For this blog, I will detail my research and development on Assignment 3, which involved researching into the professional aspects of animation work such as creating a CV, cover email and showreel.
CV
When considering my CV, I wanted to create something that reflects my life skills and experiences, tailoring it to be relevant to the animation industry. I am most interested in 2D animation, so I decided to tailor my CV (as well as the rest of my work in this assignment) towards that specifically.
Luckily, I had an existing CV to work off of when applying for a different job. However, this CV was quite weak visually and extended to one and a half pages. For this assignment, I decided to condense it, tweak it towards more art-centric topics, as well as make it more visually appealing based on my research of other artists’ CVs.
An example I found in my research that appealed to me a lot was this resumé from the artist Jackie Droujko. It was very sleek in its design, easily readable and visually quite pleasant to look at, demonstrating artistic competence in of itself. https://www.jackiedroujko.com/
Another example I found was from Toniko Pantoja, an animator who has worked in the industry who I follow on YouTube. https://www.tonikopantoja.com/
His CV example had a different visual style than Droujko’s, but was still readable. The visually, his education and awards are what stands out, showing that this is what he wants to highlight for potential employers reading his resumé.
I leant a bit more towards Droujko’s style of resumé, as the visual style appealed more to me and came off as having a better visual flow to it, also showcasing some graphical competence in of itself.
I decided to use canva to create my CV, working off of this template.
Slowly I transferred over information from my CV. Instead of listing all of my work experience, I decided to highlight the three pieces of work experience that were related to my interest in art to show my interest in the industry.
I didn’t include my phone number as I highly favour email as a method of communication for a variety of reasons, though I may include it in future iterations of my CV.
This was a work in progress, directly copy and pasted from my old CV. It looked rather cluttered, and I felt it had some irrelevant information for what I was trying to go for.
I condensed it, moving art and animation to the top, reordering and reprioritising this section bit by bit.
I also decided I wanted to condense this section to five points to keep it more concise. I removed the specifications of what instruments I play.
I then also decided to remove the part about me playing piano, to keep to the general point I was trying to make that I have an interest in art and stories in a variety of forms.
I implemented some phrasing differences as well, such as changing “comfortable” to “enjoy” and “acquired” to “expanded” in order to demonstrate more confidence in my abilities.
In this section, I decided not to list After Effects despite mentioning it in Skills and Interests, as despite using in the past I’m not as comfortable with it as I’d like to be, but it’s definitely a skill I’d like to expand on, and I think in future I will list it at the side here. I didn’t want to make this list too long and crowded, though perhaps I could remove a different program such as Procreate, as it usually isn’t used in studios like After Effects is.
Perhaps this is hypocritical, but I put down Moho as a program as I was recently able to purchase it in a sale and I’m planning to learn it during my year out, as I have seen some local animation studios use it for their projects. Of course when actually applying to jobs, I will only put software that I have more experience in. I aim to become more confident with all the software I’ve listed, particularly ToonBoom Harmony, Moho and Blender.
I made some slight changes here as well, removing the point about working with kids as it isn’t relevant.
I also changed my description from “can mediate in stressful situations” to “who is happy to collaborate with others” to not only make the sentence more positive, but also emphasise my teamwork skills which as important in a studio setting.
I also changed my job description from “2D Animation Generalist” to “2D Character Animator” as that is what I really specialise in and am best in, which is reflected best and most prominently in my showreel.
Moved these apart as they were a bit crowded before…
And for now, I had something I was quite happy with! I did decide to change something, though, which was the image on my CV.
Rather than having my real face, I decided to change it to the drawing of my character that I created for my showreel’s title card, as I felt it demonstrates some of my artistic ability, as well as a bit of my personality.
I came to quite like this drawing as a representation of myself and implemented it in other things such as my LinkedIn and even my blog here.
The way I coloured this character was originally intended to go along with the colour scheme that I chose for my CV, but I realised that this made the two blend together too much. Therefore, I decided to explore some different potential colour schemes for my CV.
