Category: Professional Practice

A cover letter is pretty similar to a CV, but you’re not allowed to copy and paste. This is essentially your first impression to your employer, letting them know you’re interested in the job, company and that they’re going to gain something from hiring you over other people. Things like complimenting their company’s work and showing you know what you’re talking about are big points when it comes to creating a cover letter, as it’ll help the employer see you’ve doe your research and had interest in the company beyond seeing a job offer post on LinkedIn.

I used a word document template for my cover letter, filling in the blanks following a PowerPoint presentation uploaded onto Blackboard by my tutors, helping me understand the importance of the contents and their hierarchy. Putting my contact details and name on the left hand side of my document rather than the top right was done as i was following the document template but i also feel it made it more obvious who i was and made my letter more memorable. I started my letter with addressing the CEOs of the company i was applying for, in this case, Taunt Studios, followed by my representation of research with naming a few of their projects such as green beans and Tot, complimenting their style and naming a few more projects then moving onto why i was applying and what i could bring to the company if they hired me. The second paragraph i talked about the skills i had that are beneficial for a 3d animator that i had then finished it up by thanking them for reading the letter and considering me for the position as this shows you’re not just demanding the job and its just a nice thing to do.

Alongside a CV and cover letter, another important part of your identity as an animator is your showreel. This is a short demonstration of your strongest animations, 3D models or designs as still shots, to show your client, potential employer or just anyone who’s interested, what you’re capable of.

Most times when creating a showreel, it’s probably going to be because you’re trying to get hired so you need to keep your work relevant to the job position you’re trying to achieve. For example, if you’re applying for a 3D animator, you’d be putting your strongest FINISHED 3D animations, it helps sometimes to even breakdown shots to show your audience how you work through an animation from start to finish but only if you feel the piece is strong enough. Often if your potential employer is looking for a 3D animator I’ve noticed they also advertise that skills with 3D modelling will give you a better chance and stand you out from other applicants, so if this is the case you should add some turn tables (around 1 or 2) of your strongest 3D models relating to that job, e.g if its a video game company and you have swords or monsters, include them but if you you’re applying for a children’s tv show, you obviously don’t want to send that in as its irrelevant to the company and makes it look like you haven’t researched the company enough to actually care if you get the job or not.

To start developing my showreel, I opened Maya, making playblasts of animations I felt were relevent to my job role of “3D animator” since we’re marked on the showreel and not the content inside, I made sure to render out each animation in the same aspect ratio of 1920×1080 so they fit nicely in the frame and had good continuity. Once I had rendered all the clips, I organised them all into a folder to easily find them later and installed Adobe Premiere Pro, using this time to go back over the learning content on blackboard from my lecturers.

Now Premiere had been installed, I opened it and created a new project, titling it appropriately with “Showreel” and dragging my animations into the project, switching to “edit” tab at the top. When I was on Blackboard, I saw a folder with “how to edit to the beat in premiere pro” and navigated to this link to watch through and follow along. I already had my clips in my project, so I just needed to add “mark in” and “mark out” to my clips to tell the software where I wanted my clip to start playing and where to end, though I found out later after automating them to the sequence, it didn’t matter much because they switched at the next marker to stay on beat with the song. Speaking of song, I still had to insert it so I found a few songs on a royalty free website (link here) and chose the song I felt suited my reel best. I wanted the song to be upbeat and be able to hold interest of my audience yet not be overwhelming or annoying as this wouldn’t leave a great impression.

Back to the video, I dragged and dropped my song into my project and dragged it onto my sequence timeline, making sure it started at 0 so it’d be heard from the very start. Moving back to my clips, I dragged them individually into the top left preview window and set the mark in and outs with keyboard shortcuts I and O. With my marks set, I clicked back onto my sequence timeline and hit keyboard shortcut spacebar to start playing my video, listening to the beat and deciding which beat I wanted to follow and what the pattern was going to be. I heard a solid drum beat happening every second or so, so i used M to place a marker at every other beat to give my clips time to play out. After a while of trial and error, I got the clips to how I wanted them and inserted them in an order of what I thought was my strongest piece first, followed by a clip of animation I did for last years 3D animation project, then another walking cycle and finishing with another clip from last years project. I felt this helped break up the content and mix it up instead of showing two walk cycles back to back and two snail animations back to back, making it more interesting. I inserted them by going to the “clip” tab at the top left, scrolling down to “automate to sequence” then changing a drop down box to “sequence to unmarked” and hitting ok, now all my clips were in time to the beat and switched seamlessly from one animation to the next.

My next move is to watch a few title sequence tutorials to make an interesting title card, as this is important for the start and end of my showreel to introduce who I am, how to contact me and the position I’m applying for.

