Holy cow my life makes me smile!
Today was fantastic! We got there bright and early and all excited for everything to find that the doors were still closed. There was a massive long line of people waiting go get their tickets so we were pretty excited that we got our tickets last night.
We kinda messed around and stuff until around 10 when we went into the side tent and started chatting to people.
The first table right inside was BlueSky.
I talked with the recruiting lady and Jeff Gabor, the lead animator, about portfolio stuff and whatnot and I got some pretty useful advice. He said that I should make my portfolio full of happy things. According to him "if it makes us sad we won't hire you". Okay, good to know haha!
His hair is fantastic, and he worked on Rio so he had some tips for modeling the birds in my senior project that I was more than happy to receive. I'm so excited to start on this project!
After BlueSky, I went and chatted with this lady that had real stop motion puppets at her booth. She wasn't a professional or anything but it was cool to just hold them and play with their fingers. They were actually really heavy, I guess that's what happens when you have a steal armature inside a silicone doll body.
One of my friends informed me that the line for Sony was pretty short, so I jumped all the way to the back of the tent and I talked to them about portfolio stuff. The most reassuring thing they said to me was when I mentioned that my professors said it's impossible to get a job in storyboarding fresh out of college, he said "that's not necessarily true," which made me perk my ears. He told me a bit about what I should have in my portfolio and how animation works at Sony, and then I thanked him and moved on to the next guy, who happened to be John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy.
While I've never actually watched the show, I was still impressed by his weird character designs. So I asked him how he keeps his characters from all looking the same. His kind of laughed and made a joke about how his characters all look the same. But then he gave away his real secret, "you have to be influenced by everything and everyone, especially people outside of animation." He specifically called out caricatures, which my stomached flipped over, but I guess it makes sense so why not.
I then proceeded to walk down the row of tables, talking to every person and asking for advice from the pros. After a while, my friends hunted me down to inform me that a panel on Frozen was about to start, so we ran over to the ballroom and waited in line for it and watched their preview and gosh I am so excited to see it! The Director, Head of Story and a few other guys that worked on Frozen were talking about the storyboard process, and they also told us some Disney storytelling secret which were fantastic and super helpful. I'm going to try making up little stories with it so I can experiment with it.
After that we went to lunch, which was a nice break, but dang networking is so fun I hated leaving for even a minute!
When we came back from lunch, we went and talked to a few more people in the tent, mainly Laika. Because dang it if I could work for them I'd be so peached! I talked with one of the ladies there about puppet creation and I showed her my Panic puppet, and she said it looked really good! Which is totally reassuring since I was all worried about it looking silly. She said there's an internship for puppet creation as well, which I may or may not be applying for this summer...
I continued going around, chatting with people, asking for advice, making friends, showing off my sketchbook to people and gaining advice. Until I got to the other side of the room when I met Sabrina Cotugno, an amazing animator who made one of my favorite animated shorts, and who now works on Gravity falls. She was super sweet and she gave me some really good and unique advice that wasn't just the copy/paste answer that a lot of people were giving me. And by copy/paste I mean 'you want to do storyboarding, put storyboards in your portfolio', seriously, that's not advice people haha. Sabrina told me I should try adding backgrounds in my portfolio and I could add sketches of a few other things. I bought a print of the two characters from her short too cuz I seriously love them and I got her to sign it so it was amazing.
After that, I did more networking and chatting, just spending time talking to a lot of people and showing off my sketchbook. So next I decided to try talking to people on the main floor.
The main floor was a lot bigger, but it was also more crowded which was lame. But oh well, I talked to a lot of people who worked as animators or concept artists for companies I really love, I talked to Disney for a bit about internships, I'm going to try to get a portfolio review with them and Nickelodeon tomorrow but their time slots were all full so here's hoping someone cancels. Right about this time, my friends and professors were starting to get antsy, so I figured we were going to be leaving soon, but I wanted to chat with a few more people before I left for the day. And by a few people I mean one person. Chris Sanders.
At first, I was super SUPER shy about the thought of just going up and asking him for a picture. But after a few minutes, I kicked myself and said, 'regret doing something stupid instead of regretting doing nothing at all' so I spun around and marched straight to his booth. I chatted with his girlfriend as I was standing there waiting to talk to him, but when it was finally my turn, I was glad I got over being nervous. He was so sweet! Gosh he's just so happy and cute - he looked completely different from how I pictured him though. I asked him about how he keeps his stories original, and he basically told me 'take a simple idea, and make it awesome." So I told him about Bird Food, the short my class is working on, and he seemed to like the story idea, maybe when it's done I'll send it to him so he can see it haha. I also asked him to look through my sketchbook and he did - quite happily - and I completely forgot that I had How to Train Your Dragon pages in there, but he had the cutest reaction ever to the sketches. Gosh I love this guy he's so cute! After he had flipped through about half of my sketchbook, he handed it back to me and told me I should start drawing with a fatter pencil. Apparently it helps to prevent Carpel Tunnel drawing with your whole arm rather than your fingers, which makes sense but I'd never heard that advice before so I'm going to try it. He also told me that I had good stuff in my sketchbook.
A pro, who has made a ton of my favorite movies, said I had good stuff in my sketchbook.
Excuse me while I faint from happiness.
Seriously, it's like the best thing ever hearing from pros that your stuff is good, it makes my life have so much more meaning!
Chris was the last person I talked to before we left and got Pizza at Dino's Pizza - which is fantastic I might add.
Dang with how much happened today, I can hardly wait until tomorrow. I am learning so much here and I'm getting a super impressive stack of business cards. I secretly love it cuz it gives me ideas on what to do for mine...
Welp, Saturday here I come!
