PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE: INDUSTRY TALKS

Throughout Semester One, we were visited by a number of industry professionals who gave advice and spoke to the class about their careers. I found several of these talks to be very useful in regards to developing a portfolio and got me to think more deeply about my future career in the animation industry.

DEEPA MANN-KLER

Deepa Mann-Kler is an artist who works in a variety of media including Virtual Reality, neon installations and photography. Her work explores themes such as health, identity and belonging. Deepa spoke about how her career developed and how she landed in the animation industry. It was interesting to learn about the unusual path she took to enter the industry. She seemed very creative and unafraid to tackle media to create her art. She spoke about her company 'NEON' which creates an Augmented Reality game that helps children in receiving injections and other medical aid. It places the child in a world in which the painful sensations of the needle are placed in the context of a cute character helping them put on armor. This lessens the pain as the child sees it as simply a process in the game. Similarly, she also helped develop a VR application called 'Breathe VR', which helps relieve stress in elderly patients. When experiencing pains or aches, the game places the patient in a calming virtual field, which then focuses the patient on their breathing, thereby soothing them.

BRIAN COYLE

Brian Coyle spoke about his career in the games industry which was very eye-opening. He gave a lot of good advice on what employers look for in a portfolio. What I found helpful about this was that he kept it specific and relevant to each career, e.g animator, modeller, game designer. With his knowledge of the industry he was able to answer our questions with a lot of detail. For a character model, he gave examples of good ways to display it in a showreel with nice lighting and good posing. He instructed to always keep a neat composition in your imagery.

KRIS KELLY

Kris Kelly, the managing director of Enter Yes, a Belfast-based animation studio, came to talk about his company and his experience being the head of a company. Kris was very passionate about the creative process and emphasized the importance of a good script. He was interested in telling stories that affect the audience on an emotional level. His studio's work include credits such as 'Looper', 'The Fall' and 'Derry Girls'. He warned us of the issues that a bad script can cause. To him, it was vital to iron out any problems at this stage of the process before moving onward. He also made sure to inform us to stay honest with our work and take on board criticism whenever possible, adding that you must accept that your work will never be perfect and there will always be flaws. However, once you realise this, it's much easier to fix such problems. Kris also emphasized the importance of sound in a project. I agree with this sentiment as without good sound design, an animation can easily fail to be convincing. His final advice was to always storyboard your work and not to refine anything too fast.

CATHY MOORE

Cathy Moore is the employability and careers consultant in the Belfast campus of Ulster University. She spoke about how to be more employable and how to make a well-crafted CV. This was very useful from a practical standpoint and got me to think more about making a good CV. She advised us to try to be unique and stand out from the crowd when applying for work placement. She showed us a virtual CV in which someone modelled a room exhibiting all of their work where the employer could walk around and view it in 3d. I found this to be very interesting as a concept and I'd be intrigued if I were an employer.

LAUREN PATRICK

Lauren Patrick, a past student of Ulster University animation came in to talk about her job at Jam Media. Lauren works as a compositor in the Belfast studio of the company. It was great to see her demo of her compositing process and her current work. She showed us her work on 'Becca's Bunch', a new kids show that the studio is producing for Nick Jr. Using AfterEffects, Lauren would have to track and mask on several layers to add the limbs and eyes onto pre-made puppets. She went through her process and showed us exactly the steps very clearly. The footage that she was provided with as a compositor needed CG elements added onto live-action. She then provided us with footage to mask and track ourselves which was useful. I found her talk very informing as a whole.

GREG MAGUIRE

Greg Maguire is the CEO and co-founder of Humain, a Belfast company which creates and uses rigging technologies for clients. Greg has been in the animation industry for decades and therefore has a great deal of extensive knowledge about it. It was fascinating to hear him talk about his career and how he started small. From the beginning he urged us to take risks and seek out opportunities at any chance you get. By using his own experience as an example, he was able to encourage us to put ourselves out there in the industry and not be afraid to talk to people and share ideas. His career has spanned a number of years and his credits include Harry Potter, Happy Feet, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Avatar. I liked his honest approach to the talk and his informal tone throughout and I felt that I learned a lot from his talk. His company Humain deals with a lot of rigging technology. His team develops software that makes rigging more streamlined and easier to manage for his clients. He spoke of FACS, a Facial Action Coding System, which is a documentation of how the muscles in the face interact with each other. He explained how his team use this system to decode the complex equations that lie behind the subtlest of facial expressions. Another thing that Greg emphasized in his talk was that collaboration is key. By collaborating, you learn far more about your strategies and processes than if you were to work by yourself. I thoroughly enjoyed Greg's detailed talk. I found that I could take away something positive and constructive from nearly every industry talk this semester. I hope to implement the things that I learned over the course of these talks into my own work in the future.