Position Statement

I am a passionate 2D animator who works both traditionally and digitally. What is important to me is creating compelling narratives centred around realistic characters audiences can relate to. I take inspiration in my visual aesthetic from classic Walt Disney Animated films and Studio Ghibli films. Outside of animation I also have a diverse portfolio of work including caricatures, gag cartoons and poster designs. Although I would describe myself as a primarily 2D based animator, what is most important to me when choosing a project is the content and the cause. So I do not limit myself, I am new into the industry and eager to learn to improve my practice. I have very much enjoyed experimenting with new techniques and materials and will continue to do so in the future. Working on Extended Practice has taught me that I should always be willing to take risks in my work and I'd like to continue to do that in whatever paid work comes my way. Throughout my three years at university I have made sure to develop my skills in specifically what I want to do. However, with a project like Extended Practice I took it upon myself to undertake all areas of the filmmaking process including editing and sound design. My skills do vary in these areas but I proved to myself that if I need to in the future I can take on extra tasks in the animation production.

Lifting Tower Brief

Initially I was skeptical about undertaking this brief. It sounded like a lot of fun but I was very aware of how much other work I needed to do at the time so was hesitant to take on another project. Mike encouraged me to stay and commit to the brief because he felt like it would be very beneficial to my practice.

Lifting Tower Concept Art

Lifting Tower Moodboard

Lifting Tower Initial Storyboard

The journey on this brief was not always easy and it definitely put my abilities to the test. But in the long run I felt I was very successful. We began the brief by working in groups of around six and in each group we had to come up with a pitch each to show to each other. then with these pitches we were to figure out how we could fit each of them into an around a minute in length animation. What came next did confuse me and I feel effected the workflow. We were then put into new groups as certain people decided to opt out of committing to the rest of the brief. I felt like this was a bit jarring as I was not prepared for this change. This change was made more jarring still because I and the others in the group essentially had to abandon our initial ideas that we had put time into developing, I for example had spent quite a bit of time and attention fleshing out the idea into a fully coloured storyboard. But to be able to work efficiently as a team we simply could not just stick to our fleshed out ideas because they were all too complicated and different.

Malachi, Callum and I were put into a group with Janice a third year illustrator. I was initially quite skeptical about being paired with an illustrator because going into the brief we were told that everyone was expected to animate. Luckily Janice had previously done some animation and i feel the quality of her animation was very high.

This experience of developing our animations was an incredibly rewarding experience to me because seemingly by accident I found myself undertaking a director role of the project. I found that everyone in the group was essentially happy for me to direct meetings and arrange meet ups. I felt like this would be a lot more stressful than it turned out to be and I think the reason for this is all the members of my group were incredibly easy going, easy to work with and eager to produce the best animations possible.

We did run into obstacles down the production line. My first bit of animation for the project was very poorly received and I essentially needed to start all over again. The reason for this is because I tried to do an animation with no line-work. I felt like this would test my abilities and was a chance for experimentation. As a first attempt it was okay, but it was not up to a professional standard and I felt like I had let my team down. But I produced another animation very quickly after and i feel like the second animation I produced was far higher in quality.

Plans for the Summer

I'd like to talk about what I am planning to do in the Summer. Of course I'm finishing my studies so it's not like I'm coming back in September. However I'd only like to talk about what I plan to do up till September.

• Finish my Grad Film
• I really want to finish this as I feel it's one of the best things I've made and contains some of the best footage I've ever animated. I don't just want to finish it because it's always nicer to finish a project you've laboured over for so much time and put so much love and attention into. but also because I feel like it has a lot of potential in being entered into festivals to get attention that way and just in general being shown to someone. I'm almost viewing it as the second most important thing I personally am coming out of university with, the first being the showreel.
• Continue to apply to studios in the North

• When recently applying to studios I've made sure to keep updating the above table I made. Obviously my 'Studios I still need to apply for' table is looking a little bare so I need to fill that up. But I will continue to write down any studios I like the look of and keep them in this table until I contact them. This system is already proving very helpful to me because if i don't write down the studios I've applied for I'll easily forget.
• When I say 'Studios I've applied for' I mean applied in terms of jobs and internships. Obviously I'd very much like a job, but to get another internship would be just amazing because I've really come to realise how excellent an opportunity an internship is. Matter and Co is not an animation studio yet I feel like I learnt so much about working in the industry there and about myself as a practitioner. That is why I am not only looking for jobs in the North of where I want to be living in September, but the South and really just about anywhere I can get to in the country.
• Take a piece of Pre-Existing Material and Animate it

