This past week was filled with interesting talks and meeting some very talented people in the film industry at Siggraph held at the Vancouver Convention Center, the first time the conference was held outside the US.
Some of the talks I attended included watching Pixar’s new short La Luna with a talk from the director, Story Telling with Color featuring Dreamworks, Cinematography, Character Rigging, a talk by animator Carlos Baena, The Spirit of “Rango,” Kung Fu Panda 2 final battle talk, and special vfs student-only talks by ILM and Lino DiSalvo.
For me, Siggraph started off great, talking with the lead R & D Engineer at ILM and the lead animator for Rango, Kevin Martel, after their talk. Everyone I had the chance to speak with at Siggraph was very nice and accommodating to my questions. Kevin even watched my push assignment and said all the mechanics were there and had an overall positive reaction to it!
I also talked to recruiters from several studios: Framestore, Double Negative, ILM, Sony, Method Studios, Animal Logic, Rainmaker, Pixomondo, The Mill, and Mirada. There was also a lot of talk about student demo reels during the week.
I think Lino DiSalvo brought the reality home when he was visiting our campus with two other Disney recruiters and said, “It’s all one pile, you’re reel could be right next to a guy from Pixar who’s been doing this for 15 years.” So despite there being a lot of work in this industry it is still highly competitive and makes one want to work that much harder.
Lino also said that everyone starting out has about 200 bad shots in them and must get them out before they can really start improving. Lino was a graduate of VFS 3D11 – I’m in class 3D90. He’s the voice of the main pigeon in Bolt and was Supervising Animator on a little film called Tangled.
During his vfs student-only talk, he showed us the progression of his animation for some of his shots on Tangled, as well as, never-before-seen footage of a Disney production coming to ABC this Christmas. It was interesting how close the process we’re learning here at VFS is the same Lino uses at Disney, like shooting reference of himself. Lino also mentioned his wife, who’s an actress and actually performed as reference for Rapunzel in Tangled, helps him make acting decisions for his animation.
Overall, Siggraph was a great experience and had made me even more excited about entering into this industry after graduating from VFS this December.
I’ll begin animating on my short film in the next week. I’ve spent the last two months modeling, remodeling, rigging, and re-rigging my characters. Stay tuned to my YouTube channel as I will post assignments as I complete them: http://www.youtube.com/user/LucasRidley
Also check out Vancouver Film School’s blog: http://blog.vfs.com/