Visiting the House of the Mouse

So last Wednesday was my studio tour of the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. It was a unique and rare opportunity so four of us from my animation class made the trek down to SoCal. We had scrambled to get our portfolios ready and I even assembled a demo reel. In reality, it was 150 students with only time for 5 portfolios to be viewed and even then we missed a link in the chain over submitting our work for one of those 5 spots. It was a little disappointing but I did try to learn from the work that was being critiqued. Here are some of the tips they gave for portfolios:


• Keep your reel short. Cut to your best stuff and don't drag it out with your long complete animation. Two minutes is a good length.

• Open Big!! Don't lead up to your best work and have your worst work in the front. You want to grab their attention right at the get-go!

• If your portfolio shows some weaker work and some stronger work, just cut that weak work out so you don't drag down the portfolio.

• Show some personality in your work.

• Surprise them! Give them something they did not expect. Although I'll point out this has to be tempered with not SHOCKING them.

• Make them laugh! Have some work that is funny and gives them a good positive emotional response.

• Have some figure drawing from life. Some quick gestural pieces along with some longer studies.

(Okay, except for the first photo, these are all Disney-centric photos taken at the San Diego Comic-Con since I needed something to break up all this text and I could not take any photos inside the studio).

Although many of the students had not picked out a clear direction, it is helpful but not completely necessary to have your focused niche picked out. At least at this stage they were guiding students into what their strengths were from a hodge-podge of pieces. But at the more advanced stage, you should have a direction to focus on. They would ask us, "Are you Vis Dev? Rigging? Story?" In truth, for our school, we are just at the very beginning of learning animation and are getting the sampler of everything. But some of the disciplines are:

• Animation: The ones making the characters and things move and come to life.

• Vis Dev: Visual Development. Designing the characters and look of the animation. Character designs. Model sheets. Turns. All that prep work.

• Rigging. For 3-D animation, taking that 3-D creation and applying a skeleton and joint structure to it so the animators can make it move.

• Lighting. Especially for 3-D, where you put the lights. This also means what type of lights or colors. This can affect the emotional mood of the storytelling along with the clarity so Light is very important.

• Story. Creating the story to be told but also the backstory on the characters.

There are probably other divisions that I didn't write down but it is important for the creative people to become friends with the tech people. That was hammered home on several occasions throughout the day from a creative team on an animation short that needed the tech software guy to get them to their visual look for the animation to simply having a tech support guy there on hand to assist animation great Eric Goldberg during his presentation when the laptop wasn't working right.

Eric Goldberg was our final presentation of the day and we had front row seats for that. He explained about the Disney Appeal and narrowed it down to three areas: Character Conception, Drawing, and Movement & Acting. Character conception could involve using a character's name to define them like with their Seven Dwarfs but it is also the look to fit that personality. Drawing is just having good craftsmanship and an appealing drawing rather than sloppy amateur artwork and an unappealing character. Movement & Acting gives that character life. It helps if animators are also actors so they can act out how the animation should go.

Another phrase used was "Play! Create! Innovate!" Essentially, you can break that down into having fun (it will show in your work) while you are productive and creating but also to push the medium forward with innovation. You see all three of these in action at the Disney Studios.

During the walking tour, we were rushed to different areas throughout the studios (sometimes too quickly) but we got to sample a variety of different divisions. We got a sneak peak of the animation short PAPERMAN, which is quite excellent and uses new technology but with a classic animation look. The studios is also in full mode working on WRECK-IT RALPH, their fall feature animation, which looks interesting. I tried to keep a list of everyone we met so here goes....

Darrin Butters: Our MC and animator
John Musker: 35 year veteran animator
Mike Gabriel: Art Director
Lorely Bove: Visual Development Artist

Part of the WRECK-IT RALPH team....
Doug Bennett: Supervising Animator
Dave Komorowski: Character CG Supervisor
Bill Schwab: Visual Development Artist
Zack Petroc: Modeling Supervisor
With this group, we got to see how they developed their lead character in WRECK-IT RALPH from beginning to final design using Z-Brush and making 3-D turns.

We also met...
Bradley Raymond-Director
Jim Fitzrandolph-Game Design Director, Disney Interactive Media

There was also the PAPERMAN team of....
Jeff Turley: Art Director
Brian Whited: Senior Software Engineer
Patrick Osborne: Animator
Hyun Min Lee: Animator
Amol Sathe: Lighter
PAPERMAN is an animation short and many put this as their favorite part of the day. With this presentation, we got to see what started as a side project during some downtime to sometime that innovated the medium with some new software. It really utilized 3-D software for a 2-D look.

