Sam the Man

I was chatting with 2006 Graduate Sam earlier today on the wibbly wobbly web, and he mentioned that he had updated his online show reel. You can checkout some of his best work from the last year. He was telling me that each of the scenes with the 3DS Max Character Studio Rigs (the ones that look like they are made out of blocks) were animated in a single day. Nice work Sam, you make an animation teacher proud.

6 comments:

Lisa said...

heck yes! a single day? nice man...really nice ! :-D

Sam said...

Thanks guys. I thought it might be interesting for students to get an idea of what an animation job involves.

The Disney stuff is what I'm usually working on, and I have to animate a 30 second episode by myself each week. Everything up to that point is prepared for me, sets are modeled and characters placed into the scene, so I just have to jump in, animate then hand it off to be rendered once it's approved.

The blocky characters were from a another project where I had to produce one standalone 7 second scene each day. That's 210 frames a day, but it's much easier when there's only one character and no need to worry about things like "story" and "continuity". :)

It probably sounds scary to students: I could never imagine producing that much animation each week (creating one minute in a year was hard enough). But they eased me into it when I started here, and it's surprising how much more efficient you become when you have to just animate for 8 hours a day, every day with the burning sensation of a cat-o-nine-tails against your bare back.

Anonymous said...

as they used to say in tafe: Far canal!
Thats awesome. Looks like you had fun year.

frank said...

Hey Sam

I'm a first-going-into-second year animation student at Southbank. About the middle of the road when it comes to skills.

Thanks for the description of your work.

The block animation of the rollerskater reminds me of Victor Navone's work in Ratatouille.

You were obviously a muli-talent before adding animation to the CV. Do you do other production work as well (e.g. don't say this out loud in the level 3 studios... multimedia)? Or is all your work at Liquid, animation?

This has been a really good post topic. Thanks Sam and Ian (Lisa & Clay as well).

Sam said...

Hi Frank

My job is just animating. The multimedia department operates as a different company altogether.

Most of the other animators here are generalists who can jump between animating, rigging, modeling or texturing as required, so having those skills can be a big help. I'm not so good at those things, so I just animate.

If Lisa and Clay are still reading this, I'd be interested to hear how the roles work at Krome and Blue Rocket too, if you can discuss it.

Anonymous said...

I think its much the same...

thouthands of people play with the scene before and after me... all I do is the animation... that doesnt include lip sync or special effects (or fix ups luckly for me, unlucky for someone else).

-clay