME!!!



Whew, and i'm spent. In the course of the night Matt and I lost and found each other in the throng several times, but by closing time we were totally separated. I waited outside for a bit, while the remaining people trickled outside. Socializing with complete strangers from the party and getting a hug from a very pretty woman. After a little while longer I stumbled down the main street of Montreal at 3am bought some pizza that I didn't eat, and finally found my way back to the room. Matt was not there either so I called him. Turns out Matt and Marcel were looking for another party lol. I reminded him that we still had beer in the room and that they should come over. Marcel showed me some of his very nice animation and gave me a bunch of websites to check out. When all was said and done, and everyone said goodnight it was 5am. What a night zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

It was really hard to wake up this morning, lol. I had already decided that I was going to forgo this mornings lectures in order to make time to visit the job fair. Matt went on ahead of me while I had a nice leisurely breakfast. After the party last night I realized how important business cards are at an event like this, portfolio or no portfolio. So I went to the nearby copy shop, bought 2 sheets of card stock and cut myself 20 cards. I wrote my name and email addy on each and then headed to the con. Whenever I had a few moments I would draw a tiny doodle on a card, adding to its value as an original piece of art. Hopefully people will be less inclined to toss them away.

The job fair was smaller than I thought it would be, so it was quite easy to meet everyone in a few hours. I grabbed a bunch of loot and talked to everyone to gauge what skills they were looking for and what software I should familiarize myself with. Maya seemed to be the preferred program among the video game people, at least for a starting point. Lastly I looked in on the Disney room. I had previously passed it by because another guy was pitching his folio. When I looked in this time however I was quickly greeted and invited in. I explained that I was merely testing the waters and meeting the people that I may be pitching to next year. I asked what they were looking for in a portfolio. They suggested that I talk with Dawn Rivera-Ernster, Disney's director of talent development. Dawn was really outgoing. She gave me the name of a bunch of different websites displaying artist's work and suggested that I have a look through and see what professionals are doing and work towards that. She found it difficult to guide me in the right direction since she had no idea how far my drawing skills went. So I gave her my livejournal address so she could see some of my sketchbook drawings. She was happy with what she saw and told me that I was well on my way and that I shouldn't limit myself to only storyboarding as a career, from what she saw I may be able to get work in concept design for characters and who knows what else. This was a huge boost to my ego, considering the same drawings were deemed no good by someone at school. I left with so much pride and drive to better my craft that I had never felt before.

While I was waiting for the elevator outside Disney's room. Dawn came into the hallway to talk with the other Disney reps to see if any of them wanted to go for coffee. They seemed to hum and haw about it, so I said. "I'll go for coffee with you." So Dawn, Aaron Holly ( Disney's lead character technical director) and I headed downstairs. We stopped by a deli to pick up a sandwich each and headed over to Second Cup for a mocca with whipped cream. This is why I came to Adapt, you can't buy this kind of networking. My devotion to my career has bolstered tenfold by Dawn's encouragement and I look forward to sending her some of my work very soon.

If you are reading this Dawn and Aaron, thank you so much for hanging with me today, you have no idea how much it meant to me that you took the time to give me guidance. I'll be in touch :).


When I met up with Matt around 1:30pm I told him what happened, much to his shock and horror at what he had missed. I had this stupid grin on my face from the high I was on, after having lunch with Dawn and Aaron.  With the job fair taken care of I could continue to attend the lectures.  The next speaker was David Krentz, a freelance jack of all trades.  He does illustration, conceptual design, digital painting, storyboarding, 3D modeling, and even sculpting.  Of all the speakers so far he is the one that I most identify with.  He started working in animation at Disney and then went freelance.  I had always thought that that the jack of all trades attitude would hurt me in this field.  So I felt guilty for having hobbies that varied so widely from each other when I was younger.  David mentioned in his lecture how odd it seemed that artists would only do one thing.  What happens to those people when there is no work in there expertise?  He has known people that stop drawing altogether when hit with that kind of problem.  So not only does a widely varied set of artistic skills help to keep work fun it also helps in times of adversity in the job market.

