Rachel DixonÂ
During Week 04 of class, we were introduced to some guest speakers talking about their experience in the animation industry and how the grew as designers and people since graduating university.
The first speaker we listened to was Rachel Dixon who spoke on her experience with getting placement and balancing her part time job and work. Rachel sated she worked in the studio Mammoth and how she felt scared when being asked to animate as it was so different from university, and coming into second year she realised she didn’t know what she wanted to actually do. I found myself relating to this, being in second year and learning different skills and softwares has made me realise that i am unsure of what exactly I want to do.
Rachel stated that from this, she started watching youtube tutorials and modelled everything and when it came to her portfolio everything was crammed in and it was a bit messy which ultimately left her with no identity as an artist. This allowed me to think of my own portfolio and the information I wanted to include in it, Rachels talk was extremely beneficial for me as I did relate to some of the things she was saying, I wanted to make sure when I began my own portfolio that I was organised to avoid them same mistakes.
However, as opposed to this Rachel did state how this allowed her to experiment with loads of different things such as; low poly modelling, high poly modelling and some texturing skills which helped her realise what she wanted to do. After hearing this, it made me think of the direction I will take with my own work, I will make sure to experiment during free time to see what I enjoy and develop more skills before I begin to look for placement.
The industry talk with Rachel was a lot of help in terms of giving me an idea of what to expect, this helps when ti comes to creating my portfolio and to put the work in making projects to help with placement. Rachel spoke on how her current work she had create a project where she was making a character along side an animal and had to study how a dog moves and how the human body moves which was so interesting, I remembered how the creators of The Lion King talked about studying the movement on lions and tigers. This is something I would want to experiment with through my own modelling.