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watch My Animation Reels

Nice reel. Are you looking for clients, or for a studio, like Laika to hire you? If the latter, you might want to include slates to identify your specific job title. For example, animator, or animator for a specific character if there's more than one. Also, if a scene is finished are you saying that you're also the compositor and effects artist as well?

- Wolf
 
Laika knows I exist and I do know some people who have worked for that company, but thus far I've never had the pleasure of working for them.

I'm capable of doing some compositing but, I'm not the one you want for that job. I'm primarily a puppet maker, animator, prop maker, painter and otherwise an all around practical special effects artist. What I've featured in both reels are my talents as an animator but I did create most of the puppets in those reels. And YES I'm always looking for clients.

In particular I'm hoping to find more horror/fantasy/sci-fi films to work on because I consider realistic stop motion creature effects my specialty. Working on TV commercials pays MUCH better but my first love is still movie monsters and with today's digital tech, stop motion special effects creatures can look and perform a million times better than ever before and on a lower budget!

I've spent most of the last year animating things like piggy banks and stuffed squirrels and those are fun jobs in advertising but my heart bleeds for more monsters.
 
If you're after feature work, Laika is probably your best bet. Portland's a beautiful city (both my mother and sister live there) and I have a few former students who work, and love the West coast. There's also commercial work as well.

Another former student does a lot of commission and commercial work in Portland.

http://sirrobrob.com/About-Rob-Shaw

- Wolf
 
Laika already has my showreels and my resume, they know they can call upon me at any time. What I'm really wanting to do however is not the style of animation Laika produces but to do more special effects for independent live action films. I can produce a level of realism to creature effects (like in the movie 'The Thing' or 'Aliens') on a budget much better than full scale live action puppets or CGI animation.

I've done it quite well on a few indie films and I'm looking for more of those kinds of productions to be involved with. My goal is to make it better known that the technology known as Ray Harryhausen's 'Dynamation' is alive and well and better than it's ever been because of the ability we now have to do digital compositing and digitally add the motion blurs to the animation. Most of all we can see our animation now while we're shooting it. In the past, animators shot their animation "blind" in the sense they couldn't preview their animation... so mistakes were never seen until the shot was done and the film got developed. Today we can perfect the motion as we shoot it.

Got a monster film you wanna make with a 10 foot tall thing with 5 legs and a head with two sets of jaws? Talk to me, I can get that done on a much lower budget that you can get by any other method and it's gonna look frigging awesome too. :)
 
It's a good pitch. I think it will come down to showing a producer or director how much they'll save by going the stop-motion route vs. CGI in terms of money and time -- pre, production and post over going a 3-D computer pipeline. If you can prove that the stop-motion route is more viable, or if they want an old-school look then you have a way to market yourself.

Monsters are also very specific. Maybe expand to models as well -- cars, planes, space and starships, submarines, etc. ... . A good friend of mine started out working on the sub models for The Hunt for Red October. She now works for ILM.

- Wuf
 
Ah but that's already been done... BY HOLLYWOOD ITSELF! Many people are under the mistaken impression that Hollywood films no longer use miniatures but the reality is quite the opposite. Most of the biggest special effects films today use as many physically real landscapes as they used to, if not more. CGI is very risky because it's not real from the git-go but miniatures are real. All of the Star Wars films (including the prequels) employed tons of miniature builders and most of the landscape environments seen in those films are gorgeous miniatures.

CGI is a great tool for handling stuff like water and fire which was virtually never done well in miniature just because of the realities of physics. One of the challenges of shooting miniatures that used to give their small scale away was depth of field. When a miniature was something like a long space ship, it was nearly impossible to keep the entire thing in focus but now, digital cameras can keep everything in crisp focus.

The digital tools we have now threatened to put practical special effects artists out of work a decade ago but that has completely turned around because those very same digital tools have made our jobs much easier and less expensive to produce and at a higher quality.

The problem is that people believe what they believe until they lay eyes on something that changes their mind, so it's up to people like me to do the work (sometimes at cost) in order to demonstrate that reality.

I can put a stop motion alien on the bridge of your space ship talking to your captain and it will look real because it is real... the low budget CGI alien is going to look like a video game insert shot. (maybe a very good video game but a video game none the less) That difference makes all the difference to whether your audience is distracted by something they know isn't really there.

I have done live action puppet monster effects and I love doing it, but that experience taught me that beyond a certain size live action monster puppets become too heavy to support themselves and need lots of puppeteers to control them and those puppeteers are hard to hide... stop motion monsters can be as big as you like and the puppeteer is never on camera.

Something I don't like to admit but it's true is that most everything you see on my special effects stop motion reel was done dirt cheap, so just imagine what I could do with a small workable budget. So far I've added stop motion special effects into 3 indie films and I'm thrilled that in all cases, the producers and directors were very glad they hired me. :)
 
As it too frequently happens, a job I was expecting to take me through November has just evaporated. So if anyone out there needs my animation, prop/puppet fabrication or design services, please contact me.
 
I love RH's films and also met him on several occasions. I supervised one sequence which was an homage to Ray's legacy, so I appreciate seeing you doing the same. :thumbsup:

- Thomas
 
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