As I'm currently trying to make a living as a freelance character animator working remote, I found this article by Dana Boadway from the the April Animation Mentor Newsletter, very interesting.
I don't mind relocate to be able to do what I love. I really enjoy moving around and explore new places, but at the moment, I simply can't. So hopefully Dana is right and that more and more studios will consider remote workers.
Even tho it's a shame it wasn't nominated for Best Picture, it's great that it got the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Well deserved! Congratulation Pixar! Here's some behind the scenes-stuff:
Watching behind the scenes stuff is a huge inspiration for me and I never get tired of it. Especially about animation. It's just so cool. This Walter Lantz video may be old stuff to some, but still...it's cool. Enjoy!
About a year ago I worked at Ambient Entertainment in Germany on the animated feature Urmel voll in Fahrt. Now the DVD is out and it's cool to see my shots in context and fully lit and rendered. This was my first job ever, straight out from school.
Looking back at my animation in the shots now they're kind of...well, they could have been a heck of a lot better :), but the job the guys in the FX department, the lighters and render-guys did, is stunning. Also, I couldn't have gotten a better entry into the animaton industry than working at Ambient.
Richard Williams has been a huge inspiration ever since I started animation a few years back. Just watching documentaries about him, listening to him talk or hear others talk about him makes me wanna animate.
So...I'm back in Norway! I left New Zealand September 15th to return to Norway and work the rest of my contract with HuHus remotely. Currently working on the children show Veggie Tales which is kinda cool.
My time onsite at HuHu in New Zealand has been really great. Made some awesome friends and the studio is a very nice place to work. New Zealand is also a truly beatiful country with the nicest people on the planet :)
Haven't been too much time lately to work on my showreel, but there's a couple of tests I've been working on during the past months that I will try to put up soon.
Alrighty. So, for ages I've been wanting to do some wacky cartoony stuff, but all kinds of other things has gotten in the way. Now, I've found some time to do it. I know this isn't the greatest gag/story in the world, but I just wanted to do something cartoony for the sake of practicing it. Here's my blocking pass (main keys/extremes only) of my first attempt.
Congratulations to Team Grojf for winning the FJORG competition at Siggraph. Their winning test, The Red Truck, is a stunning piece of emotional storytelling and animation, created under extreme conditions in 32 hours. Awesome!
There's a couple of really good quotes from this lecture that really stood out to me. "Brick walls are there to let us prove how badly we want to achieve something" and "'Luck' is where preparation and opportunity meets". Pretty cool stuff to keep in mind.
As I'm currently trying to make a living as a freelance character animator working remote, I found this article by Dana Boadway from the the April Animation Mentor Newsletter, very interesting.
