It's surreal to condense 20+ years of work into 3 1/2 minutes. There's a mix of vis dev animation tests, code and production work all from my time at Sony Pictures Animation. This is only a fraction of the work I've done, many projects cannot be shown as they are either in active development or retired without becoming a feature film. Such is the life of a development artist.
Most of the work in the reel is done on a condensed timeline with a few artists. The old saying "Fast, good or cheap. Pick two." is very relevant for development. The execs tend to want fast and cheap. Expectations are that we make everything look high quality as possible.
Note on supervision: You'll see that I list "sup" on each piece. That means that I: bid the work, scheduled artists, kept execs and producers informed of the progress, managed day-to-day tasks for the artists, tracked down tech issues, gave feedback to artists, presented work for review with the directors and was responsible for quality and on-time delivery.
Gargamel - Smurfs: The Lost Village, which at the time we made the piece the film was untitled. Typically we create work very early in the film making process. Here we knew that the design aesthetic was to go back to the original comic book by Peyo. Since our crew is small and often on multiple projects at once, we tend to wear a lot of hats, which is why you'll see that I do a lot of tasks on most of the work in the reel. Here I supervised, made the anim rig, textured everything, did the cloth sim, lit and comp'd.
Cheesepider - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. Talked about this in the previous post. We could pull this off in a short time period because I had already rigged and textured Barry and the Pickle. Supervised, textured and rigged Barry and Pickle, lit and comp'd.
Tim and Pickles - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. The fourth and largest piece for this film. This is just one shot. If I recall I spent only two days animating this shot, including addressing notes. Even though I supervise and give notes to the other animators, we ultimately need to make the directors happy, so I receive revision notes as well. Supervised, rigged Tim and Pickles, textured Pickles, animated, lit and comp'd.
Smurfy plowing into glass cake cover - Smurfs. Sup'd the live action shoot as well as the cg. The whole piece was large enough and under a tight timeline that we were able to get additional help. This crew was double our usual so I could concentrate on managing a larger crew. I had done the rig for earlier tests. Supervised, rigged and textured Smurfy. I animated and lit other shots that are not in the reel, an earlier post has the full piece.
Wave Test #2 - Surf's Up. When we make an animation test, it's intended only to be viewed internally. Most often they find their way outside. Our first test was so well received and subsequently played so often, that we were asked to create another piece. Our wave rig prototype had been sent to Imageworks after the first test, for this piece we tested the first production rig and give some early feedback on it. Directors and execs liked the surfing in this enough that they had Imageworks re-create the animation for the film. I supervised, rigged and textured Cody and animated.
Gene - Emoji Movie. This was very early in development, and we threw a lot of ideas into this piece. There is a subtle voxel ring on the edges of Gene's head/body, it looks like compression artifacts on YouTube. I had to make the face rig very flexible since we had to be prepared for Gene's mouth to stretch all the way across his entire face, or that his mouth might end up anywhere inside the sphere. Supervised, rigged and textured Gene, lit and comp'd.
Corn Disaster on the Great Wall - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Part of a longer piece. I talk about it in an earlier post. This shot came together very quickly, couple days in total. Had to texture, rig and animate in a couple days. Supervised as well.
Barry - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. Walk / run cycles are normally our second phase in development. After the director(s) and character designers sign off on a design, we'll rig, texture and animate the main characters. Supervised, rigged and textured Barry and lit the shot. We tend to skip a comp for cycle test and do everything straight from the render.
Flint, Sam, Tim and Pickle Dance - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. Part of a longer animation test. Flint, Sam and Tim are Imageworks assets from the first film, but because Imageworks and SPA use separate pipelines ( long story ), we have to re-rig, re-texture and re-do the hair. Fortunately Imageworks is very organized so the re-texturing process is fairly easy, but I had to write a lot of code to transfer all the data and prep it for our use. Supervised, modeled some bg pieces, re-rigged and re-textured Flint, Sam and Tim, rigged and textured Pickle, animated everything, did the cloth and hair fx, lit and comp'd.