I ended up not following a tutorial and making my own background with inspiration from the cloud filter in Photoshop. I created 3 different coloured cloud filter layers and stacked them, lowering the opacity as it continued to create a nice 3 coloured sky. I then created a new layer and painted tiny white dots, varying in size with a few bigger ones with a low opacity bigger dot on top, these were my stars which i then duplicated and turned the layer around randomly for more variation. Creating another new layer, I used the ellipse shape tool to create a white circle, taking the ellipse selection tool to select a circle of this shape and rasterise the shape layer so i could erase a part of it to make it resemble a moon. I created another new layer and made some clouds out of the ellipse shape, merging them together and rasterising the layer so i could move the clouds bout, duplicating them and placing them for variation. Finally, i duplicated the moon layer and gave it an outer glow then made a big cloud which i turned the opacity down to 27 to create a barely visible fog and then exported all my layers separately to be taken into after effects.

When in after effects, I dropped all the PNGs into my composition and found a tutorial for infinite backgrounds which i followed to create the moving stars in the back of my showreel title cards https://youtu.be/mQZRuViuT_w. I placed all the images in the same order as the layers appeared in photoshop so it’d look as similar as possible then exported it as a media file to be imported into my premiere pro project. Below is the looped animation.

Once in premiere pro, i edited all my clips together by using the sequence markers to time my reel to the beat of my song, creating a graphics layer for text on each clip to explain what the clip was and where it was made e.g maya or unreal engine, and I chose a cute font i felt matched my simple background animation along with an appropriate colour, though for the explanations on my clips, i used an easy to read white font so as not to distract from the animations.

I exported my reel as an mp4 and uploaded it to YouTube where it can be found here and below: https://youtu.be/wbBuzHrFbRQ 

Part of our assignment requires us to design a CV, we’ve had a few classes on what makes a good CV such as the difference between an appropriate personal statement and a bad personal statement, the layout and the hierarchy of the information, some tips on what information to include and what matters in a CV.

We were given a few tools to help us along the way which could be found in folders on the Blackboard website. Personally I really found that the past years students CV examples gave me a good idea of what layout I was going to use, how to design the font and how to make everything tie together and look visually pleasing. Since most of these CVs had some colours, I decided I’d roll with my last name and the leaf logo I was wanting to create to design my CV in a few shades of a pale green colour, but I’m not so sure anymore that it looks professional and I’ll have to ask my tutor.

The other tool I found quite helpful was the Vmock CV AI tool, which you have 10 upload attempts from sign in and the AI will read through your CV, comparing it to other Ulster University CVs then highlight words and sections, telling you ways you can improve those sections like if there wasn’t enough impact in your wording or if you’ve used the same word too many times. I was happy with it in the start, but as it kept telling me to auto-fill to their CV template in order to make changes, I felt a bit fed up with not being able to change sections to what I wanted, and the biggest problem I felt was it didn’t allow me to write a personal statement, which is quite important in this work. To combat this, I read through the mistakes the AI was telling me about and went through my original word document, correcting words and fixing up my sentences so they fit the criteria better, and saved them both to compare with my tutor as I wasn’t sure which layout was more effective.

Reading through the PowerPoint slides, I noticed we were advised to first make a separate word document of all our experiences, relevant information and in the future, achievements which I obviously don’t have at the minute being in second year. I followed this advice and wrote down pretty much everything i thought I’d need so I could copy and paste things like my contacts, my strengths and software skills and experiences, rather than having to type them all out everytime I was altering my CV for this assignment. I wrote my first draft of my personal statement in this document too, changing it a few times after I pasted it into my CV and then again with the help of Vmock.

After having my tutorial with my tutor, I had all the questions i needed answered and made changes which can be found in my “feedback” post. Below is my finished CV.

The animation industry has a lot more layers to it than just animation, there’s a whole pipeline work must go through in order for the animations we see on our screens to be produced.  I’m going to be researching further into this to explore all the different roles that are in this pipeline, giving a brief summary of what each does.

Starting off, we have the production management department. There are four roles in this department

• Director -Coming up with the look and feel of the whole animation
• Producer – keeps track of time and budget, oversees departments and searches for partnerships
• Production Coordinator – mainly looking after assets, delivery and stocks, making sure equipment is on hand for all departments
• Runner – taking notes, database trackers, material logging, sorting out accommodation, in large scale companies they help the production coordinator

The development department with just two roles help support the pipeline by creating the ideas for storylines and visuals of the animation.

• Writer – giving unique story ideas in the form of a script to directors and storyboard artists
• Concept artist – Designing the look of the animation with visuals of certain characters, places and environments

Pre-production is in charge of getting into the finer details of concepts, creating final pieces to be used in the animation

• Head of story – using the scripts, they make animatics and plan panels of action, cameras and staging
• Storyboard artist – creating a sequence of images following the script to visualise it with annotations that show what’s happening in each image
• Art director – creates the art style for the animation
• Character designer – creates characters complete with personalities and appearances based off of concept art and the directors descriptions
• Model maker – create ready to animate models of props, characters and environments that have been agreed on, work in both 3D and stop motion animation
• Background designer – takes inspiration from concept art and storyboards to create detailed background environments

The production department starts work on the final animation, given the assets and information from previous departments.

