Evening with Blue Sky

Aww no picture.

We were joined by Blue Sky's Deb Stone, talent development manager, and Matt Munn, senior animator. If you thought it was just going to be another talk about "Hey, this is the summer internship opportunities, come apply!" that you might have already heard before, you missed out big time. Yes, we got a short, and informative, spiel on the internship, but it was followed by Matt talking about his journey and experience / workflow as an animator at Blue Sky.

Blue Sky Summer 2015 Internship
It is a paid internship with a housing stipend and lasts 10 weeks, from June 15th to August 21st.
The categories change around each year for the internship. This year we've got:

Animation

Art / Visual Development

Effects

Character Simulation

Lighting / Compositing

Production

Rigging

Stereo

Story Artists

Production Engineering

Research & Development

If you are interested in applying, get on those reels and resumes as the application deadline closes on March 20th. Polish them up as Blue Sky only chooses one applicant for each department!

"My Life: An Animator's Journey". By Matt Munn.

Often times when you watch or read an interview with animators they always tell about how they were super into cartoons as a young age and wanted to become the artist behind the screen. If you weren't one of those people you may feel like you're already behind. Matt was also one of those who didn't fall into such category of wanting to be an animator from a young age. In fact, he wanted to be a doctor! However, through a friend, Matt found interest in game programming and begin to study coding on his own time and entered the University of Delaware for Computer Science. Through his studies there, Matt found that he wasn't doing a whole lot on the gaming side so he went to discuss with the head of the graphics department and found himself as a modeler for a facial recognition software research. Now, he is all into modeling and wanted to be an artist instead of a programmer. He continued to work on more work to create a portfolio and got into the Savannah College of Art and Design for his MFA but after his first animation class he fell in love with animation.

Coming out of school, Matt found his first studio job at Fathom Studios working on Delgo. Later on, due to winning a contest by the 10 Second Club, Matt was contacted by Sony Picture Imageworks and he started on Open Season. Five years later, because Matt really wanted to focus on animated features and not VFX films, he found himself at Dreamworks for Puss in Boots and Legend of the Bonekeeper Dragon. Finally, in 2012, Matt arrived at Blue Sky and has worked on Ice Age 4, Epic, and Rio 2. An amazing journey through all these studios and Matt really emphasizes on how the studios is like an additional version of school from learning from the fellow amazing artists and the different workflow that each studio employs.

Most important to take away from all that is to always follow your heart. It's okay to take the time to figure out what your dreams are and it's never too late. Success is gauged on being able to do what you love for your living.


Awesome story but the evening hadn't end yet! Next, Matt shares with us what his workflow is like at Blue Sky.

First comes dailies where you get your shot(s) from the director and have a conversation about the purpose of the shot.

Next up is to look at and reference the layout and storyboard.

Now to brainstorm. What are the challenges? What are needed to accomplish the shot? What to do to satisfy the needs of the shot in an effective and clear way? In other words, consider your acting choices. Once you've got all that, what separates a strong animator from the rest is to think of how to plus the shot, making the shot stronger. Consider how to make the shot more funny or more gripping.

Time to thumbnail! A lot of people seem to hate doing this as they just want to animate and not draw, but thumbnailing is important as it helps get the idea of what needs to be done and it helps figure out high and low moments and key poses.

Reference! Takes lots of reference. Reference won't ever hurt you and can only ever help you. If you can't do certain things yourself, ask someone else to be your reference or look online elsewhere.

Now you can animate and begin your blocking pass. Think about your poses, timing, silhouette, appeal, and lines of action. Make sure things are clear and have a conversation with the director of what is working and what is not.

Add in those breakdowns. You're an animator, so sculpt the motions. Having Maya auto interpolate between two key poses is not what you want to be happening.

Spline pass is for those human elements in your animation and when you can fine tune those ease in and outs, arcs, and fully animate the lip sync. Once everything is looking good, the director will give the pre-final thumbs up meaning it's good enough to go into the film. At this stage you get to go into...

Polish. Here, you're just taking the extra time to add in the extra detail. Little jitters, eye darts, twitches, etc., to give more life, and to tighten up the animation a bit more.

Now you're all done and on to the next shot!


Happy animating!

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