Big Z - Surf's Up. One of the earliest animation tests we did. We were still finding our footing as a department. Visual development had been done for years, but doing it in 3d was very rare. 3d was thought at the time to be too cumbersome, too long of a process to be done in a fast pace and rapidly changing environment. I knew it could be done and was constantly championing the group and setting out to prove that it can be an integral part of development. This was a test that began to cement that notion in other people's minds. Supervised and rigged.
Pickle - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. Another phase 2 walk cycle. If I recall, there was only one or two days to rig and texture, which is the norm for vis dev. I also added this because I like the blink, hard to see in this, but his eyelids close like a camera aperture rather than a clam shell. Supervised, rigged, textured and lit.
Hefty - Smurfs: The Lost Village. This is a voice test, which is our phase 3 for main characters. If you cast an actor to star in your live action film, you'd have them perform a few lines to see if this is indeed your star. We do the same. Supervised, rigged, textured, lit and comp'd.
Cal - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. Part of a larger piece. Talked about this in an earlier post. Supervised, rigged and animated.
Code - Spa Shop. What is shown is a custom UI that I built to house hundreds of tools we've made over the years, some of which dates back to my Imageworks days ( 20 years... ). I'd estimate that I wrote about 90% of what's in the UI, Omar Smith wrote the rest, save the one that was written by Dan Kramer. The code that survives are tools that have been written and improved upon as needs or Maya changes. We use the tools interactively and in everything from rigging, lighting and pipeline scripts. Most are MEL but these days I tend to use Python.
Code - Spa Rig Character. Another custom UI. The tabs and buttons are created by parsing the rig script for hash tag mark ups. Depending on the tag, it will build a tab or button. Utilities and the main "run" section have special handling and their own unique tab. The rigging code itself has evolved over years. I can create a fully functioning rig and passable deformations in about an hour.
Columbia Logo - Hotel Transylvania. Sometimes I do production work for our films. It tends to be mostly logos. SPA and Imageworks are separate entities as far as pipelines and union vs non-union, both of which have their challenges when it comes to sharing work. I spent years at Imageworks before SPA, so I know the pipeline. The Columbia logo comp itself has been around Imageworks for a long time, but each time I do a logo the whole thing has to be rebuilt ( long story ). I supervised, re-textured the Mavis Bat, did the fx, lit and comp'd.
SPA Logo. This is SPA's second logo. Justin Thompson, Dave Bleich, and I re-designed the logo. I did the concept, modeling, rigging, texturing, animation, lighting and comp. We had done a bunch of concepts for this. The execs liked this one and had almost no notes through the whole process.
End Credit Cards - Open Season 4. This was a quick and fun project. Our direct-to-dvd films have small crews and very tight timelines, but they are a lot of fun to do as you get to try ideas and find quick solutions. Dave Feiss drew the characters, Sean Eckols designed and painted the cards, I took his Photoshop files and animated as many of his layers as I could. I think it was about a week from concept to completion for these.
Barry - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs Marketing. If we have time between projects, we will team up with our marketing department to do short, fun promotional pieces. This one is Barry celebrating 3 million likes on the Cloudy Facebook page. From concept to delivery was about three weeks if I recall correctly. I did everything except the animation.
Columbia Logo - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. We love to mess with the Columbia lady. Supervised, re-rigged and re-textured Barry and Banana, did the fx, lit and comp'd.
Cloudy 2 Logo - Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2. The super talented Glenn Harmon did an early pass on this. I took it as a jumping off point and kept adding and improving until I ran out of time. I did everything except the original concept.
I've left off work from my time at Sony Pictures Imageworks since that was over 15 years ago. While I was there I did everything from modeling, rigging, animation, fx, lighting, comp and supervision in 7+ years on lots of feature films.
Music: Liquid Blue by The.Madpix.Project — Provided by Jamendo
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