Tag Archives: iPhone

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Hector Lopez

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Hector Lopez and I’m a character animator/game developer.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I did quite a few jobs in my days before getting into animation. The craziest I would have to say when I worked for a food dristribution company. My job was a material handler working inside a freezer stacking pallets with frozen meats. We walked in there looking like eskimos since the temperature inside was 0 degress. I worked there for several months while I was in school. After a couple months I got used to it. Being inside a room at 0 degress doesn’t bother me anymore. Unfortunately, since I was in school full time I could not keep up working there since it was a graveyard shift. School came first.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I’ve worked with several animation studios on loads of projects. The projects I had most fun on was doing facial animation for “Red Dead Redemption” and “GTA IV Ballad of Gay Tony” for xbox 360 and PS3. I always enjoyed playing games like Grand Theft Auto and all Rockstar games for that matter.

How did you become interested in animation?
My interest in animation came at the age of 17 when I was still in high school. I was always drawing and I remember Continue…

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Danielle Powers

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Danielle Powers and most recently I’ve worked on a freelance project doing visual development and before that I worked at Nickelodeon as a texture artist apprentice.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Nothing too crazy. I’ve worked at Taco Bell, Albertson’s, and my college library to name a few.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
The Penguins of Madagascar was my favorite project to work on. I was on the show for nearly a year and I’m proud to say I was a part of it and I worked on it from the very beginning, before there was even an art director. I painted A LOT of textures for the character’s habitats which were used in the pilot episode and I see them show up in many current episodes and even Penguins toys at Toys R Us.

 

How did you become interested in animation?
When I was five, the Little Mermaid had just been released and I was obsessed with it. I remember bringing the video tape to kindergarten to watch in class and feeling very proud that I was the first kid to own the video. As a kid I was always drawing characters from animated movies and shows and making up my own stories and characters. In junior high I had the opportunity to Continue…

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Ivan Pinzon

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Ivan Pinzon, Principal Engineer, SketchBook Dev Lead.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I worked for Imaginova Corp, developing an Astronomy App called “Starry Night”.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
My current project, SketchBook for iOS and for desktop and Starry Night
Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I was born in Bogota, Colombia and 14 years ago I moved to Canada. I got involved with the digital artist world when I joined Autodesk to work in SketchBook.

 

What’s a typical day like for you with regards to your job?
It’s a combination of different things: code, debug, investigate and learn, plan and schedule future releases and a bit of customer support.
What part of your job do you like best? Why?
I really like to investigate and play with new concepts and ideas, try to find something that is going to be useful for our users.I also enjoy optimizing code. Faster is better.

What part of your job do you like least? Why?
Finding / reproducing bugs that caused our users to lose work. It’s frustrating to get these complains and more frustrating sometimes to not be able to reproduce these issues.

What kind of technology do you work with on a daily basis, how has technology changed in the last few years in your field and how has that impacted you in your job?
My main development machine is a Mac and developing for iOS requires to have some iPads, iPhones and iPods. It’s incredible how technology has evolved. The latest iPhone/iPad are more powerful than the computer I had a few years ago. This has allowed us to push for unbelievable features for a mobile device. Something that a few years ago was just crazy to even imagine. The current trend were mobile is getting closer to desktop is very interesting. Seems that these 2 will eventually merge.

What is the most difficult part for you about being in the business?
Keeping up-to-date with all the technology changes and being able to take advantage of them in a short period of time. It’s both challenging but at the same time motivating.

If you could change the way the business works and is run how would you do it?
I would like to spend more time investigating to find new innovative tools. But, work has to be done so finding a good balance is never easy.
In your travels, have you had any brushes with animation greatness?
I’ve had the chance to watch and listen to a few amazing guys, from sketching artists to animation professionals from studios like Pixar and Marvel. Different techniques and tools.  This has given me a chance to understand what artists need and with this I try to find a fun, simple and effective way to expose this in our software.

Describe a tough situation you had in life.
Leaving my family and my past in my home country and starting from scratch again in Canada while keeping my wife and kids afloat
Any side projects you’re working on that you’d like to share details of?
All I can say is that I’m working in some interesting technologies/features that I hope eventually are going to see the light of day.
Any unusual talents or hobbies like tying a cherry stem with your tongue or metallurgy?
I love airplanes. I have a private pilot license although I haven’t flown in a few years and I like to build and fly aerobatics model airplanes.  I’m lucky to have my son Nicolas as my partner and we compete in Canada and the US.  I also like to play the piano.

Is there any advice you can give for an aspiring animation student or artist trying to break into the business?Although I’m not an artist, I’ve had contact with many that have started from zero and have been persistent enough to develop a clear style and technique that differentiates them from the rest, finally becoming successful and recognized. Take advantage from the social networks: Deviant Art, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, …

 

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Elliot Blake

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Elliot Blake, and I’m an animation producer and sometimes writer. I just wrapped up a lengthy gig with the fine people at Six Point Harness.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I’ve kind of been lucky in that I haven’t had to do a lot of crazy jobs before getting into the animation business.  Certainly the most unusual job I had was helping to wrangle pigs one day when I was a p.a. on a low budget family feature called “Gordy.” And when I was in high school, I worked at a Cinnabon for two or three weeks. To this day, I can’t eat those things.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Well, I got to work on the original run of Futurama, all 72 episodes, as the design coordinator; that was fun, and I’m definitely proud to have been a part of it.  Working on that series was really the foundation for my animation production education, and it was great to get to see it all come together, from the initial design phase, all the way through to the final original episode.  I think my favorite projects were two I produced: Re\Visioned: Tomb Raider and Re\Visioned: Activision, both of which were web series
for GameTap, which was originally owned by Turner Broadcasting.  I won an Emmy for the Tomb Raider series back in 2008, which was a thrill, and also got to voice-direct Minnie Driver, who played Lara Croft. For a web series, the Tomb Raider project was obscenely well-funded, but unfortunately, not as widely-seen as we would have liked.  A few episodes are up on my website now , but at the time, the management thought putting the videos on YouTube would mean no one would come to watch them on GameTap.  The videogame company that publishes the Tomb Raider games recently put the episodes on YouTube, so now Continue…

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Ray Chase

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Ray Chase and I am a directing animator on “Free Birds” our first feature film at ReelFx. I am also a mentor at Animation Mentor.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I don’t know that I really had any crazy jobs.  But let’s say that I was a llama herder in Australia.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
A couple years ago I worked on a series of Looney Tunes cartoons which were a lot of fun.  One short in particular, “Daffy’s Rhapsody”, used original Mel Blanc recordings of Daffy Duck. It was pretty amazing to animate to his voice.

How did you become interested in animation?
I was always interested in animation as a kid but never thought much about doing it as a career.  Toward the end of high school Who framed Roger Rabbit came out and I was inspired; I saw it eight times in the theater.  A couple years later the Disney/MGM studios opened in Orlando where you could see real animators bringing characters to life.  That’s when I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I grew up in Gambrills Maryland. And went to school at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). They didn’t have much of an animation program at the time; this was the early 90s. After college I started applying to Disney to get a job as a 2d animator, but Continue…

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Sascha Ciezata

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http://vimeo.com/36878241

What is your name and your current occupation?
Sascha Ciezata and I am an independent animator/producer who shoots my animation with my iPhone.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I was a PA on the show Grey’s Anatomy for a season.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
 I just finished doing animation for a controversial documentary called The Sheik and I that premiered at SXSW this year. It’s the first time I’ve contributed my animation to a feature film. I’m also proud of the work I’ve done with Funny or Die.

 How did you become interested in animation?
As a kid my father used to take me to Continue…