• What I mean by that is Annabeth advised me that what would look very good in my showreel and something that would better sell myself as a 2D animating practitioner is to have some animation in my showreel that is still 2D but not necessarily in my style and in fact in someone else's altogether. She advised me to take something that already exists that is 2D and animate in that style. An idea she had was to animate Simon's Cat. This is the perfect opportunity to showcase a skill I rarely ever talk about. I feel I have pretty strong skills of replicating styles. I find it fairly easy to draw a character that already exists so I figure it shouldn't be too hard to animate a pre-existing character either
• 11 Second Club
• I am aiming to sell myself as mainly a 2D animator. However, I am coming out of university very skeptical of selling myself as just this. My skills do not necessarily lie in 3D animation, yet I still do have a great admiration of 3D. I may slightly prefer 2D as an art form and prefer to work in it, however I feel there are some amazing 3D studios I would still love to work at including Pixar and Blue Zoo. Furthermore, I feel like 3D animation has a lot of potential I am very interested to learn more about such as the ever increasing in popularity Virtual Reality. It is for this reason that I would like to animate an 11 Second Club using a pre-existing Maya rig. I am very passionate about creating nice flowing movement in human characters and i would very much like to improve my abilities in human movements such as lip syncing. So I definitely do not want to limit myself to just 2D.  

Cops and Daughters Grad Film

I didn't finish my Extended Practice animation in the module Extended Practice. But, I feel like some of the footage I produced for it is of the highest quality I've ever produced. Furthermore, the entire animation is of a quality that is consistently high. Obviously, I had to think about my time-management. I couldn't spend forever on minor details so obviously there are certain parts that I do not think of as perfect, however in general, the animation keeps to a nice consistency. In the past, I'd admittedly rarely ever finish an animation to my liking, usually for the reason of spending a lot of time over tiny details without thinking about my time management scaled up to the entire project. This meant that either a good quality animation would remain unfinished or I'd find myself rushing the animation close to deadline and even though I'd finish the animation, I would not be happy with the final product.

I'd very much like to finish my Cops and Daughters animation. In fact I'm definitely going to try to finish it by June 11th, of which our end of year show and exhibition week will commence. Furthermore, I want to finish it by this date so I can enter my animation into film festivals. I feel that if I complete the animation to a standard I have been working on it up till now, I think there is no way I wouldn't be able to enter it. Manchester Animation Festival is the main festival I have my eye on and the festival I feel is most appropriate for my animation that does deal with more mature themes. The deadline to enter an animation into this festival is around mid July so I'd really like to finish my animation within a comfortable margin of this date.

So how am I going to finish it in time?

Well, I have confidence that a month (or nearer three weeks) is a reasonable amount of time. One of the only other times I have committed myself to finishing my animation was for the Processes and Production module of which the deadline was January 2015. I finished all the line-work for that animation in time for the deadline but I had only coloured one scene. I really liked this animation and still do like this animation and at the time was advised that the entire animation would be a lot stronger if it was coloured entirely. Therefore I decided to commit myself to finishing the colouring of the animation, and I did... two years later. But this animation was a lot more complicated because filling was not as simple as just one click of a button that it is on Animate CC and the bulk of the time was not spent on colouring, but spent on shading of which apart from the background designs there will be none of in this animation, I have learnt my lesson.

In the recent time period of developing the animation I have definitely seen the rate of which the footage is being developed snowball and I've found that I've recently been able to produce footage faster and faster. I've animated Lucy at age 10, 13 and 17 now and I am confident in saying that I am now very confident with animating this character as I have become more confident with developing the different backgrounds in their different aesthetics. Furthermore, looking at my shots, the rest I have to animate although are high in number are all relatively straight forward. Lucy aged 10 is almost over and as she grows older and becomes more mature, she moves less, the challenging movements now are mostly walk cycles. Therefore I am hesitantly confident I can finish my animation.

Career Track Tuesdays: Interview Training Workshop

I went to the Career Track Tuesdays on how to act in interviews. I have been to interviews before so was not completely clueless about the process. However I felt like I could benefit from some practice. It's not like I lack confidence in the interview process, I think more the issue I have is when put on the spot I struggle to articulate exactly what I want to say then kick myself after for not having thought of it there and then.

What was most rewarding about this experience was the fact that it we had to act out the interviews ourselves. I did not know anyone else there so I felt like this was realistic to a real interview environment.

Visiting Professionasl: Bianca Ansems

Bianca Ansems is a storyboard artist at Cartoon Network. But being a storyboard artist is not her only skill and she specified to us that going into the industry that she only learnt then that she did not have to put herself under any specific label like that and it's okay to be more generalist. Her other skills include being a director, an illustrator, working freelance and as a stop motion animator. She worked an internship of five months and worked two weeks at Aardman Animation Studio.  She spoke very highly of her time doing work experience, she heavily encouraged us to be looking for placements saying that it was a great way of learning how to work in a team.

Bianca's talk was incredibly beneficial to me. In particular because she tailored it to us as students considering she was a student so was very sympathetic to us and very aware of keeping us informed about the things she did not know when she was going into the industry. In particular, her insight into free-lance work was incredibly beneficial to me. Working freelance is something that I think will be inevitable, however I am very skeptical about going straight into freelance immediately after uni. And up till this point, I have been advised to find work in a studio first. Bianca however did talk up being a freelance animator because she said it can be an incredibly rewarding career if we go about it in the right way.

Max Ardron Presentation Boards