I felt that this looked nicer…
This looked even nicer…
And this…
And then lightening that just a bit more resulted in this, which I quite liked. The removal of the gradient helped the icon stand out a bit more.
However, something still felt a bit off that I couldn’t quite place.
So I tried a darker colour…
And then an even darker colour, which immediately clicked with me!
Additionally, I decided to remove the frame entirely and just have a transparent version of this drawing on the document, which ended up looking even nicer! I realised that what made this come together so well, along with the more professional look to it now, was that the contrast in my document had dramatically improved.
I tested this by making my current document and my old one black and white. With my old design, there was still some contrast and it was still readable, but the higher contrast looked nicer and more visually coherent.
And so, I had my final document, which I was very happy with.
Cover Email
In terms of a cover email, I had a pre-existing one from the same job application that I used for reference but tailored more specifically to animation.
Since our cover letter had to be based on an actual studio, I decided to tailor it to Paper Owl Studios. I’m familiar with them as they were involved with ScreenWorks in my work experience which pushed me to pursue a career in animation in the first place, so there was some genuine passion I could put into the letter. Additionally, some people who work for them were present at the 2D Animation Pipeline Masterclass that I attended, so I wanted to convey my appreciation for the studio.
To make the task a bit less overwhelming, I decided to lay out a basic structure first.
If you reference my previous cover email, there are some things that I kept the same, however I laid out some key things I wanted to highlight in an animation context specifically.
I wanted to emphasise that personal connection to Paper Owl Films first and foremost, so that this would immediately signal my genuine interest in working at the studio.
I realised while writing my first draft that this section was a bit long.
This was a decent draft, but far too long with the paragraphs being too dense. I did feel that the personal connection thing was important, but I wasn’t sure how to cut it down.
(I also forgot to remove a previous note.)
This was a better draft but still too long. I realise the irony in writing “key eye for detail”, though at least I spotted the mistake.
Was almost there but really had to narrow in on what’s most important for me.
Close…
Some rewording and condensing later, I finally had a cover email I was decently happy with. I don’t think it’s perfect and I think this will benefit from some feedback and tweaking before I send something like this to a potential studio, but all things considered I think that it was a decent attempt where I covered my skills and interest in animation and storytelling without full on copying my CV, showed my personal connection and interest in the studio and gave a decent summary of what I’m like in a professional context.
Showreel
My showreel was probably the part of this assignment that I was most excited to approach, as I find video editing a very fun process. Sadly due to time limitations I wasn’t able to finish/polish some animations as much as I would have liked to, however I thankfully had a lot of pre-existing animations that I was able to include.
I had recently created a song for fun called “expectations”, and I realised that it would work very well implemented into my showreel.
I first compiled all of my best animation in one place and started sorting them in Blender. I was originally going to use DaVinci Resolve, however I couldn’t due to some audio issues.
My showreel was initially a bit longer, going over 5-7 seconds over the time limit, but I managed to cut it together to a perfect 60 seconds with a fade out for the music in the end.
I wanted to include a variety of animation projects to highlight my range of skills when it comes to character animation. I put some clips aside in case I wanted to bring them in later and slowly but surely put everything together in a way that I felt worked to convey my strengths in the medium.
I timed the lip-sync parts quite intentionally with the music, as well as aiming to have other clips have timing that correlated to the music to create a more pleasant and memorable viewing experience. That being said, it took a few iterations to ensure that things weren’t cutting together too quickly just for the sake of lining up with the music.
In the future, I think I may consider including some of my 3D animation work in my showreel as well, however since this assignment is focused on 2D and it’s what I’d prefer to work in, I decided to focus on my strengths in that medium.
This was my first iteration of a showreel, with a temporary title card.
A piece of feedback I got was to potentially put my coloured animations first, as in a showreel you want to highlight your strongest pieces first, much like in a portfolio. However, I decided to keep my walk and run cycles first, as I felt that despite not currently having colour, they have stronger animation which is what I wanted to highlight the most.