Today was fantastic! We got there bright and early and all excited for everything to find that the doors were still closed. There was a massive long line of people waiting go get their tickets so we were pretty excited that we got our tickets last night.
We kinda messed around and stuff until around 10 when we went into the side tent and started chatting to people.
The first table right inside was BlueSky.
I talked with the recruiting lady and Jeff Gabor, the lead animator, about portfolio stuff and whatnot and I got some pretty useful advice. He said that I should make my portfolio full of happy things. According to him "if it makes us sad we won't hire you". Okay, good to know haha!
His hair is fantastic, and he worked on Rio so he had some tips for modeling the birds in my senior project that I was more than happy to receive. I'm so excited to start on this project!
After BlueSky, I went and chatted with this lady that had real stop motion puppets at her booth. She wasn't a professional or anything but it was cool to just hold them and play with their fingers. They were actually really heavy, I guess that's what happens when you have a steal armature inside a silicone doll body.
One of my friends informed me that the line for Sony was pretty short, so I jumped all the way to the back of the tent and I talked to them about portfolio stuff. The most reassuring thing they said to me was when I mentioned that my professors said it's impossible to get a job in storyboarding fresh out of college, he said "that's not necessarily true," which made me perk my ears. He told me a bit about what I should have in my portfolio and how animation works at Sony, and then I thanked him and moved on to the next guy, who happened to be John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren and Stimpy.
While I've never actually watched the show, I was still impressed by his weird character designs. So I asked him how he keeps his characters from all looking the same. His kind of laughed and made a joke about how his characters all look the same. But then he gave away his real secret, "you have to be influenced by everything and everyone, especially people outside of animation." He specifically called out caricatures, which my stomached flipped over, but I guess it makes sense so why not.
I then proceeded to walk down the row of tables, talking to every person and asking for advice from the pros. After a while, my friends hunted me down to inform me that a panel on Frozen was about to start, so we ran over to the ballroom and waited in line for it and watched their preview and gosh I am so excited to see it! The Director, Head of Story and a few other guys that worked on Frozen were talking about the storyboard process, and they also told us some Disney storytelling secret which were fantastic and super helpful. I'm going to try making up little stories with it so I can experiment with it.
After that we went to lunch, which was a nice break, but dang networking is so fun I hated leaving for even a minute!
When we came back from lunch, we went and talked to a few more people in the tent, mainly Laika. Because dang it if I could work for them I'd be so peached! I talked with one of the ladies there about puppet creation and I showed her my Panic puppet, and she said it looked really good! Which is totally reassuring since I was all worried about it looking silly. She said there's an internship for puppet creation as well, which I may or may not be applying for this summer...
I continued going around, chatting with people, asking for advice, making friends, showing off my sketchbook to people and gaining advice. Until I got to the other side of the room when I met Sabrina Cotugno, an amazing animator who made one of my favorite animated shorts, and who now works on Gravity falls. She was super sweet and she gave me some really good and unique advice that wasn't just the copy/paste answer that a lot of people were giving me. And by copy/paste I mean 'you want to do storyboarding, put storyboards in your portfolio', seriously, that's not advice people haha. Sabrina told me I should try adding backgrounds in my portfolio and I could add sketches of a few other things. I bought a print of the two characters from her short too cuz I seriously love them and I got her to sign it so it was amazing.
After that, I did more networking and chatting, just spending time talking to a lot of people and showing off my sketchbook. So next I decided to try talking to people on the main floor.
The main floor was a lot bigger, but it was also more crowded which was lame. But oh well, I talked to a lot of people who worked as animators or concept artists for companies I really love, I talked to Disney for a bit about internships, I'm going to try to get a portfolio review with them and Nickelodeon tomorrow but their time slots were all full so here's hoping someone cancels. Right about this time, my friends and professors were starting to get antsy, so I figured we were going to be leaving soon, but I wanted to chat with a few more people before I left for the day. And by a few people I mean one person. Chris Sanders.
At first, I was super SUPER shy about the thought of just going up and asking him for a picture. But after a few minutes, I kicked myself and said, 'regret doing something stupid instead of regretting doing nothing at all' so I spun around and marched straight to his booth. I chatted with his girlfriend as I was standing there waiting to talk to him, but when it was finally my turn, I was glad I got over being nervous. He was so sweet! Gosh he's just so happy and cute - he looked completely different from how I pictured him though. I asked him about how he keeps his stories original, and he basically told me 'take a simple idea, and make it awesome." So I told him about Bird Food, the short my class is working on, and he seemed to like the story idea, maybe when it's done I'll send it to him so he can see it haha. I also asked him to look through my sketchbook and he did - quite happily - and I completely forgot that I had How to Train Your Dragon pages in there, but he had the cutest reaction ever to the sketches. Gosh I love this guy he's so cute! After he had flipped through about half of my sketchbook, he handed it back to me and told me I should start drawing with a fatter pencil. Apparently it helps to prevent Carpel Tunnel drawing with your whole arm rather than your fingers, which makes sense but I'd never heard that advice before so I'm going to try it. He also told me that I had good stuff in my sketchbook.
A pro, who has made a ton of my favorite movies, said I had good stuff in my sketchbook.
Excuse me while I faint from happiness.
Seriously, it's like the best thing ever hearing from pros that your stuff is good, it makes my life have so much more meaning!
Chris was the last person I talked to before we left and got Pizza at Dino's Pizza - which is fantastic I might add.
Dang with how much happened today, I can hardly wait until tomorrow. I am learning so much here and I'm getting a super impressive stack of business cards. I secretly love it cuz it gives me ideas on what to do for mine...
Welp, Saturday here I come!
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