Today has been a real boost to my morale, and my options have been opened to the feature film world instead of just television.  Isn't it amazing what can happen in a few short days.

Wow, what a day. I can't believe the people we met today. The day started out like I expected. We were a tad irritated that we had to go in early to register instead of getting it done last night. We woke up around 6:30am and got ready to go. We had a very nice continental breaky up stairs, with a few of the other guests staying at Chez Roger. Then we were off.



The first speaker on the agenda was Ryan Cook. Ryan talked about lots of cg methods used to simulate buildings, smoke effects and lots more. His company "Double Negative" has done a heck of a lot of movie cg. Batman Begins, World Trade Center, and Harry Potter 5 to name a few. I asked him some questions about green screening vs. blue. He chuckled and said that he felt it to be just a personal preference, though many other professionals will say different. One of the theories is that blue seems to be the preferred method if shooting closeups on actors, the skin tones turn out better.



The second speaker was Mark Goerner. Mark is a freelance concept designer and illustrator. He too has many projects under his belt. He went into his approach to design. A very good lecture on what questions to be asking yourself when designing something. I took many notes :). I also suggested that Matt strike up a conversation with him after the lecture and give him a business card. Matt was reluctant and shy but I soon goaded him into it. Matt gave Mark his card after a lengthy talk, and Mark was all too happy to take it. Score one contact in the biz for Matt :)



A minute later Matt was engrossed in another conversation with a friend of Mark whom is also in the biz. Gunar makes two, way to go Matt.



Then we headed up to the Art Expo showing all sorts of different digital art paintings some of which were incredible. Also at the Art Expo was a woman giving people a chance to enter a speed painting contest using a Cintiq tablet and Corel Painter 10. Matt and I both had a go at it, wish us luck. The prize is a free Painter 10 and an Intous 3, not too shabby.



After our fun we went in search of food. A nearby Second Cup was an excellent way to snack and sketch the people passing by.



From this point everything just sorta snowballs like crazy. Matt and I bumped into the official photographer for Adapt, John. We all got to talking about where we were from and why we came and became fast friends. Later on that evening we met John again at the opening party. When the party wrapped up Matt and I were invited to dine with John and his brother Joe (a coordinator for Adapt). Also at the table was an assortment of people in the "know". Among them was Jean Eric Henault, creator of cgchannel.com on my left and Fausto De Martini, lead modeler for Blizzard's cinematic team on my right. I hope I made a good first impression :) Dinner at Le Baton Rouge was very nice and the company was amazing. The shock of being around all these pros still hasn't fully sunk in. I feel like this is where I want to be. Playing with the big boys in film and game cinematics. I couldn't have chosen a better place to sit :)

After a few hours we all went our separate ways. Matt and I walked to our hotel geeking out over our good fortune and our new friends. Dear god, what will happen tomorrow?

Greetings all from the great city of Montreal. My good friend Matt and I are here to attend Adapt '07. We left Ottawa around 3pm and took a greyhound to Montreal. We arrived at about 6pm, and walked a few blocks to our hotel. We dropped off the gear tout suite, and power walked to the Hyat vite vite to get registered before they stopped at 7pm. We arrived with about 20 minutes to spare only to discover that they closed the registration at 5pm and were now only giving out temp passes for the keynote speaker, Phil Tippet. It was quite interesting to hear an older gentleman swear as much as I do. I listened intently to his old stories of working on old films like Star Wars and Robocop. His company did the stop-motion mock ups for Jurassic Park before Spielberg decided to go CG. I hope I see him again during the week. He is one of those people that you just want to sit down with them and pick their brain about everything. I was quite surprised to learn a trick for making small puppets seem immense. You film at a much higher FPS (96 or something crazy like that) and move the puppet quickly. Then when played back at a normal speed it gives the impression of weight. He used this method when he puppeteered the rancor in Return of the Jedi.



Anyway, more to come later.
Jason