• Rigger – takes the 3D models, giving them bones which enable them to move
• Animator – following a brief such as a storyboard or description, they create a sequence of still images then play them back rapidly to give the illusion of movement, causing the characters to move, speak and interact with their environment
• Animation technical director – creating and testing tools to help improve the digital artists workflows, also offer technical support
• Layout artist – In charge of depth and perspective
• Lighting artist – Light placement, selection and intensity to fit the mood
• Effects technical director – In charge of creating digital effects such as fire, smoke, water, lightning, etc
• Compositor – putting everything together to create the finished images

Post production department

• Sound designer – creating sounds to be used in the animation
• Composer – creates original music pieces to fit the atmosphere or emotions of characters
• Editor – working on the planning of scenes, shots and editing the final animation together to create a finished piece
• Edit assistant – helping the editor to keep track of materials, scene orders, video format outputs for clients and arranging meetings

Distribution department

• Sales executive – get the animations shown on screens via licenses
• Marketing executive – work on creating advertisement to help the animation reach an audience and encourage them to watch it

 

Moving on, I’m going to be looking for open and active job applications in the animation industry.

Starting with Indeed, i have found around 6 actively looking job applications, one even from a popular AAA company in the gaming industry.

• Role: Junior technical animator
• Company/employer: Sumo Digital ltd
• Position: Full time entry level

• Role:  Junior animator/motion designer
• Company/employer: Hurricane
• Position: Full time junior

• Role: Character animator, Facebook reality labs
• Company/employer: Guardian jobs
• Position: Entry position

• Role: Junior motion designer/animator
• Company/employer: miri growth
• Position: full time entry level

• Role: Gameplay animator (junior/mid level)
• Company/employer: Rockstar games
• Position: full time entry level

• Role: 2D animator
• Company/employer:  Play N’ Go
• Position: full time entry level

I thought it’d be best if i sourced my research from more than one website, so I’ve also taken a look on Glassdoor to find some more jobs.

• Role: Junior 3D animator
• Company/employer: Idea Boxes
• Position: full time Junior

• Role: Full time junior motion graphics designer
• Company/employer: Tapin
• Position: full time junior

• Role: Junior technical animator
• Company/employer: Aardvark swift
• Position: Junior

• Role: Animator/editor
• Company/employer: Gabriel Skelton
• Position: junior to mid level

Now that I’ve covered some of the available jobs, i think it’d be beneficial to go over a job in detail to see what they’re looking for in an applicant and get an idea of what the job is like.

Random42 Scientific Communication are on Glassdoor hiring a 3D animator, with Junior positions available, and are looking for someone experienced and enthusiastic about 3D animation with a strong show reel. They give a list of skills they’re looking for you to have such as

• Strong skills in rigging/character animation with their preferred software being 3DS Max, but other software’s are considered
• Meeting deadlines with high quality work
• Good communication and motivation skills
• Workflows which are organic, procedural and which make use of tools and modifiers to create unique animations

Alongside these skills, they’ve made another list for skills that would be nice to have and would probably set you apart from the rest of the applicants to be better considered.

• Having a good understanding of modelling, texturing, lighting, rendering, animation and compositing
• Experience working with game engines and the Unity animation pipeline
• Experience with render engines
• Compositing in Fusion or Nuke

Additionally, they tell us that training can be provided to people with cross-compatible 3D application skills, then end off by telling us where to apply, what to send in and give the option of keeping your CV and considering you for better suited positions.

To end my research, I’m going to find an animator currently working in creature animation and find out a bit about how they got there, if i can find any old work and just in general try find out as much as i can about their journey.

I have chosen to research Richard Oud as he was one of the animators who worked on Horizon Zero Dawn and throughout the whole game i was so inspired and impressed with the creature animation, especially how the machines were made to feel so realistic to their real life counterparts.

Richard is a lead animator at game studio Guerrilla Games and has worked there four over 14 years now. He used to be an animation intern at DNA productions where he worked on the ant bully for 9 months from July 2005 – March 2006, where he graduated and then joined Guerrilla Games and got to work on 3 games known as the Killzone franchise, an fps game, where he was doing the gameplay animations.

In 2009, Richard Oud was an animator for first and third person animation for Killzone 2, which then progressed into Killzone 3 in 2011 and finally Killzone: Shadow Fall as a cinematic animator in 2013 before taking lead creature animator in Horizon Zero Dawn. Unfortunately i cant find much on his work with Killzone other than the YouTube show reel, but i can find older demo reels from about 13 years ago showing his progression to where he is now.

https://www.youtube.com/user/richardoud/videos all his animation demos can be found here on his YouTube channel, including the show reel for Horizon Zero Dawn.

His socials such as linked in, Instagram, twitter, can all be found in these links:

Linked In – https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-oud-8173519/?originalSubdomain=nl 

Art Station – https://www.artstation.com/richardoud

Twitter – https://twitter.com/richard_oud

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/richard.oud/

He is also a teacher at ianimate, focusing on combat and gameplay animation https://ianimate.net/richard-oud-bio

His journey has taught me that even if you entry the industry in one area, you can still work your way up or completely change direction and get a job in another position, you’re never stuck in one place.