SPAM MUSUBI & RUFIO

From Annecy France to Stuttgart Germany. I went to FMX 2011, the 16th Conference on Animation, Effects, Games and Interactive Media with my classmates from Gobelins l'école de l'image and it was like a breath of fresh air from working all hunched up in front of my desk all the time working on the same animation for weeks on end. I was especially inspired by presentations from Clay Kaytis (Supervising Animator at Walt Disney Animation Studios) about how they made Tangled and it was just amazing watching rough test shots of Rapunzel getting into character and jaw dropping to see Glen Keane critiquing their work in dallies. I was sooooooo jealous. lol. And they also showed lots and lots of rough sketches of Glen Keane's Rapunzel and it was like a visual oasis. Just drawing after drawing, pure ecstasy. They also showed a very rough animation of Maximus the lead horse in the movie and it was the funniest thing that I had seen a horse do. I was very thankful to Clay for sharing all these goodies with the public. It was very inspiring to say the least.

I also very much enjoyed the making of presentation of Pierre Coffin(Director) for Despicable Me. He showed us the original character designs of Gru and it was interesting to see the evolution of Gru and why he changed the way he did. Of course when Pierre showed rough playblasts of Gru's test animation I was gawking at the simplicity of the awesome poses that the animator had chosen to do the various acting test shots. It really made me re-think about the essence of acting in animation.

Bobby Beck did a supreme job with his presentation for Animation Mentor. He went over film scenes from Midnight Cowboy, Lemony Snicket and Forest Gump and just really did a fine job of explaining great acting references for animators and stuff you can use to make your performance that much more authentic just by using strong poses and eye movement. To try and think outside the box and be original in terms of acting choices. It was also interesting to note that he was not happy with the style that Animation Mentor Demoreels seem to be cornering themselves into and he strongly suggested for all AM students to rise above and challenge each other to be different.

Those were just a few of the things that I had experienced while at FMX, there were many other things I learned, mainly about how hard it is to make it into this industry especially if your a character animator, but it definitely helped me get some tips and tricks to make the bumpy road a bit smoother. I would advise everyone who wants to get into this industry to participate in conferences like this in the near future such as Annecy Film Festival and Siggraph 2011 which will be held in Vancouver this year if you can.