However, I do intend to polish these animations up later on. I can potentially cut together the sketched versions and the final versions to show a bit of my process as well, like I did a bit with the dog walk practice animation.
I think the animation at the end is also a strong one and a good and memorable end to the showreel, with the clip also demonstrating a sense of humour.
Another piece of feedback I received was about lowering the sound for the lip-sync pieces. I agreed and lowered the music volume for those, subtly fading in and out so the sudden volume change wouldn’t be as jarring, as well as slightly upped the volume on the clips themselves. I did a bit of audio editing in audacity for the “kill or be killed” lipsync piece, and although the sound is a bit more compressed sounding now, I think it’s a fair trade-off between that and the otherwise overwhelming music in the clip which would overlap unpleasantly with the music I have for my showreel.
Lastly, I included my email, which I had initially forgotten to do. This would mean if a potential employer sees my showreel, they don’t need to scramble to look for my contact information, improving the likelihood of being contacted in the first place.
In Clip Studio Paint, I finalised this page and I ended up liking the character icon so much that it turned out to have multiple uses, as shown earlier by me using this image in my CV.
I also decided to add a blink animation to add a bit of life to the beginning and end of the showreel, and show some animation and personality right off the bat.
I originally intended to have some line boil here as well to add more life to the title card, and I may add this in the future, but wasn’t able to here due to time constraints.
Above is the finalised version of my showreel. I implemented the feedback I got as well as changed a few of my own things. I did a lot of cutting in the project to improve the quality, such as holding frames a little longer or in the “scared to get a few scars” clip, extending the scene where the camera is behind the character so the cut wouldn’t be so jarring. Then also managed to include some more clips from the project I liked.
For improvement, I think I could list the programs used in my showreel as they come up, and as I mentioned I would like to work on finalising some more animations such as the walk and run cycles and the body mechanics for a more polished look to the showreel. In the future I would like to create a portfolio site and/or an Artstation which I could potentially show on my title card as well.
Overall I’m quite happy with how my showreel turned out. As I mentioned, I would just like to polish up some animations in it, but I think I’d like to keep some sketched animations as well to show some more of my process. I think it flows together quite well and I’ve overall gotten very positive responses when showing it to others.
Portfolio
The portfolio was optional and I chose not to submit one for my assignment as I currently don’t feel that I have enough individual strong drawn pieces to display in a portfolio, however that is something I would like to change over the next year and work on building a strong portfolio for a career in the 2D animation industry. Therefore, I still did some research on this.
I’m in the process of making a portfolio website as I feel this would be a great way to display my work, and I will work on expanding this over the next year. I did create an Artstation to add to and expand on over time as well, which I linked to in my CV. After I finalise my showreel, I may add this to my Artstation as well. I may consider creating social media for portfolio and animation industry related things specifically and link to this in my CV and showreel as well, as this is a good way to connect with other artists in the industry and opens up opportunities for your work to be noticed by studios.
This video from Jackie Droujko was super insightful in learning more about the structure of portfolio sites as well as emphasising your strongest work and how to put it together in a coherent, understandable and engaging way.
Some more inspiration:
https://www.ssavaart.com/portfolio
https://aaronblaiseart.artstation.com/projects
https://www.artstation.com/goblaing – Caity Kerr’s portfolio that I enjoy who is doing a placement at Paper Owl Films
Although I haven’t uploaded anything to Artstation yet, creating one and engaging with the site a little bit provided me with some more insight into the industry and more opportunities to find fantastic portfolio pieces and art inspiration.
https://xinxishere.wixsite.com/chloe-stewart – inspiration from a friend, whose site layout I really like. Chloë a very easy to navigate site which displays her best work in a very organised manner. It’s also very visually coherent and appealing with a consistent blue and white theme throughout.
Although I have not yet created my portfolio, my research has definitely helped me gain some insight into what goes into making one, and I look forward to developing it as I expand on my art skills and create more pieces to showcase my creativity and ideas for potential employers as well as other artists overall.