Visiting Professionals: Tom and Henry Purrington from Golden Wolf

Tom and Henry Purrington are senior 3D artists at the animation studio Golden Wolf in London. I have admired the work of Golden Wolf for many years, in fact they were one of the first smaller animation studios that I learnt about. Before I was even doing an animation course, the studio was pointed out to me by a peer on art Foundation and I was alerted to their awesome animation that celebrates twenty years of Cartoon Network.

This animation instantly made me fall in love with the work the studio produces, vibrant, energetic and bursting with enthusiasm. And when I at the time scrolled through their catalogue of other work found that although it was all incredibly diverse, the quality of for example, just the animation was so very high.

  

They told us about the fundamentals of their studio; Rule 1: No egos. They spoke about how everyone at the studio views themselves as on an equal level to everyone else, no one views themselves as higher or lower. Secondly, there is no room for okay, I gained the sense from watching the talk that everyone puts in 110%, that is how the quality of the work is so high. Even though the workload that is expected of an animator at Golden Wolf seems incredibly high, you need to enjoy what you're making, often if an animator is not enjoying or getting any enjoyment out of the work they are producing, then it will show in the final product.

The guys gave us an incredibly valuable insight into how they produce the studios work. They showed us the ident they produced for the Guardians of the Galaxy Disney XD animated series. The final product is of an incredibly high quality with diverse and incredibly complex camera angles. The animation is incredibly complex yet fluid. To me as a 2D animator it boggles the mind to see something like this where throughout all the proportions of the characters stay completely consistent. How they animated it was by creating 3D rigs of all the characters, animating them and filming them with all the camera angles that will appear in the final product. Then they would pass on this demo footage to the 2D animators to use as reference material to create the final product.

The most useful points I took away from the talk was the pair's incredibly valuable insight into the perfect showreel. The showreel essentially needs to sell you. They would much rather see thirty seconds of beautiful imagery than two minutes of mediocre. I followed up this advice by asking them if they look for anything particular in a showreel, for example run cycles or action shots. They replied that they do not look for anything in particular, just avery high level of quality, for example physical movement in an animation that has weight to it.