We also were introduced to a program that brings in interns to show them the ropes and some of them are later hired on as a full employee. From the different divisions....
Helen Chen: Visual Development Artist
Paul Felix: Art Director
Christian Eisenacher: Senior Software Engineer (I loved this guy's dry German sense of humor!)
Brent Burley: Principal Software Engineer
Lisa Allen: Animator
Marlon Nowe: Animator
Emily Tse: Lighter (We saw her demo reel and she had a great bit about staring at the sun. Very funny!)
Alessandro Jacimini: Lighting Supervisor

And then, of course, we saw a drawing and lecture by Eric Goldberg who did some drawings of Donald, Mickey, and other Disney characters.

All this was put together by Dawn Rivera-Ernster and her team. Dawn, Darrin Butters, and another person, who's name escapes me, conducted the portfolio reviews. Also, during lunch, we got to talk to George who works in Lighting and got some good insight into what is involved in 3-D lighting.

In all, it was a good day and much was learned. Many thanks to all the fine folks at Disney Studios for opening their home up to us.

Figure Drawing

While digging up some figure drawings for my Disney portfolio, I found some old drawings that didn't look that bad. Some are on a large sheets of paper that even a tabloid-sized scanner can't handle. Somehow, I had reduced some of them to a letter size during my graphic arts days (probably on the copy machine). I dearly want to get back to some life drawing and am searching for that right drop in session locally.

My Portfolio

Here is the portfolio I'll be showing at the Walt Disney Studios.

My Demo Reel

Mid-Terms this week and I've been scrambling to get my turns done, my backgrounds finished, and my character sheets completed. But last week, we got some news that is causing me to move all of that to the backseat. A few of us are getting the opportunity to visit the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank for a portfolio review and some workshops. While the timing could be better with our first ACME night broadcast also this week, I think we all knew what an incredible opportunity this is.

So the four or five of us going have been scrambling to get our portfolios ready and perhaps even a demo reel. With us still being in the infancy when it comes to animations completed, would we have enough to make a demo reel? Well, I did manage to scrape up enough from the past year and a half to get almost 2 minutes. Ideally, you wouldn't show something with ball bounces and brick drops, the most basic of animation assignments, but this is where we are at when it comes to showing our work.

So above is my reel. I've been told that putting it to music is tacky so I do have one without to show but I could not help putting it to some tunes, which I have seen with some demo reels.

Randoms Faces

Just a few face sketches done in-between poses during the TIME BANDITS movie. No, I wasn't bored but just was in a sketching mode. None of these have anything to do with the movie.

Time Bandits Drawing Marathon

This semester's Monster draw, where we watch a classic film and stop and draw stilled images, was TIME BANDITS. I don't think I've seen this one in 25 to 30 years. There were some cute parts but I don't think this film got any better with age.

David Warner was the villain. He did a fine job and proved to have some nice images to sketch.

This drawing had less shading than the others and more drawing of the figure. I like it.

The Supreme Being. A great face to draw.

When I think of character actresses, I don't usually think of Shelley Duvall. She only had two small scenes as the character Pansy with Michael Palin but she was great and almost stole the movie for me.

I did like the scenes with Sean Connery as Agamemnon. Him battling the minotaur in the greek helmet and the people with the Agamemnon masks got my Art History geek going.

We didn't have a pose of the giant that used the ship as a hat but I thought it was a clever idea and I liked the shot of the giant sitting down on the ground. So I drew it from memory. And then the last shot was a practice shot of Alan Napier from THE MOLE MEN.

Moore Turn Final

Final animation turn for the Moore character.

Worker Turn Final

Final version of the Worker turn.
Extra drawings added.
Inked.
In living color.
Stick a fork in it 'cause it's done!!!

More Saturday Night Sketching

More pencil clean ups from the St. Paddy's Day Par-tay! But these were just misc.-themed ones. Above is a space scene since I'm dying to do some inking of some space with some asteroid rubble after recently looking at a Jim Starlin WARLOCK comic book splash page that has, as someone called it, some very "baroque" inking. I'm also ramping up to do some background drawings with rocks and stuff for my animation later this week. For my drawing above, that left arm will need some fixing. Probably the right as well.

Head sketches above and the whole page below.