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3DTotal: Thanks for taking the time to talk to 3DTotal, James. As a graduate of Escape Studios can
you tell us a little about how valuable the course has been to you and your career at The Mill?
James – 3D Supervisor, The Mill: The course I attended at Escape turned out to be quite a crucial part in kick-starting my career in the industry. Firstly you gain a strong base of knowledge really quickly, which
you can then take into a job with confidence, and you are also surrounded by experienced industry people the whole time you are there. This gives you a great opportunity to meet the right contacts, which is as equally important in gaining work as anything else.
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3DTotal: You mention in your interview that you consider yourself to be a “generalist”, who covers a multitude of disciplines. How many of these skill sets can you attribute to the Maya Core Course and do you see this broad coverage as a necessary part of surviving in your industry?
James: No matter what part of 3D you end up following, either as a specialist or a generalist, it’s vital to get a broad knowledge base of everything, especially if you are working in commercials. You may be only an animator, but when things get sticky in the middle of a project you may be called upon to do a number of different tasks. Also I find doing the same thing all the time can get boring, so if you are trained in all disciplines of 3D it gives you scope to move around tasks from time to time. |
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3DTotal: Do you find that an intensive course is the best way of getting industry savvy and how much prior experience or knowledge do you feel is important, if any?
James: I actually taught myself Maya for about a year before I attended Escape, and even with this basic knowledge I think I was able to make the most out of the course, because instead of going in totally blind, I already had a stack of problems and questions to be answered. I don’t think this is vital but there is never any harm in preparing. Escape prepares you as much as it can for the industry - when I was there, not only did we work on all the skills of 3D but through their strong ties with other companies they organised trips to various post houses so we could see how those skills translate into the real world, which was really interesting. |
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3DTotal: You have collaborated on and supervised the recent “Drench” advertisement which many
people will remember fondly. What were the main challenges this project presented and what did you learn most from the experience?
James: This was an animation exercise mainly, but as animators we are always trained to put weight
into characters. In this case a puppet suspended from strings has a completely different feel and then
to add to the mix, we had to make it dance like a puppet could never do ... However with many hours
of testing the balance between puppet and dancer we ended up with something quite successful.
Aside from the animation, the attention to detail on the model and lighting helped tie the character
into the environment with a decent level of realism. It also helped that when the live action environment was shot, there was a replica model of Brains on set. We made sure that we got as much reference footage as possible so when it came to recreating it in 3D, we had something to perfectly match to.
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